„Stephen Hawking. A Life in Science” – Fragmente 2

Din cartea: „Stephen Hawking a Life in Science” – Michael White and John Gribbin. John Henry Press.2002.

Electrons and atoms are not like tiny snooker balls bouncing around in accordance with Newton’s laws.

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…in a small city in Hertfordshire a seventeen-year-old schoolboy named Stephen Hawking was getting ready for the Oxford entrance examination in a large, cluttered bedroom in his parents’ rambling Edwardian house.

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Stephen and his father settled on the first alternative, and he was entered for the examination toward the end of his final year at St. Albans School. The intention from the start was that he was going for a scholarship, the highest award offered by the university.

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Stephen insisted that he wanted to read mathematics and physics, a course then known as natural science. His father was unconvinced; he believed there were no jobs in mathematics apart from teaching. Stephen knew what he wanted to do and won the argument; medicine had little appeal for him. As he says himself: My father would have liked me to do medicine. However, I felt that biology was too descriptive, and not sufficiently fundamental. Maybe I would have felt differently if I had been aware of molecular biology, but that was not generally known about at the time.1

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The entrance examination was pretty tough. It was spread over two days and consisted of five papers in all, each of which was two and a half hours long. These included two physics and two mathematics papers, followed by a paper that tested candidates on their general knowledge and awareness of current affairs and world issues. A typical question would have been something like “Discuss the possible short-term global consequences of Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba.”

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Little did he know that he had scored around ninety-five percent in both his physics papers, with only slightly lower percentages in the others. A few days after the second interview the all-important letter fell on to the Hawkings’ doormat. University College was offering him a scholarship. He was invited to enroll at Oxford University the following October, the only condition being that he obtain two A Level passes in the summer.

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In the late fifties and early sixties, Oxford, as a microcosm of British society, was on the brink of great change. When Hawking arrived at the High on his first October Thursday as an undergraduate, the university had in many respects changed little since his father’s time or, indeed, for the past few hundred years. University discipline had relaxed somewhat since the end of the war. Before then, students had been forbidden to enter the city’s pubs and could, if caught, be expelled from them by the university police, known as the Bulldogs. Women were not allowed in male students’ rooms without written permission from the dean, who would specify strict time limitations and conditions in a letter sent to the head porter, who would then rigorously uphold the dean’s instructions. All this changed when servicemen returning from the war entered the university either as freshmen or to restart courses interrupted by the fighting.

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Most Oxford colleges are built in the form of a number of quads, each with a lawn at the center and paths around and across the grass. From the quads, staircases lead off into the buildings, and the students’ rooms are on a number of levels up to the top of each staircase.

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The intake at Oxford was still largely male and from the country’s private schools, and the majority of those were from the top ten, including  Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster.

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A simple point of reference illustrates the changes about to hit Oxford soon after Hawking went up, encapsulated by one of his contemporaries. “When we arrived in Oxford,” he said, “anybody who was anybody rowed and never wore jeans. When we left, anybody who was anybody never rowed and did wear jeans.”

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Despite its many charms, Hawking’s first year at Oxford was, by all accounts, a pretty miserable time for him. Very few of his school contemporaries and none of his close friends from St. Albans had gone up the same year.

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The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed either to be brilliant without effort or to accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was regarded as the mark of a gray man, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.2

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They were all or nothing, the focal point of the whole three years of study. Hawking once calculated that during the entire three years of his course at Oxford he had done something like 1,000 hours’ work, an average of one hour per day—hardly a foundation for the arduous finals. One friend remembers with amusement, “Towards the end he was working as much as three hours a day!”

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He had applied to Cambridge to begin Ph.D. studies in cosmology under the most distinguished British astronomer of the day, Fred Hoyle. The catch was that to be accepted for Cambridge he had to achieve a first-class honors degree, the highest possible qualification at Oxford.

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The chief examiner asked him to tell the board of his plans for the future. “If you award me a first,” he said, “I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a first.” They did.

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It has been said that Cambridge is the only true university town in England. Oxford is a much larger city and has, lying beyond the ring road, heavy industrial areas nestling next to one of Europe’s largest housing estates. Cambridge is altogether quainter and more thoroughly dominated by academia. Although evidence suggests that the University of Cambridge was established by defec-tors from Oxford, both seats of learning were created at around the same time in the twelfth century, using as their model the University of Paris. Like Oxford, Cambridge University is a collection of colleges under the umbrella of a central university authority. Like Oxford, it attracts the very best scholars from around the world and has a global reputation, paralleled only by its great rival and historical twin a mere eighty miles away. And, like Oxford, it is steeped in tradition, drama, and history.

