No Souvenirs, Journal,1957-1969

...By studying worship, he unveiled basic patterns of man's attempt to find cosmic meaning...

...His troops had broken out into open country, and the Germans could not have stopped them short of Berlin...

...Thus Eliade's overwhelming optimism: "I have limitless confidence in the creative power of the mind...

...Norman Mailer tests his courage by walking Harlem at night...

...Wilson properly chose to make the opportunity diplomatic rather than military...

...A source of inspiration to Romanian intellectuals in exile, he meets with the playwright Ionesco, the philosopher Cioran, the critic C~linescu, with the young writers who publish Cabiers de l'Est (an East European dissident literary journal stationed in Paris), for the flame of freedom must be kept kindled...

...house are Romanian artifacts he and his wife Christinel have given us over the years, reminders of a past in a country we have known in the beginning of life, a land of beauty neither can forget...

...Though fascinated with symbol, Eliade is very much aware of this world...

...She sets out to discover how Charlotte's own make-up and her environment and the things that have happened to her have combined to turn her into what she has become, and although the author acknowledges in the end that her quest has not been entirely successful, still Didion can see in Charlotte proportions which approach the heroic...

...The agony of such a question has not subsided...

...Norton and Company / $14.95 Robert H. Ferrell In the twentieth century the United States undoubtedly has had some opportunities to change the world, to reconstitute the world's wickedness or waywardness into something approaching the American dream, and it does seem probable that one such chance for change came at the end of the First World War, in the weeks after the armistice of November 11, 1918...

...Pershing wanted to turn them loose-contrary to the British and French commanders, Haig and P&ain, who had had enough...

...But the young man who used to read voraciously into the night, who would wonder at the monumental and exciting task of understanding man's need for beauty and holiness, for peace as well as magic, needs no souvenirs: He contains the human heritage like an enchanted receptacle...

...The British and French were too tired from their awful wartime exertions--nearly a million dead for the British, far more for the French...

...No souvenirs" means that all is gone--only his eyeglasses remain from the country he left forever in 1942, not realizing at the time that he would never return...

...BOOK REVIEW No Souvenirs, Journal, 1957-1969 Mircea Eliade / Harper & Row / $15.00 Juliana Geran Pilon Known and loved in America for works like Patterns of Comparative Religion, Cosmos and History, The Sacred and the Profane, and many others, Mircea Eliade is famous throughout the world as a historian of religion and philosopher of culture...

...A man who still consults the poets of his native Romania for inspiration (he would read passionately from Eminescu at literary gatherings in his home), who remembers in intimate detail his land and its music...

...Certainly the years 1945-49 when the nation possessed a The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 37...

...That duty, however, includes a relentless faith in human energy and spirit...

...Will his "vocation" emerge intact...

...The University of Chicago, which he joined two decades ago, has embraced them with affection...

...Perhaps no answer is possible...

...Upon reading Teilhard, Eliade exclaims in his journal: "What a joy to rediscover in a Western theologian and 'man of science' the optimism of Romanian peasants, they themselves also being Christian but belonging to that 'cosmic Christianity' which has long since disappeared in the West...

...Not if we forget what we are: the only animals capable of worship, the only creatures able to comprehend and question the inevitability of our own death...

...Partly because of the publicity generated by the American official propaganda organization, the so-called Committee on Public Information, and partly because he was such an obviously large but still unknown quantity, Wilson in reputation stood far above the leaders of the allies...

...He has uncovered the archetypes of sacred consciousness, convinced that the West can learn from ancient mythology: Eliade explores the forms of ritual--that primordial rehearsal of commitment to the Author, the reaffirmation of faith in the basic human scenario...

...He asks "How can one live in history without betraying it, without denying it, and still partake of a transhistorical reality...

...no use complaining of having been born in an industrial society...

...The trouble with the peacemaking began, and America's moment passed before the Paris Peace Conference opened late in January 1919...

...each division contained over 27,000 men...

...We must also accept 'progress...

