NORMAN MANEA
535
The perception of outrageusness is being lost; we are now reaching a
routine cohabitation with the outrageous. Nothing appears audible
unless it is scandalous, but nothing is scandalous enough to become
memorable.
More than ever, we desperately need, perhaps, a "transcendent ideal"
in our centrifugal, materialistic, mobile world, from which the concept of
the ideal often seems to have been banished. On the other hand, in the
aftermath of totali tarian systems of all persuasions, a clear-sighted approach
to the manipulations unleashed by every ideal is all the more essential.
So, in trying to understand the dangers facing democracy, it may be
useful, perhaps, to look to the "life history" of the fight against totalitari–
anism, in what meant the power of the powerless Auguste the Fool
confronting the immoral environment of his time and place, even when it
implied taking risks.
As the century counts out its dizzying end, it seems in a hurry to clear
the burden of its historical memory.
For the Eastern European writer who moved early or more recently
to the Wes t, the end of the century concentrates as in a funnel a bizarre
mixture of life histories. The Holocaust, the communist dictatorship,
exile-which also are, not at all by chance, Jewish tragedies-these sum up
the key traumas and the far-from-neglible price that they entail.
Anyone who today examines that past called the twentieth century has
a certain sense of weariness, not just with what was, but also with what is
still to be after this exhausting "preliminary exercise" towards a radically
new world, as it is announced by the new century and the new millenium
already at our door. Also at our Jewish door, of course, with or without a
Mezuzah.
Despite his marginal place in the public arena of our consumer world,
the writer may still have something important to say even in his strange
role as a speaker. Not as a prophet of the future-the last prophets died two
thousand years ago and they were often wrong-but as an independent
observer of a troubled past and as an independent participant in a troubled
present. Mter all, at this end-beginning of the world, the fleeting and con–
stant human anxiety, its uniqueness, its extraordinary creativity, its drama
and its dreams, are here with us, around and beyond us, to be scrutinized
in the century-long moment of each still-living day.
