The stillness in the midst of the tumult shows us the beauty of the world.
\nOne of the past evenings, I took a long walk through the center, on Calea Victoriei Street-Bucharest with a friend. Without a specific destination. I bought water from a crowded store in Victoria Palace area. People arriving from work after a long day, bleary-eyed, buying something to eat. It was past ten o\u2019clock. We took it slowly down the boulevard, getting lost in the night. Cars rushing by, spreading the smell of fuel around. One more luxurious than the other, going fast, making apocalyptic noises, reminding me of the century of speed in which we find ourselves living. One by one, electric scooters were rushing past us, cutting the air in two. For a moment, we felt the urge to hop on one of the scooters parked on the sidewalk, but resisted the temptation, we continued our aimless walk, admiring the capital city shrouded in the night. Buildings towering in the streak of new times, illuminated terraces, where people enjoy wine, pizza, coffee or a bitter cigarette, telling stories that draw people closer and keep the attention awake, museums nostalgically preserving the imprint of the past, luxurious shop windows, with smiling mannequins dressed according to the latest fashion, theaters where eternity pulsated, hotels sheltering tourists and businessmen, churches lifting its deep silence to the sky.
\nAbove, a sheet of stars, guarded by the moon that rises slowly in the sky, like a lighthouse. Appetizing smell of flowers, filling the summer with fiery aromas. Warm air, drifting like steam along the road. There weren\u2019t many people walking around at that time of the night, and anyway they had a rhythm more adapted to the century in which we live in. We continued to walk calmly, placing time in a different matrix, as if we had entered a parallel reality. Us and a few visitors slowly exiting the gate of a museum, and a foreign delegation, with people dressed in suits, passing right by us on their way to the hotel. The world flowed continuously, time also undulated in the rhythm of footsteps echoing on the asphalt.
\nWe ended up in the Old Center, getting lost among the lighted terraces, pulsing with modern or oriental rhythms. There were a lot of people. It seems that all of Bucharest is nestled in that charming core, reeking of history and hot stories. Insistent waiters, urging us to stop at their terrace. I couldn\u2019t hear them. We continued to walk slowly, losing ourselves among people and places, following the thread of a parallel time. In front of the National Bank, three chefs dressed in white from the bakery in the area were taking a cigarette break. Their faces pressed by work made an abstraction from the world that was hanging out on the terraces. They accepted their condition, puffing on cigarette smoke as if from a final illusion.
\nNo clock to tell the exact time. Time went madly downhill, sometimes resting in our crotch. On the way back, a passerby who seemed to have come from another world crossed our path. Barefoot, dressed in rolled up suit pants and a worn shirt. He was pulling a troller after him, asking the people who got in his way: \u201cDo you think it is possible to live in the Capital City with one hundred lei a day?\u201d Then he walked on without waiting for an answer. His question rang in my ears for a long time, as did his hurried allure that mimicked prosperity and poverty alike. I think it\u2019s the question that resonates most in the minds of people concerned with material things, even if it\u2019s more or less conscious, and maybe I wouldn\u2019t have been aware of it so acutely if I hadn\u2019t heard it uttered endlessly by the stranger which hastily passed us by, like a relic of these times.
\nAnd yet, in the great rush for material comfort, do we know how to carve out moments that seem to have no purpose and which nevertheless give life a deeper and more lasting meaning?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The stillness in the midst of the tumult shows us the beauty of the world. One of the past evenings, I took a long walk through the center, on Calea Victoriei Street-Bucharest with a friend. Without a specific destination. I bought water from a crowded store in Victoria Palace area. People arriving from work after … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-virtual-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2787"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2791,"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787\/revisions\/2791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dianalis.ro\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}