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Stephen Hawking, B.A. (Hon.), arrived in Cambridge in October 1962, exchanging the scorched, barren landscape of the Middle East for autumnal wind and drizzle across the darkening fields of East Anglia.

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In the days leading up to his move to Cambridge, with the world outside looking set to tear itself apart, Stephen Hawking was gradually becoming aware of an inner personal crisis. Toward the end of his time at Oxford he had begun to find some difficulty in tying his shoelaces, he kept bumping into things, and a number of times he felt his legs give way from under him. Without a drink passing his lips he would, on occasion, find his speech slurring as though he were intoxicated. Not wanting to admit to himself that something was wrong, he said nothing and tried to get on with his life.

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He had originally chosen to go to Cambridge University because at the time Oxford could not offer cosmological research and, most important, he wanted to study under Fred Hoyle, who had a worldwide reputation as the most eminent scientist in the field.

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When Stephen returned to St. Albans for the Christmas vacation at the end of 1962, the whole of southern England was covered in a thick blanket of snow. In his own mind he must have known that something was wrong. The strange clumsiness he had been experiencing had occurred more frequently but had gone unobserved by anyone in Cambridge. Sciama remembered noticing early in the term that Hawking had a very slight speech impediment but had put it down to nothing more than that.

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He returned to Cambridge and awaited the results of the tests. A short time later he was diagnosed as having a rare and incurable disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, known in the United States as Lou Gehrig’s disease after the Yankee baseball player who died from the illness. In Britain it is usually called motor neuron disease.

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One of the amazing ironies of the situation was that Stephen Hawking just happened to be studying theoretical physics, one of the very few jobs for which his mind was the only real tool he needed. If he had been an experimental physicist, his career would have been over.

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In the twice-daily ritual, well established at the Cavendish and carried over to Silver Street, everyone would meet at 11 a.m. for coffee and 4 p.m. for tea to exchange their latest thoughts and ideas.

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During his first two years at Cambridge, the effects of the ALS disease rapidly worsened. He was beginning to experience enormous difficulty in walking and was compelled to use a stick in order to move just a few feet.

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Over the course of the talks at King’s, Roger Penrose had introduced his colleagues to the idea of a space-time singularity at the center of a black hole, and naturally the group from Cambridge was tremendously excited by this.

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Hawking peered through the window, watching the darkened fields stream past and the juxtaposition of his friends reflected in the glass. His colleagues were arguing over one of the finer mathematical points in Penrose’s discussion. Suddenly, an idea struck him, and he looked away from the window. Turning to Sciama sitting across from him, he said, “I wonder what would happen if you applied Roger’s singularity theory to the entire Universe.” In the event it was that single idea that saved Hawking’s Ph.D. and set him on the road to science superstardom.

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Applying singularity theory to the Universe was by no means an easy problem, and within months Sciama was beginning to realize that his young Ph.D. student was doing something truly exceptional. For Hawking this was the first time he had really applied himself to anything. As he says: I . . . started working hard for the first time in my life. To my surprise, I found I liked it. Maybe it is not really fair to call it work. Someone once said, “Scientists and prostitutes get paid for doing what they enjoy.”11

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The final chapter of Hawking’s thesis was a brilliant piece of work and made all the difference to the awarding of the Ph.D. Doctors and Doctorates 73 work was judged by an internal examiner, Dennis Sciama, and an expert external referee. As well as being passed or failed, a Ph.D. can be deferred, which means that the student has to resubmit the thesis at a later date, usually after another year. Thanks to his final chapter, Hawking was saved this humiliation and the examiners awarded him the degree. From then on the twenty-three-year-old physicist could call himself Dr. Stephen Hawking.

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Obviously, since it could emit no light, such an object would be black, which is why the American relativist John Wheeler dubbed them “black holes” in 1969. But although it was well known that the general theory made this prediction, at the time Hawking was completing his undergraduate studies and moving on to research no one took the notion of black holes seriously. The reason is that there are very many known stars that have more than three times the mass of our Sun.

