Eliade was blessed with the happy combination of an unusually keen mind, strong intuition, a fertile imagination, and the determination to work hard. Much of the structure of his later thought, and some of the paradoxes of his life, were foreshadowed during his student years. Simultaneously he was both a Romanian patriot and a world citizen. He was proud of Western civilization, although he lamented its provincial character, particularly its will to "universalize" Western ideas and values into the norm for all of humankind. Looking back, he could see that in his country previous generations had had no cause to question their historic mission to consolidate Romania's national identity. His own generation, though, had experienced World War I and seemed to have no ready-made model or mission for themselves. Eliade's plea was that his compatriots should exploit this period of "creative freedom" from tradition and should try to learn from other parts of the world what possibilities for life and thought there were. His ultimate concern was the revitalization of all branches of learning and the arts, and his great hope was to decipher the message of the cosmos, which to him was a great repository of hidden meanings.
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