Zi: 19 martie 2026

Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș

Fragrance

(novel)

*

I have read, as you very well know, various translations and have made translations myself. But the translations of intellectual imposture are not ignorance, but malice in continued form. When someone wants to falsify an author, they do it with impudence. And you must realize it, yes, realize it in time. But that means knowing all the languages ​​from which it was translated, and that’s not the case. Fact for which we let ourselves be lied to, we take it for granted, because we can’t check it. And even if we start checking the translation, making a good translation means translating it yourself. Because you trust what you saw, what you touched with your own hands, what you felt face to face. And, certainly, some have not forgotten, but they have begun to rewrite, for grandchildren and the ignorant, their world, their past, which is also yours. The exaggerations, the misrepresentations, the erasure of events, their rewriting are part of the mystification of history. Some rewrite their history to breathe it better. Others partially forget it and start to fall in love with their own perspective. You dust off one side of the sofa, and you leave the other side there. And when you try to enlighten only certain parts of history, you don’t bring history to the present, but you cut it badly as you wish.

I saw on TikTok that the haircut bowl is still popular among chinese people, and not only them. Workers’, from the axe. Like sausages made from cutting pork with an axe. You put the bowl on your head and cut around it. Bad haircut for your hair, cutting it with scissors against, you make ladders, you draw a line at your eyebrow with a razor, you’re cutting out some geometric shapes in your hair. At youth, getting a tattoo means joining a gang. It’s a silly terribleness, but ultimately excusable. You say that he didn’t have the courage to think. But as an old man, without a gang, with tattoos on you, you’re like a never-finished socialist construction, left in ruins, ready for any defecation. And when I read: „non-smoking hotel” my heart suddenly rejoices, just thinking about how horrible it would be to enter a room where people have been smoking for years and you want to pray in peace. Most often I go to the hotel to rest. I reserve writing for my home. But if I were to go at some point to read, write, edit or paint, I would need peace and fresh air. The table, when you work, can be ascetic. Or, more often, it is ascetic, because you forget about yourself. But the hotel must be a space of equilibrium, a clean and quiet space, where I can feel good and hear my thoughts.

The headphones on the street are anti-thought for me. I need to hear everything that’s going on around me. The headphones in my ears are a huge risk, because they’re like riding a bike in the middle of the highway. And if you close my ears with music, it’s like closing my eyes with ads I don’t need. I go in to buy milk and bread and chocolate and toilet paper, and I listen a music, often, I don’t want. The crowd needs of a space of dreaming, and their dreaming is to fill it with music. Many don’t understand the lyrics, but they catch the rhythm. They stay with the rhythm in them, the rhythm plays in them. And the rhythm makes its own world, its own state, which has no peace. And when I want to pray on the rhythm given by others, I break the rhythm inside, to make my own peace, my hesychia. And my fight for hesychia is with every noise, with every squinting, haughty, insensitive look, with every music, advertisement and waste of time.