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But quantum theory said that there is a way to make a star denser than a white dwarf. If the star were squeezed even more by gravity, the electrons could be forced to combine with protons to make more neutrons. The result would be a star made entirely of neutrons, and these could be packed together as closely as the protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus. This would be a neutron star.

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The density of the matter in a neutron star, in grams per cubic centimeter, would be 1014—that is, 1 followed by 14 zeros, or one hundred thousand billion. Even an object this dense would not be a black hole, though, for light could still escape from its surface into the Universe at large.

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The quantum equations said, in fact, that there was no way that even neutrons could hold up the weight of a dead star of 3 solar masses or more and that, if any such object were left over from the explosive death throes of a massive star, it would collapse inward completely, shrinking to a mathematical point called a singularity. Long before the collapsing star could reach this state of zero volume and infinite density, it would have wrapped space-time around itself, cutting off the collapsar from the outside Universe.

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if it were possible to squeeze our own Sun down into a sphere with a radius of about 3 kilometers, it would become a black hole. So would the Earth, if it were squeezed down to about a centimeter. In each case, once the object had been squeezed down to the critical size, gravity would take over, closing space-time around the object while it continued to shrink away into the infinite density singularity inside the black hole.

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The mid-sixties turned out to be one of the most important times in Stephen Hawking’s life. Having become engaged to Jane, he realized that he would need to find a job very quickly if they were to be married. After obtaining a doctorate, the next stage in the career of any academic is usually to secure a fellowship, accompanied by a grant, in order to continue research.

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Fellowship is considered a great honor and a means by which academics may continue with their research and be paid for it. In return, a college gains prestige if one of its fellows turns out to be highly successful.

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The couple was married in July 1965 in the chapel of Hawking’s postgraduate college, Trinity Hall. It was not a typical “academic” wedding, but neither was it, by any means, a society occasion. Both sets of parents were ordinary, middle-class people.

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Of course they both knew, as did all the others on that day, that Stephen might die within a short time. In fact, according to the medical predictions he was already living on borrowed time.

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At the DAMTP and in Cambridge academic circles, Hawking was beginning to cultivate a “difficult genius” image, and his reputation as successor to Einstein, although embryonic, was already beginning to follow him around. People who knew him in those days remember him as a friendly and cheerful character, but already his natural brashness, coupled with his physical disabilities, was beginning to create communication difficulties with many of those around him.

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Both Jane and Stephen knew that they should not waste any time in starting a family once they were married, and their first child, a boy they named Robert, was born in 1967.

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Hawking was working harder than he had ever worked before, and it was paying dividends. In 1966 he won the Adams Prize for an essay entitled “Singularities and the Geometry of Spacetime.”

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He spent most of this time in collaboration with Roger Penrose, who was by then professor of applied mathematics at Birkbeck College in London. One of the major difficulties the two of them faced was that they had to devise new mathematical techniques in order to carry out the calculations necessary to verify their theories—to make them empirically sound and not just ideas. Einstein had experienced a similar problem fifty years earlier with the mathematics of general relativity. He, like Hawking, was not a particularly brilliant mathematician. Fortunately for Hawking, however, Penrose was. In fact, he was fundamentally a mathematician rather than a physicist, but at the deep level at which the two subjects become almost indistin-guishable.

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Hawking’s way of working is largely intuitive—he just knows if an idea is correct or not. He has an amazing feel for the subject, a bit like a musician playing by ear. Penrose thinks and works in a different way, more like a concert pianist following a musical score. The two approaches meshed perfectly and soon began to produce some very interesting results on the nature of the early Universe.

Octavian Paler – Van Gogh sau revanşa prin artă (5). Tentaţia absolutului.

Vincent Van Gogh – Midday Rest (after Millet), c.1890

   ” Iubind un lucru, nu-l vedem oare mai bine şi mai corect decât neiubindu-l ?” – (Van Gogh)

S-a scris mult despre sinuciderea lui Van Gogh; nimeni nu s-a gândit, totuşi, că ea nu s-a petrecut numai în duminica în care pictorul şi-a tras un glonte în piept.

Ultimii săi ani au fost apoteoza geniului său, dar şi o lungă sinucidere. Aproape întreaga lui mare operă este realizată în aceşti ani în care soarele orbitor al sudului coboară în noaptea sumbră a nebuniei, dar tot atunci Van Gogh se supune unei presiuni înfricoşătoare la care, în mod normal, o viaţă, şi cu atât mai mult una măcinată de boală, nu poate rezista.

