From Zero to Infinity and Back

Around the age of forty, I received a book from my father. It had gray covers, rather thick, unpretentious looking. Back then, I was convinced that time is patient, that other priorities existed, which could quickly appear to put off something that waited un-complainingly and much too quietly for its turn at the surface of the present. I flipped through it. My father never asked me if I had read it. He had done what he considered, in the depths of his German-educated character, to be his duty. The rest no longer depended on him. Indeed, I never read my family's biography written from that paternal perspective. After he passed away, I read parts of several chapters with tears in my eyes. The scores of questions that arose in me would never receive answers. I choked up. Ignorance? Weakness? Any label I could give it couldn't excuse a kind of essential failure regarding the development of the self. After decades, by chance, I met with a similar situation. A father put down on paper, for his sons, his story - the story of those whom he knew either directly or indirectly, of those whose threads of life extend across the world and beyond it, to the grave. Painstakingly and meticulously, Adrian Barbu unravels the ball of connections from which his life derives its meaning, now visible to all. Knots and signs. Excerpt from Forward, by Marina Constantinescu