I owe the best parts of me to my parents.

My artistic side was freed from flattening restrictions through the creative fire and built with the realization that hard work is the only path to artistic excellence, by my mother, a ballerina of immense beauty and graceful strength. I’m afraid I missed her inner equilibrium and power to be mild.

To my father, the great Professor of Symbolic Logic and intellectual legend in the romantic Transylvanian town of my birth (Cluj-Napoca, 1974), I owe my intellectual upbringing, with hope that someday I will live up to his expectations, for at least one moment… to make up in part for all his efforts and the hurt I put him through.

I would’ve been nothing without their arduous efforts.

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The First Story

The first literary piece I remember creating was in Primary School. I enjoyed so much the success of my story, engraved on the faces of my teacher and classmates, that I knew I would never stop writing. In that moment, I realized what powerful magic words have, how they make people experience immaterial worlds emerging from an artist’s mind. So, what if the same skillfully crafted words were used to describe the beauty of reality?

Shortly after, I ran away from home to ascertain life’s experience—essential for becoming a great writer of “that kind” (the real-life kind). Although I returned home after three days—after all, I was just eleven—the course of my entire life afterward has followed that same path.

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Literary Influences and Inspirations

I first read Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in high school, and that started, irrevocably, my appetite for South American literature, for the freedom of idea-flow and for words that fly like butterflies, heavy with meaning like rhinos. To the pundits of institutionalized form and the pompous pricks without weight of the façades, I say: Fuck them.

Before Garcia, Dostoevsky was my mentor. His Demons shaped my life.

I read authors, not only solitary books—everything I could find, following their path in thinking. And I had great sources, playing in huge libraries. It was like Hemingway’s big-game hunting, but with great minds as trophies.

Then came my idol, Sartre. But there are too many names to put on this page. And books. Wonderful, magical books.

The last two were Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum… the fourth tango with the Pendulum, I believe. Funny how, the first time I read it, I was fervently against it as “toxic nonsense,” which I now see as “the light.” I was so caught up in appearances and details, I missed the point. Happens.

I’m still reading through my father’s PhD thesis: Undecidability and Knowledge. I will get it in the end.

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Academics and Adventures

Two university degrees later—Political Sciences at BBU, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and Graphic Design at AUT, Auckland, New Zealand—thousands of books read and lived through, quite a few books written by myself too, and all the lessons learned from countless adventures stretching from Borneo’s jungle to the canals of Venice, from the wildness of Komodo to the peaks of artistic refinement inside the Pompidou Centre, I think I’ve built myself into the seasoned intellectual I intended to be back then. With the limitations that separate my intentions from their outcomes in reality—but still, here I am, immersed in the unfolding reality, not in a room of my choice surrounded by books of authors I agree with.

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An Intellectual Purist

Because of my love for life, I remained a purist as an intellectual, harvesting my resources through other means. I’m thinking for thinking’s sake. My pull is the truth. My art is likewise.

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Life Experiences

In the fields of doing, I have been a fisherman on a tuna longliner boat in the stormy South Pacific, a political analyst in volatile times, and a way-too-generous blackjack dealer. I’ve been an award-winning artist and an average builder, an advertising campaign manager and a real-life adventurer, a father of two luminous children who never cease to amaze me and whom I love dearly, a failed husband and a stellar future lover, plus many, many more roles in the past and hopefully in the future, too.

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The Writer

But in the end, I am a writer, and a fellow scholar, in search of truth and meaning.

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This is almost me,

Mihai

September 4th, 2023