Timpul său se comprimă brusc, gata să explodeze. Flacăra lui dansează pe lama de cuţit dintre extaz şi moarte. Pictorul se grăbeşte. Se teme că nu va avea vreme să-şi descarce sufletul ? Cândva, iubind o femeie care l-a respins, s-a dus acasă la părinţii ei şi le-a cerut voie s-o vadă numai cât timp va reuşi să-şi tină degetele în flacără. De fapt, aşa procedează şi cu viaţa lui. Vrea să existe numai câtă vreme reuşeşte să se menţină în flacără. Altfel… A cerut un pistol spunând că vrea să împuşte corbi.

Printr-o curioasă compensaţie cei care simt presiunea destinului ameninţând să-i omoare repede sunt parcă mai obsedaţi de eternitate. La 35 de ani, Van Gogh e obsedat de ideea de a ajunge după moarte într-o stea. Când alţii sunt în plină vigoare a vieţii, el se pregateşte de nemurire convins că lumânarea nu va mai arde mult.  

Vincent Van Gogh – Old Man in Sorrow, 1890

 

Poate că absolutul este totdeauna revanşa celor frustraţi în existenţa lor relativă, a celor care neavând aproape nimic s-au hotărât să vrea totul. Dar convingerea mea e că orice ar fi făcut în viaţă acest olandez s-ar fi dăruit la fel: total.

Există oameni care nu-şi pot menaja şi distribui forţele. Ei trebuie să arunce o dată totul în cântar. Chiar viaţa lor. Ţinta pe care o urmăresc o devoră. A trăi nu e pentru ei decât un mijloc de a se lăsa devoraţi. Nu-i sperie gândul că se va întâmpla să moară mai devreme decât alţii.

Ei nu pot fi cumpătaţi când e vorba de visul lor. Trăiesc sub o dictatură sublimă, a pasiunii care îi omoară. Curajul lor nu trebuie confundat cu al celor care făceau ocheade femeilor în drum spre ghilotină. Pur şi simplu ei nu pot trăi altfel. Van Gogh n-a putut păstra niciodată o măsură în existenţa lui. El nu s-a priceput în nici o privinţă să se oprească la timp, să nu cadă în exces. Până şi biserica protestantă s-a speriat de zelul său la Borinage, retrăgându-i dreptul de a predica.

Acest solitar ciudat nu ştia, într-adevăr, să se servească de o idee în interesul său. Se pricepea numai să ia în serios totul. Vânzător de tablouri la Londra, refuza să recomande gravurile pe care le detesta. În toate pasiunile năvăleşte, ca şi la Academia din Anvers, ca o bombă, intempestiv, fără tact şi fără măsură. El nu cunoaşte decât excesul. Şi în singurătate şi în suferinţă şi în furia de a crea.

Vincent Van Gogh – Vase with Oleanders and Books, c.1888

   Ajuns în Provenţa, pictează într-un ritm frenetic, de dimineaţă până seara. Cu eterna lui pipă între dinţi, trece pe străzile din Arles urmărit de copiii care strigă în urma lui şi râd. Se duce în câmp, unde stă toată ziua sub soarele năucitor. Lucrspune el. ează repede, fără să revină, fără să facă retuşuri.

Stăpânit parcă permanent de gândul că nu are prea mult timp la dispoziţie. Seara îşi ameţeşte uneori foamea cu absint. Sunt ca o locomotivă care pictează. Şi dacă auzim cum trebuie aceste vorbe, simţim că ele sunt rostite cu o voce sugrumată, de un om care bănuieşte că moartea poate să-i sară oricând în gâtlej. Suprimă uneori detaliile în maniera lui Giotto, căutând să ajungă repede, cât mai repede la esenţial.

În peisaje, lumina e aproape de paroxism, arborii par să se răsucească surescitaţi de căldură şi totul e însetat de un absolut confuz şi fierbinte, iar în autoportrete îl simţim parcă pe pictor gata să murmure, cum o va face o dată, „Ah, viaţa, pricina despărţirilor, a plecărilor”. Fără îndoială, cineva care murmură asta nu e deloc nepăsător când priveşte în jurul său. Dar despărţirea, plecarea, tristeţea, au început, chiar sub enormul disc galben al soarelui care exaltă energiile vitale.