...He sympathizes, at times, with Hirai's approach: "We have no theology...

...Perhaps he is right," says Eliade, not resigned so much as bewildered--the West doesn't seem to know what it stands to lose...

...We dance...

...The new women's consciousness tries to insist that beneath the maulings of environment, women, except that they are more highly sexed, are just like men...

...It is a great story, America's moment during the few weeks beginning with the armistice of 1918...

...He knows, too, how appreciated he is in his own country today...

...It doesn't believe, doesn't understand...

...Goaded by his wife who desired to display some new gowns by the famed couturier Worth, and probably not needing the goad anyway, Wilson desired to be a world prophet (to use the phrase employed by Walworth for the second volume of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilson biography of twenty years ago...

...Eliade agrees with Teilhard and Father Danielou that "we have a body and we are here, on earth...

...we must therefore accept life as it is, as a natural mode of being...

...He tells horror stories from Communist Romania--of priests tortured for reading the Bible, of innocents in prison fed excrement--and is bewildered...

...Creation, as all life, can thrive only beyond arbitrary force and mindless censorship...

...He and his wife are happy here...

...His origins are simple--his father was an army officer of peasant stock...

...I f he w i s h e s " - - t h e perpetual, perplexing * * i ~ P . . . . Eliade is, of course, a citizen of the world in the broadest sense, for his contemporaries include Pico della Mirandola no less than Papini, Croce, Balzac, Buddha...

...Eliade is keeping his native tradition alive abroad...

...The American people had sent two million soldiers to fight in France...

...For, ultimately, Eliade is a son of that rich, small land of clear lakes and wide meadows, so tortured now by both God and man...

...we must try to live as free beings even in the midst of the most terrible social, technological, psychological conditionings...

...That passion is very genuine indeed: On my visit to Romania in the summer of 1975 friends and relatives all begged me to send them Eliade's works from America, for the few books they had obtained, illegally, in French editions, had set everyone on fire...

...Eliade has no answer...

...What went wrong...

...I would want us to fall as Hector did...

...BOOK REVIEW America's Moment: 1918 Arthur Walworth / W.W...

...The peasant believes that the world is good, that it returned to that state after the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Savior...

...Eliade has difficulty understanding the reason for violence, for man's inhumanity to man...

...In a military sense it was as Robert H. Ferrell, professor of history at Indiana University and a leading authority on American diplomatic history, is writing a book on the World War Iperiodfor the "New American Nation" Series...

...Eliade loves dance, he loves wine, he loves to read...

...Eliade radiates knowledge...

...Why is freedom so difficult, love so rare...

...An opportunity for diplomatic leadership was clearly there...

...And what's more, says Didion, women's divergences are neither more worthy nor less worthy, but instead are equally worthy of literary examination...

...How could his journal be called No Souvenirs...

...Even on the most informal occasions, relaxed and sipping his favorite scotch-and-soda, he will ponder upon the meaning of ritual, the need for transcendence as well as conformity among the hippies, or the implications of Kissinger's Spenglerianism...

...The unfortunate part of story ensued-the part that turned the opportunity, however rightly chosen, into a moment rather than an achievement...

...And in the face of imminent global destruction, in spite of Western nihilism, with no souvenirs from home, that certitude persists...

...He knows that "the ugliness, the boredom, and the exalting of the insignificant of which the artistic creations of the last twenty years make a display are, with nihilism in philosophy, anarchism in social ethics, and violence in political activity, the expres36 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 sions of a single, specific existential situation of man in Western societies...

...Evidently, though, not all limitation is evil...

...President Wilson in many ways was a great man, but already had antagonized a majority, perhaps two-thirds, of the membership of the Senate...

...At a time when modern confusion and disillusion threaten a rerun of prehistory, Eliade's insights into the earliest modes of finding inner harmony, of recapturing creation, of transcending the ephemeral, could serve to reawaken a sense of identity, indeed, a redefinition of beauty...

...America is, indeed, his new land...

...And if we try, we will succeed...

...Fitzgerald is drawn to expensively turned-out women...

...General John J. (Black Jack) Pershing had 42 huge divisions, 39 of them on the line...

...What have been the other moments of American power...

...And Hemingway feels good when he's fishing...

...he is disarmingly gentle...

...Doing our duty, at peace with our conscience, and, nevertheless, without illusions...

...Starting this fall she will be teaching philosophy at Emory University...

...But Didion refuses to dismiss silly and incompetent women as being merely silly and incompetent...

...But even as his philosophy inspires those who read him, his personality endears him to those who know him...

...It was, of course, a grand accumulation of troubles or errors...

...But a constant theme running through this novel and through much of Didion's work is that while there is a discernible behavioral norm in the human condition, woman diverge from the norm in ways inherently different from men...

...What was the trouble...

...It liberates [modern] man from certain inhibitions which made him incapable of loving his own prehistory [and history...

...He senses a "suspicion and refusal toward all the authors protected by the regime...whence the passion of the youth for us who are in exile, who for fifteen years have been the target of all the insults of the official powers, from the literary critics to the political police...

...He works long hours and has good friends..Joe Kitagawa, Paul Ricoeur, and Saul Bellow gather at his home for anecdotes and good food...

...Her psychological dishonesty and her delusions have reached the point of rendering her nearly incapable of functioning, the kind of woman who up to now has been dealt with in literature as funny--a character--or has been written off in exasperation...

...On occasion this apocalyptic vision is reflected in his journal: "At moments of great melancholy, when I feel the end of Western civilization near, I meditate on destiny and on the lesson that Hector gave us...

...Eliade is not only a man of genius, of dynamic exuberance...

...The country still prided itself on the ideas of Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe...

...Yet his roots are very much in this busy, materialist world of ours on the edge of self-destruction...

...His scholarly endeavors are remarkably passionate: "I want to show the cathartic function of a correct understanding of myth...

...It seems to me that man will succeed--if he wishes-in remaining free and creative, in any circumstance, cosmic or historical...

...In a copy of his journal, which he brought last year on the occasion of his birthday alongside a bottle of wine, he inscribed these words: "these pages--from Paris to Chicago, from Exile to a new citizenship...

...That liberation consists of an ardent, almost erotic appreciation of the spirit within each of us...

...While most twentieth-century philosophers of psyche were analyzing the secular musings and aberrations of our cerebral hemispheres, Eliade was perusing prayer...

...To deny this, and "to think like a materialist or Marxist means giving up the primordial vocation of man...

...At the time of the armistice Pershing's men had just taken the Argonne forest, at dreadful cost--the equivalent, in dead, of one of his big divisions...

...Twenty-six thousand dead soldiers in the Argonne had been a high price, and perhaps it would not be all of the price, for a military opportunity...

...Fascinated by the experiment, Eliade is watching--not disinterested but still detached, as only a sage can be...

...The American nation had had little experience with European international affairs since the eighteenth century and the era of independence...

...Consequently, to disappear as man...

...But it is not in vain that this temptation and this risk exists...

...Yet exile this is...

...How simple...

...Deep down, he knew that Troy was destined to perish...

...Learning from Proust: "The happiness of listening and remembering...

...My basic optimism probably finds its source in that certitude...

...Walworth describes it, "America's moment...

...In a diplomatic sense it was also America's moment, for the Germans had applied to President Woodrow Wilson for an armistice, not to the British or French, and Wilson had set the terms of the armistice according to his own Fourteen Points, announced some months earlier...

...Logical implications of comfort...

...Throughout my Juliana Geran Pilon, a personal fn'end of Mircea Eliade, is a native of Romania and has recently received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago...

...His adolescent novels and short stories are no more...

...The books he had shipped were lost...

...But not if we give up our own essence...

...But women cry when a dispassionate view would hold that there is nothing sad, and Joan Didion would hold that that is every bit as significant...