Tag Archives: history

Puiu

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When I started adjuncting at UVa Wise, the office next door belonged to a Sociology professor named Puiu. He came over to say hello and showed me around the building. Over the next months, I got to know Puiu not only as a nice guy, but as a brilliant statistician.

He came to my rescue while I was getting my MPH, spending three hours one afternoon explaining regression and means uses, patiently, over and over again, until I could recite the basics if not quite understand them. He’s one of the reasons I passed biostatistics. His kind, grandfatherly voice, his careful repetition of things and his teaching method of “here’s what you need to know” or “here’s how this works” based on whether my eyes were glazed or confused, his laughter when I tried very hard to get it right and his encouragement of what little pieces I had grasped as building blocks to the rest: they were incentives to do something I literally hated. I didn’t care about biostatistics but wanted Puiu to think I was smart because he was so smart.

Puiu came to our bookstore a couple of times, and as he told me during a biostats session, “I have fallen in love with your husband.” He and Jack started a bromance. They could talk European politics for hours—and did. Many a night they closed the bookstore sitting on the front porch, drinking and talking into the dark.

We often held international nights at the bookstore, and Puiu agreed to do one on his home country of Romania. He and his girlfriend brought desserts and drinks from his homeland (she was from New York), and he set up a slide show for the assembly.

It was then that we learned that he had been part of the occupying force in the Romanian capital building in 1989, fighting for the revolution. He pointed to the window where he had been stationed, showed us the angle from which he had been firing, explained why he had been there and what the whole thing was about. Then he said something that has haunted me ever since.

“Here we are, twenty years later, and everything in Romania has a different name and operates the same. In the same way as we fought against that summer. Nothing is different. It was for nothing. Oh, we believed it, at the time. We were young, we were idealistic, we would change the world. We would fight for our cause, we would die for it, to bring democracy to Romania.”

A teenager asked, “Did you kill anyone when you were shooting?” The assembly froze. Puiu shrugged. His girlfriend stepped forward and offered desserts at the back table. The group dispersed quickly to eat and chat.

I didn’t know whether to apologize for the poor taste of the child’s question, but after the event Puiu sat on the porch with Jack and me and his lady. And he said, as if continuing a conversation, “I saw a man fall. He didn’t get up. I think it was me. It was not worth it. Everything has a new name and it all operates in the same way as before. Do not—” and here he looked straight at me; I don’t know why— “do not ever let someone tell you, if only we overthrow this, if only we can change this one thing, then utopia is there. Violence for idealism is not strategy. It is a trick for the new dictator.”

I nodded, we drank. Puiu doesn’t have any fingernails on his right hand. I never asked, and he never offered to talk about that.

When people talk about divided America, I think about quiet, gentle Puiu, who killed a man and lost his fingernails for a cause he believed in but that didn’t believe in him. And I pray for wisdom.

The Monday Book – Wind, Sand and Stars

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Jack gets to write today’s book review –

Wind, Sand and Stars – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

wind

Some years ago Wendy and I watched a movie called ‘Wings of Courage’ at the IMax theatre in Chattanooga. It told the story of a pioneering mail flight across the Andes from Chile to Argentina that went badly wrong. The pilot was called Guillaumet and he crashed in the mountains and had to walk over many days through the snow to reach safety. What I didn’t know was that the story was based on a chapter in this book.

As an enthusiast for anything to do with early aviation, I was delighted when Wendy handed me the book from some (pre-quarantine) thrift store outing. She thought I’d find the book interesting and she wasn’t wrong. Saint-Exupery’s writing is wonderful and the translation by Lewis Galantiere does it full justice. The author describes his own experiences as one of the early aviators opening up mail routes around the world – particularly in North Arica and South America. His descriptions of the perils of flying at low altitude and before the days of navigational equipment are amazing and nail-biting.

As I finished the chapter about Guillaumet’s experience in the Andes we watched ‘Wings of Courage’ again on line and it proved very true to Saint-Exupery’s telling of the story. When I came to the final chapter, I was once again blown away as the author described crash landing in the Sahara. He was trying for a record flight between Paris and Saigon and got lost as he was heading for a stopover at the Nile. He plowed into a hill top destroying the plane, but miraculously escaping injury along with his engineer. They struggled for days finding a way to rescue with very little food or water, almost exactly replicating the earlier Andes story, but with sand instead of snow.

The book, however, isn’t all about flying. There’s a good deal of philosophizing about the meaning of life, the relationship between people and peoples, and the futility of war.

I think the only thing that might bother anyone reading the book might be the authors views on the effect of technology on humanity. He appears to view all technological advance as completely benign but I suppose we have to allow for when the book was written.

‘Wind, Sand and Stars’ finishes with the author visiting Spain during the civil war and ruminating on the way a community can be so easily and sadly divided.

Many people know Saint-Exupery best as the author of the children’s classic The Little Prince. He flew a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in 1944 from which he never returned.