Căci Van Gogh face parte dintre artiştii care nu pot trăi şi crea în acelaşi timp. Arta lui nu se mulţumeşte cu o parte din forţele lui. Ea îi cere, necruţătoare şi despotică, toată energia. După ce pictorul a eşuat în toate tentativele, singura şansă de fericire care i-a mai rămas este cea care îl ucide.

Drama lui Van Gogh se joacă astfel pe o scenă goală, fără spectatori, între complexul eşecului şi tentaţia absolutului. El are pietre de moară legate de picioare şi, pe de altă parte, aripi ca Icar. Nu poate să renunţe nici la unele, nici la altele. Singurul lucru de care poate dispune este viaţa sa. Şi-o macină şi şi-o arde. „O, Doamne, nu există Dumnezeu”, exclamă el, dar ce există atunci ? Există arta !

 

Vincent Van Gogh – Vase of Lilacs, Daisies and Anemones, c.1887

  Cât timp va mai reuşi să-şi ţină degetele în flacără, va face, prin artă, o tentativă disperată: să-şi concilieze pietrele de moară cu aripile. Ceea ce nimeni n-a reuşit. Van Gogh încearcă înainte de a fi răpus. Şi tocmai această îndârjire eroică a singurătăţii lui care umple pânzele de lumină, de lanuri de grâu şi de ceruri prinse într-un vârtej cosmic, această încordare supremă care înalţă geniul, doboară omul.

Dar asemenea personajelor dostoievskiene, el ştie că dacă a pus piciorul pe prima treaptă, trebuie să înainteze, să trudească până la cea din urmă.

Publicat în Revista “Flacăra” nr.1334 – 01.01.1981

Octavian Paler – Van Gogh sau revanşa prin artă (4). Fiul deşertului 2.

Vincent Van Gogh – Fritillaries

   „Din motive obscure, pe cei de care am fost cel mai mult legat nu i-am văzut decât ca într-o oglindă” – (Van Gogh)          

 

Poate nu întâmplător secolul nostru care e departe de a fi inocent vorbeşte totuşi atât de mult de drama lui Van Gogh. Desigur, tăcerea e în genere mai decentă. Dar ea ne învaţă prea puţin. Şi sunt momente când morala trebuie căutată la toate răspântiile pentru a ne continua drumul.

Înapoi în insule ! pare să fie îndemnul cel mai des auzit în acest secol în care, se zice, Sisif i-a lat locul definitiv lui Prometeu, iar artistul e sfătuit uneori, ironic, să nu uite că într-o perlă lucrul cel mai important e grăuntele de nisip.

Unui asemenea îndemn nu-i poti răspunde numai printr-un refuz de principiu. E nevoie de mai mult. Lumea nu trăieşte “mai muzical” azi decât a văzut-o Van Gogh. Nici soluţia de a învinge singurătatea printr-o tandreţe sporită nu e un remediu la îndemâna oricui. Dealtfel, mai multă dragoste nu înseamnă mai multă dreptate, cei cinici profită, chiar, de naivitatea celor care nu se pot descurca decât iubind.

În schimb, nu e prea greu să ne dăm seama că un artist trebuie să ştie să-şi suporte singurătatea şi pe de altă parte s-o limiteze. El trăieşte la jumătatea drumului dintre reculegere şi frumuseţea de care are nevoie orice om; nu poate uita cu totul de acea parte din sine care vrea să-l tragă înapoi, dar nici nu-i poate ceda renunţând să mai audă şi să se facă auzit.  

Vincent Van Gogh – Garden in Bloom, Arles, c.1888

 

Şi iată-ne revenind la singurătatea lui Van Gogh: ce deşert e acesta care se deschide mereu spre lume şi care numai în faţa morţii se resemnează să rămână deşert ? Nu cumva compasiunea, singură, riscă să nu înţeleagă mare lucru ? Dar nu cumva admiraţia riscă să binecuvânteze o singurătate atât de generoasă cu arta ?

Poate că rămânând la Paris, iubit, înconjurat de prieteni, de interes, Van Gogh n-ar fi dat acea uluitoare avalanşă de capodopere din ultimii săi ani de viaţă care reprezintă, de fapt, eternitatea lui. Totuşi, cum să motivăm nedreptatea care i se face unui artist prin faptul că, în loc să-l îngenuncheze, ea îi sporeşte forţele înainte de a-l ucide ? Nu există singurătăţi binecuvântate şi nici cinism salutar.

