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The face on the dust-jacket is an impressive one, determined, austere, with a searching gaze that suggests the attempt to penetrate eternal mysteries. These are the reflections not merely of a sensitive and profound writer but also of an immensely versatile and industrious scholar who can say casually, ‘I'm re-reading—perhaps for the twentieth time—the Bhagavad-Gita.’
Eliade left his native Bucharest when he was thirty-three. Writing in Florence in 1957, he recalls the magnum opus on the Italian Renaissance for which he amassed notes at the age of twenty, relates it to his next absorbing passion, Oriental studies and techniques of mystical experience, and ponders on the sacrificial new life that started for him at the end of the war, poverty at forty in a hotel room in the Latin Quarter, struggling to master an unfamiliar language and reconstructing in his mind the vast collection of notes and manuscripts abandoned in Rumania.
His erudition is awe-inspiring, but these admirably translated extracts from a much longer journal (published in France in 1973) are softened by a vein of Proustian nostalgia. In his preface he speaks of ‘the specific function of a personal diary, namely the possibility of “saving and preserving time” … of capturing the ineffable quality of a particular moment… the presence of a certain afternoon or a certain town or even the rapture of some fresh discovery’.
This carefully nurtured capacity for recollection illuminates and binds scattered fragments of experience; the intensely active period covered here, which includes travels in