Estimated reading time: 6–7 minutes
“And now, rereading what I have written so far, I realise I have made us all out to be rather too… “showcase” students.
Myself, at any rate.”
All that is missing is the red Pioneer necktie and a diploma reading “First Prize in the Institution” — that sort of atmosphere in which everyone is a model student, nobody is ever late and nobody forgets their exercise book at home.
In reality, we were perfectly normal students.
We skived off when the occasion called for it (that is to say, precisely when it did not, but that is another discussion), we had failed examinations to retake, we went dancing at ASE on Saturdays, but we also engaged in “interoperability” with the Architecture faculty and the celebrated “303.”
If I were asked today to explain those evenings in modern terms, I would say we were performing route optimisation under severe constraints: small budget, little time and an unlimited desire not to miss a thing.
One thing I must say clearly: throughout this entire narrative I avoid mentioning colleagues by name, although — if I wished to “pad out” the text — I would have quite enough flavoursome episodes.
It is neither mystery nor the caution of a detective novel. It is simply respect.
Memories are, when all is said and done, personal, and they compress things: they preserve the essence, but I have lost some details, rounded off some corners, and sometimes perhaps rearranged the order of events.
And I should not wish a real person to find himself “compiled” into a scene that I tell well but that he remembers differently — or would rather not remember at all.
Moreover, if we are to speak in the language of the trade: I do not wish to turn my former colleagues into variables in a programme, with labels assigned by me after decades.
Not even under that convenient and dangerous label: “they made something of themselves.”
Because “making something of oneself” is among the most subjective notions ever invented by human beings.
Some measure their lives by positions, titles and professional achievements; others by family; others by friendships kept; others by the peace of mind with which they look in the mirror each morning.
In Operational Research we would call it an “objective function” — only each person has a different one.
And so I leave them without names, but not without a place: they are there, in the background, as ordinary people, with their truancies, their failed examinations, their jokes, their ambitions and, perhaps, their joy at having caught a world in the midst of change.
Whoever recognises himself knows I mention him with affection.
Whoever does not recognise himself — that is probably even better: it means I have preserved discretion, and the story has remained about the epoch and the spirit, not about the register.
But I must not overlook the artistic brigade.
There, the undisputed star was Nae Lăzărescu — who, in his own fashion, performed “debugging” on student morale.
I believe I caught the premiere of the sketch in which, on the telephone to his father, he said he was “lying on his book, swotting away”… only “the book” was, discreetly, the coded name of a female classmate.
We went on mountain excursions with our godfather, or on organised trips.
We went to the ASE Club, where I saw Tudor Gheorghe in one of his earliest public appearances.
I was enormously taken with him, without knowing then that that voice would remain, over the years, like a refrain that follows you beautifully.
Such were those years: between the Odhner wheel and the integrals of Edmond Nicolau, between punched cards and dance steps, between graphs, tables and the eternal question “where shall we go this evening?”
We were neither heroes nor saints. We were curious.
And, from time to time, tired — but with that good tiredness that comes from being alive.
And one more important thing: we were young. So from that point of view I can indeed say that “things were better before” — as the joke that circulated after the Revolution has it.
In the end, I for one came out of university with an inventory of instruments — methods, models, logic, a kind of discipline of thought — which one could deepen as the need arose.
That is what a good university ought to do: open horizons and give you the methods to explore them.
And the optimism? It came as part of the package, even if it was not written on the diploma.