Van Gogh dovedeşte numai că există caractere care reuşesc să-şi facă deşertul fertil şi că arta se poate hrăni în acelaşi timp din frumuseţe şi din suferinţă.

Rembrandt a fost la fel de singur la un moment dat, dar el cunoscuse înainte succesul, tinereţea, iubirea; avea cel putin amintiri; în vreme ce Van Gogh târăşte după el de la început un deşert, încât îţi vine să crezi că şi amintirile îi lipsesc. Cu ochii inflamaţi uneori de efortul de a privi mult timp în lumină şi cu acea mască de indescriptibilă tristeţe care i-a impresionat pe cei ce l-au cunoscut, el şi-a jucat drama şi şi-a cucerit nemurirea pe o scenă complet goală.

Vincent Van Gogh – Irises, Saint-Remy, 1889

   Cu atât mai limpede se vede însă că în acest deşert el încearcă să aducă singura frumuseţe care i-a mai rămas: aceea a artei. Şi ce lecţie de curaj ne întâmpină aici unde totul se află la egală distanţă de disperare şi dragoste ! Nicăieri, Van Gogh nu-mi apare mai impunător ca în singurătatea lui cea mai rea.

Departe de orice zgomot, el îşi aude parcă mai bine vocea interioară. Şi cu cât e mai singur, geniul său străluceşte mai puternic şi mai nestingherit. S-ar spune că singurătatea îi e chiar de ajutor, în deşert nimic nu-l mai încurcă. îşi poate tăia drumul drept. Poate înainta fără nici un ocol spre ţintă, spre absolut. După ce şi-a ruinat sănătatea, posibilitatea de a avea o familie şi prieteni, de a trăi o viaţă adevărată, poate să nu mai facă nici un compromis.

Nu mai trebuie să împartă cu nimeni ceea ce i-a rămas. Întreaga lui tristeţe şi întreaga lui sete le poate închina acum artei. Nu-l aşteaptă niciodată nimeni, astfel că poate rămâne în câmp, în faţa şevaletului, cât doreşte. O zi întreagă, până când simte că îi vâjâie capul. Dacă vrea, iese şi noaptea, să picteze cerul înstelat. În fond, n-are pe cine cruţa, va putea deci să fie necruţător cu el însuşi.

În deşertul său, Van Gogh îşi aparţine în întregime. Fără martori, poate păşî pe cărarea subţire dintre moarte şi absolut. Nimeni nu se va speria de îndrăzneala sa. Şi nimeni nu-l va striga din pricina asta să se întoarcă. N-are de ce să ezite şi de ce să se menajeze. După ce i-a luat aproape totul, deşertul îi îngăduie să dispună cum vrea de ce i-a lăsat. Singurătatea care l-a frustrat atât de grav îi dă până la urmă o libertate totală.

Poate sta nemâncat, se poate surmena în voie, nimeni nu-l opreşte să-şi macine forţele şi să adune tablouri într-un ritm infernal, cum istoria artei n-a mai văzut încă. Poate picta uneori şi două tablouri pe zi. N-are cine să-i reproşeze tensiunea în care trăieşte. Dealtfel, e zorit. Parcă presimte că are puţin timp. Vede din ce în ce mai clar şi arde din ce în ce mai lipsit de precauţii. Uneori, tresare din această febră. « Poate-i mai bine să caut un dram de prietenie şi să trăiesc de pe o zi pe alta „. Apoi îşi reia penelul. Ce rost mai au dilemele când nu mai există drum îndărăt ?

Vincent Van Gogh – Irises, Saint-Remy, c.1889

   Şi pe urmă, în labirint, (Van Gogh trăieşte în plin soare ca în labirint) pe acelaşi drum se ajunge la moarte şi la iubire, iar pentru cei ce n-au avut şansa sau n-au izbutit să se cheltuie în formele obişnuite de a iubi ale unui om, arta e, mai presus de orice, chiar un mod de a iubi. Cu dinţii strânşi dacă trebuie, dar de a iubi.

 

Publicat în Revista “Flacăra” nr.1332 – 18.12.1980