Halfway down the Danube

What the Minister said

"The national vice of Romania is pessimism."

So said the Minister to me this afternoon. Which Minister? Never you mind. I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But he -- or she -- was making a point about expectations, and how the perceived difficulty of reform can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's not a new idea, mind you. Here's the late Emil Cioran -- philosopher, essayist, absurdist, friend of Ionesco and Beckett -- on his native land:

To concieve destiny as exterior to ourselves, sovereign and omnipotent, a vast cycle of failures is necessary. A condition which my country fulfills to perfection. It would be indecent for Romania to believe in effort, in the utility of action. Hence it does not believe in them and, out of propriety, resigns itself to the inevitable.

I am grateful to it for having bequeathed me with the code of despair, that savoir-vivre, that relaxation in the face of Necessity... Prompt to sustain my disappointments and to initiate my indolence into the secret of preserving them, my country has further offered me, in its eagerness to make me into a wastrel who keeps up appearances, the means of degrading myself without compromising myself too much.

I owe it not only my finest and surest failures, but also the talent for masking my cowardice and hoarding my compunctions.

Ouch. Beautiful -- I particularly love those last two sentences -- but ouch.

But then, at the end of the conversation the Minister said to me, "I am an optimist."

"I hope you're not too lonely," I said -- a little daringly, because one does not wish to upset Ministers, but I hoped he wouldn't take it wrong.

He didn't. "I am, sometimes, a little," he said. "But I must insist on hope."

I must insist on hope. Emil Cioran was a great writer and a very clever man. But... hope is just preferable, somehow. Putting aside the fact that resignation to inevitable failure makes failure inevitable, it just gets old after a while.

And so to bed.

Posted by douglas at March 17, 2004 01:52 AM