![]() In 2016, they brought out the English translation of his Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent, a novel about his high school years. Thanks to Istros Books and translator Christopher Bartholomew, the English-speaking public can witness the intellectual development of young Eliade. He was, indeed, a hippie avant la lettre: a young European traveler to India in the 1920s, who adopted Indian dress and practiced yoga in Rishikesh in search of enlightenment. His interests in yoga and shamanism, as well as insights into the sacred aspects of reality that could be glimpsed in everyday life, made him popular with the hippies and the New Age movement. ![]() ![]() In France and, later, in the United States, he became a world-famous historian of religions. A best-selling author in his native Romania, and an acknowledged intellectual leader of his generation, he was forced into perpetual self-exile by the communist overthrow of the Romanian government. In Eliade’s case, this potentiality fully actualized itself. Their writing is, in an important way, in the future tense their lives are still potentialities. We know how their stories end, but they don’t. Texts and pictures of young people, when read and seen many years later, can be the stuff of Greek tragedy. ![]() Mircea Eliade’s novel Gaudeamus, written before his departure for India at the age of 21, provokes similar feelings. ![]() Who was I when I was 20? I feel a mixture of shame and pity and pride when I look back at that time. ![]()
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