'Speaking about the year 2,000 - Paul Morand wrote in the twenties - ' the works of Brancusi will decorate the town squares all over the world'. It might not be quite as the French writer imagined, but at least one of the the sculptor's works should exist in each of the world's squares, and this would be:'Cumintenia Pamantului' - 'The Wisdom of the Earth'.

Indeed, one can never know when, at a given moment, a cosmic inspector appointed to supervise this rather secondary part of our galaxy shows up on Earth to ask us: ' Are you behaving yourself? Is the Earth wise? Or should we send a comet from the Cosmos to wipe out all traces of life?'

We can imagine that at that moment some politicians from the Earth will rush to hide, some outstanding physicists will bend their heads and because someone has to tell him overtly whether the Earth is wise or not, a child might show up just like in Andersen's fairy-tales, a child who might have read letter by letter its name on the socle of the statue and pointing at it would answer : ' But we are wise. See: The Wisdom of the Earth'. Then the cosmic intendant would look at it and thus there would be a chance for earthlings to stay alive as long as he would, at least partly, understand the meaning of the statue.

Still, something enigmatic persists in it even for the humans who have contemplated it. A Romanian poet, no less significant than Arghezi, dared to compare it with the ' Sphinx', declaring that 'it is only surpassed in size and duration by its elder brother's portrait, the Sphinx'. But a physician, also Romanian, stated that it is an 'idiotic mongoloid', ironically named by the sculptor ' The Wisdom of the Earth' - a statement which the scientist tried to back up by photographing a senile, mentally defective person living in the sculptor's native region. The photo shows the woman in exactly the same position as the Statue. From these two opinions any interpretation of ' The Wisdom of the Earth' can occur, probably even the one given by the supposed stranger coming from the Cosmos.'...

An English version by Melinda Erje

Noica: 'Introduction to Gunther Anders and fears of the West' 'How foolish the Westerners suddenly became (over the decades) ! Most of them became scared of their own future. The fear of the year 1,000, the so-colled 'millennarism' had some sense, even if a rather naive one, compared with the lamentable (bi-, second- ?) millennarism of today when people, even scientists with Nobel Prize, wearing medals on their chests make warnings, of course legitimate, to the world, but they also demoralize or even paralyze it with their gross apocalypses.

Gunther Anders ( born 1902 - author of 'The Antiquation of Man' - 'Die Antiquierheit des Menschen') asserts in the Preface that human beings, individuals as well as mankind, underwent and will undergo changes caused by technology.. Before asking ourselves: 'are these positive or negative changes?' we must confess that we do not yet see the difference between a wise man of today and one that lived 2,000, 3,000 or possibly 5,000 years ago as the existing records prove, not to mention the lack of any fundamental difference between the average man of today and the one who lived some thousand years ago'...

'Maybe today's youth do not properly understand the promise of novelty in the world they live in. Their world seems so natural to them that this does not allow them to see that they exist under the grace of a possible isotopy. Not understanding how close they are to another version of human being it may be that they do not perceive the future novelties either. Then it is the duty of the elders, of those who the history has twisted against their will, to tell - if they ended up by understanding what had happened to them - about the beauty of the future world. It is their duty to try to build up a chronicle of tomorrow's ideas'...

'How could one get frightened, as in this 'stupid 20th century' of the West? The crab apples might have became scared deep in their unknown souls, when some brother-apples have been taken by man for grafting; but what admirable sorts of 'Golden Parmen' or ' Jonathan' have descended from them. The wild dog might have became scared when man has taken him to be tamed; but how many steps on the stairs of existence has he climbed this way, and how deeply has he changed becoming more human, ontologically he triumphed over himself, poor steppe-beast, so today he is allowed to be buried in graveyards like the humans ones, as happens nowadays in the England of all candors.

This is why it should be told to everyone, especially to the young people brought up under the sign of piety for the matter, that we have to learn everything from our brother dog, our brother apple and from all these old brothers, old as the world itself, brother oxygen and heavy, furious, explosive brother uranium.'

An English version by Melinda Erje