After reading the LRB piece on Romanian politics, I had a run at Cioran -- luminous threads, and I am back in Sibiu and Cluj in my mind, and alive, if only for a minute or two. On the day I took the bus to the resort and walked back through the mountains, the path ended at Rasinari (resin, from the lumber industry), from which there was a long walk back to my humble quarters in Sibiu (which were actually quite nice on that visit, a garret 1BR in a very old 18th/19th c. building -- I was the first rental, and the monthly rental is now well above what it was -- and I was there during the big theatre festival, to boot). Cioran's father was on the faculty at the Orthodox seminary in Sibiu, which is right across from the cathedral, ran past it many mornings. Long commute from their home in Rasinari (I think) especially in the early 20th c. And then his stories about the paralyzing fear he felt from the Hungarian policemen. The SJ church in Sibiu is quite remarkable -- the Jesuits and Franciscans left a considerable amount of infrastructure in this part of the world. One curiosity in Sibiu: the number-puzzles in the inscriptions, in which some letters that double as Roman numerals are slightly larger than the rest of the lettering, and can be summed or taken severally to give meaningful dates or numbers. I never managed to solve any of them, but I think you would have to know a lot about the place to so.
"a drowning man clinging to the idea of shipwreck" (Cioran)
Today, New Gods, the title essay of which is a sort of distilled Bogomilism -- praise of the demiurge, as a perfect God could never have made such a world. Whenever you visit a place and St. Michael is very prominent in the ritual or the imagery, you can be assured that there are a few folks thereabouts who have some profound reservations about the essential goodness of the world. He's quite prominent in Transylvania.