Horia-Roman Patapievici

Reading gives one power and depth. Reading a book offers you an intense feeling of being alive, anf of holding a globe of light in your hands. In spite of that, we seem to spend less and less time reading books, always constrained to give more and more attention to strictly productive, urgent matters.

Everything is moving, information is extremely perishable, so it has to get to us concentrated and as fast as possible, through electronic means: TV, radio, E-mail, telephone, sms, etc. But what if we slowed down for a moment?

What if we stopped for a little while, just for a second, and we tried a bird’s eye view upon ourselves, upon our society, upon the different cultures that surround us? What if, just for a day, our stake would be to explore where we come from, so that we can understand why and where we are heading for?

The conceptual insert The Art of Cultivation is exactly this kind of moment: of escape from the immediate, in order to enter an area of multidisciplinary debates, in an area with larger perspectives. A journey with broad horizons, guided by spirit, by the exchange of ideas, by books, and the rediscovery of the pleasure for diversified reading.

The themes approached cover the formation and development of different cultures of humanity analyzed from a religious, social, economic, scientific and artistic point of view. A special section is dedicated to the scientific modernization of the Romanian Principates in the 18th an 19th centuries.