The Art of Indefatigability

I finished reading Mircea Eliade's Parisian journal earlier this year after many evenings in the park, and it was a transformative experience. There are many facets of Eliade's personality that interest me, but there is one that rises above the rest: his seemingly limitless capacity to consume and create words.

It is clear that Eliade, a prolific writer and religious historian, is an intellectual who simultaneously attracts and arrests. On the one hand, he charms us with his inexhaustible erudition—what is the demon that feeds his genius? In his world, nothing is too obscure for his appetite. He devours books as if they were glasses of water. He possesses the uncanny knack of making connections between what appear to be totally unrelated fields of knowledge. This is the mark of that rare individual who has successfully combined intelligence and creativity into a potent formula for intellectual indefatigability. How remarkable it would be to sit with him and experience the genesis of a single thought.

On the other hand, we are seized in his presence. After all, it's virtually certain he would run intellectual circles around us, and we wonder how he would respond to our inadequacies. Would we embarrass ourselves trying to maintain his stratospheric level of discourse? More important, would our meeting throw us into a state of despair? After all, many of us are simply incapable of devouring books like water. We might be tempted to give up and throw all our manuscripts away.

In "Beginnings of a Friendship," Emil Cioran gives us his own account of Eliade's productive capacity:

Everything negative, everything that promotes self-destruction on the physical as well as spiritual plane, was then, and still is, foreign to him—whence his inaptitude for resignation, for remorse, for despair, for all feelings that imply the bogged-down, the rut, the nonfuture. Again, I may be going out on a limb, but I believe that if he has perfect understanding of sin, he lacks a sense of it: he is too feverish for that, too dynamic, too hurried, too full of projects, too intoxicated with the possible.

Then there's Cioran’s account of Eliade’s lectures at the Faculty of Lectures at Bucharest:

I attended his lectures whenever I could. The fervor he lavished on his articles was fortunately recognizable in his lectures, the most animated, the most vibrant I have ever heard. Without notes, without anything, swept on by a vertigo of lyric erudition, he was a fountain of convulsed yet coherent words, underlined by the spasmodic movements of his hands. An hour of tension, after which, miraculously, he did not seem tired and perhaps, indeed, was not. It was as if he possessed the art of indefinitely postponing fatigue.

When you sit down to read his journals and spend a few hours immersed in his world, your curiosity heightens and you never want to leave. Every word, every gesture becomes a springboard for another thought. Eliade's desire to devour the world is dangerously contagious, and if his musings impel us to move forward, they do so tragically: no matter how hard we try, we will die undone. In the journal Religion, Matei Calinescu provides his own translation of some of Eliade's thoughts from the Portuguese journal:

My capacity to understand culture, in all its forms, is limitless. I wish I could express just one percent of what I think and know as nobody else does. I don't think that a genius of this complexity has ever been encountered—at any rate my intellectual horizons are much vaster than Goethe's.

Intellectual horizons vaster than Goethe's? When I read this, I can only conclude that we are dealing with either a very serious person or a person who is not serious at all. After reading his Parisian journal, I am apt to believe the former.

How can we possibly compete with people like this? Perhaps the answer lies in understanding that everyone—even Mircea Eliade—dies with more work to be done. No one that I know wakes up and tells himself that every task has been completed and every problem has been solved. This is one of the many reasons we might get out of bed in the morning, even if we don't feel like it. And when we die, someone picks up where we left off. There is no way around this.

Eliade is obsessed with time, and perhaps we can interpret Youth Without Youth as his way of dealing with the ever-shrinking space of our existence. The trick is to recognize our journey toward understanding not as a struggle among ourselves, but as a struggle against something beyond ourselves—that immaterial and elusive entity we call time. But the act of naming something does not mean we apprehend it any better. And if you're crazy enough to compete with Eliade, you would be wise to tackle Goethe instead.