This is how the unexpected end feels right now, like a suddenly severed link to source and to essence. And what a link it was!

It’s been 12 years since we first met, Mircea Popescu and I, as much as meeting may mean online. These 12 years have passed, but not quickly, nor “in the blink of an eye”, no, for they have been full and intense and ultimately transformative, despite the supposed limits of this online medium. Because indeed, we interacted mostly over these modern wires that carry themselves, appropriately enough, exactly light and dark, as he aptly observed once. Out of light and dark though, everything is ultimately shaped and our initial flitting touch persisted and grew organically into an ever more intricate and complex link. In time, it became even strong enough to bear so much more than one fun and enlightening conversation ¹ and even more than one project on which we worked together.

Through it all and at every juncture, he has been incredibly supportive and protective of all healthy growth, clearing the space for it with fire if and when needed, unerringly generous with his time, his vast experience and his superior understanding that pierced to the core of the matter and then came back reliably, each and every time, with the correct and solid model on which everything else rested suddenly at ease, suddenly ready to carry one even further, to what had seemed out of touch only just the moment before.

There was all the above and more to it. That beast, mellifluous, belovable, utterly beastly beast of an ocean, as he called it, did steal it all in the end, though. What’s left now is the legacy and, perhaps, as much as I could grow with it so far. Whether it’s enough or not, I can’t tell, but as with all I ever got, I’ll try as hard as I can to make the most of it, too. What will come out of it further, now that the link to the source of it all has been severed, I don’t know, nor can I quite begin to think much of it just yet.

I’m grateful for having journeyed together as long as we did and through the numbness of it all, there’s also the warm glow of knowing that he enjoyed my company, too. While the world is for now a darker place, life still remains the burden and the war that he knew it to be and that he enjoyed fully, although he had no illusions about its end:

Indeed, exactly so : what for an entire world, of my own death ? 

So it is indeed and there are no better fitting words that I can find for it all, either:

El nu e mort! Traieste-n veci,
E numai dus.
N-am cap si chip pe toti sa-i spui
Si-as spune tot ce stiu, dar cui?
Ca de copil eu m-am luptat
In rand cu Volbura-mparat
Si stiu pe Crivat cel turbat
Ca tara lui.
Ce oameni! Ce sunt cei de-acum!
Si toti s-au dus pe-acelasi drum.
Ei si-au plinit chemarea lor
Si i-am vazut murind usor;
N-a fost nici unul plangator,
Ca viata-i fum.
Zici fum? O, nu-i adevarat.
Razboi e, de viteji purtat!
Viata-i datorie grea
Si lasii se-ngrozesc de ea –
Sa aiba tot cei lasi ar vrea
Pe neluptat.
De ce sa-ntrebi viata ce-i?
Asa se-ntreaba cei misei.
Cei buni n-au vreme de gandit
La moarte si la tanguit,
Caci plansu-i de nebuni scornit
Si de femei!
Traieste-ti, doamna, viata ta!
Si-a mortii lege n-o cata!
Sunt crai ce schimb-a lumii sorti,
Dar daca mor, ce grija porti?
Mai simte-n urma cineva
Ca ei sunt morti? ²

1. From when it all started to very recent and there’s much more published in between and a lot more unpublished, too.[↩]
2. Fragment from Moartea lui Fulger, de George Cosbuc. Mircea Popescu published the phonetic transcription and a translation to English of the full poem.[↩]