We can only contemplate the deaths we witness. We can only write about our own death, the death whose presence we remove from the horizon of our lives, in a future full of doubt and uncertainty. Mortals, we know that we will die, but the face of our death seems impenetrable and mysterious to us, like the gate before which the travelers stop in Dino Buzzati’s fable.

Gabriel Liicianu writes about death, which appears before us as a sign and as a challenge, in Exitus. Perhaps more than in other cases, his prose is full of almost unbearable tragedy. And even when death is accompanied by a certain reconciliation with fate, on the pages of Gabriel Liicanu lies the shadow of the word in which, as in a leaden sheet, the entire burden of death is gathered: “irreversible.”

Because death, no matter how vivid it is in the funeral picture, puts the seal of final absence before those who are left behind. From now on, the dead will be only echoes, shadows, whispers, touches. Never, until the moment of our own death, will we be allowed to be with them again. An irreversible and dramatic separation draws a line of memory and grief between them and us.

Gabriel Liicanu’s book, so musical in the flow of its prose, is an attempt to gather the shadows of the dead before the echo of their footsteps dies away like a wave carried by the sea into the open sea. The faces of death are, for Gabriel Lyicana, the same faces of memory. By writing about death, it is as if we banish from our lives this terrible and terrible feeling of loneliness and regret. Conversation with the dead is a mirror in which we are given an indescribable look at ourselves.

The passage becomes, for Gabriel Liicana, a bridge that can be crossed carelessly or violently. Mysterious death appears to those who leave, like a mask of fate itself. No matter how far we go, this fact of extinction cannot be avoided. Death is what gives, in a sense, our life. As mortals, we choose to remain silent about death because its proximity would be too terrifying to allow our earthly existence.

The Serenity of Death, as strange and oxymoronic as this juxtaposition may be, illuminates the pages dedicated to Konstantin Noica and Horia Bernea. Witness – Gabriel Liichanu here is first a student and then a friend. But in each of the photographs there is, assembled with delicacy and modesty, the clarity of a passage that is absorbed like a bridge over a river flowing to the sea.

And only the death of a loved one gives us the strength to say everything that we did not have the courage to do during our lifetime. Separation, Gabriel Liicanou points out, eliminates the impulse of judgment that prevents us from completing our conversation. Only after death does this dialogue with those who are no longer there take on an intensity that we can only find in our dreams. Fate reveals itself to us at the end. Death is a gate that opens for us to pass on, where we may glimpse another paradise.

And the faces of Noika and Bernea on the verge of death reflect a calm, nourished by reconciliation and energy. The mouse that awakened Noika to death interrupts the line of existence and transports him away from the hospital ward where he will be left to die. Horia Bernea’s heart attack occurred after an apparently successful heart operation: the last act of his life ends under the sign of the light that defined him.

Gabriel Liicianu writes about another death and another passage, reconstructing the end of Emil Cioran and Monica Lovinescu with bloody clarity. This time death enters, bearing with it a hideous garment of pain and loss of self. The action takes place in a labyrinth in which the soul searches in vain for a way out of the purgatory of suffering. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro