Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—a novel.
Scene: A dimly lit café in Prague. Midnight. I – The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans – am seated across from a philosopher who died sometime between two revolutions. The ash in his glass doesn’t move. The clock above the bar hasn’t ticked in years. Smoke lingers. He looks at me with the kind of gaze only the dead can sustain—steady and unsentimental.
And then he asks: “Why, oh why, did you become a journalist?”
I told him: Because you’ve been dead a long time now, I can go with the long answer. Right? Good. Then here it is—the very long version.
“Bob Woodward is the reason I became a journalist. Ion Barbu convinced me that ether and cocaine deserved, at the very least, the courtesy of fascination.
Russian literature taught me how to love — clumsily, catastrophically, and always too late.
Annabel Lee acquainted me with reverence. And death. Often in that order.
I discovered chess thanks to Stefan Zweig — and it was Zweig who also gifted me a lasting affection for monomania.
My flair for stylistic disaster (and unapologetic flair in general) began with Cioran.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus taught me irreverence — and made it holy.
They’re why, even now, I sometimes believe I’m being “counterintuitive” when I’m just being obnoxious.
Hypochondria I owe to Nietzsche. And to Pascal.
A curious fondness for poetic maladies bloomed somewhere between a paragraph and a panic attack.
There was a time when I considered it oddly romantic to harbor a fascination with Treponema pallidum, the bacterium responsible for syphilis.
Make of that what you will.
Others joined this tangled parade.
The Sex Pistols helped me rehearse rebellion as fashion.
Sid Vicious was briefly my personal stylist — until he got traded for Dave Gahan and the high-gloss melancholy of Depeche Mode.
Then came Diesel’s “Be Stupid” campaign:
Smart may have the brain. But stupid have the balls.
And I nodded. As if that explained something.
Jeremy Clarkson, against my better judgment, convinced me that cars were worth caring about.
Which just proves the mind is a junk drawer: chaotic, loyal, and endlessly willing to surprise you.
Whether trivial or sublime, I can trace most of my life choices back to these borrowed sparks.
And I don’t share this to impress you.
This isn’t a spiritual résumé. Nor is it some intellectual calling card stitched from erudition and intent.
I’m not building a case for the coherence of my life.
Quite the opposite.
I offer these fragments because I suspect they’re all I have.
Because somewhere in this dense mesh of influences — literary, musical, pathological — I’ve lost sight of whatever original node once qualified as me.
The one speaking to you now.
Andrei Jebeleanu, editor-in-chief of Momentul.
Which brings me, reluctantly, to a too-sad conclusion:
That my so-called authenticity may not be mine at all.
That the “I” I use so confidently is a fluent pastiche.
Elegant, persuasive — and barely traceable back to anything solid.
At best, I am a clever forgery of myself.
So no, today’s conversation is not about me.
It’s about the slow, disfiguring violence through which we are born into adulthood.
It’s about the way the personality we come to call “ours” is often the most foreign and unrecognizable part of us.
And how the passage from adolescence to maturity doesn’t resemble a growth — but an amputation.
A severing.
Sometimes subtle. Sometimes surgical. Often total.
We become who we are, quite simply, by surrendering who we were.
Not through transcendence. Through substitution.
I didn’t choose my profession after a period of soul-searching, wrapped in linen, meditating in some misty cloister, decoding signs from a reluctant divinity.
No.
I chose it while watching All the President’s Men on a nondescript Sunday, spoon-deep in stracciatella Häagen-Dazs, my parents half-asleep next to me on the couch.
And just like that — without ritual or lightning bolt — I became Myself–Bob Woodward.
Then came Gogol.
His sadness. His disintegration. The idea that a man might vanish — not into death, but into his own fate.
And just like that, I mutated: Myself–Bob Woodward–Gogol.
Later still, Céline arrived like a fever.
That trembling, toxic elegance. His cynicism that bled like poetry. The black humor of someone who’d seen too much and laughed in all the wrong places.
By then, I was already hyphenating wildly: Myself–Bob Woodward–Gogol–Céline.
This is how identity has always worked for me.
Like a name tag at a badly organized conference — overwritten until the original is no longer legible.
I didn’t grow into myself. I assembled.
Accreted.
I copied what felt magnetic, then let the glue of emotion convince me it was mine.
I don’t believe in the unified self.
I believe in the curated one.
Not forged in fire — but built out of exposure, admiration, and barely conscious mimicry.
And maybe — just maybe — that’s what authenticity is, too.
Not a wellspring bubbling up from some inner sanctum.
But a collage.
Taped together with longing.
And accidentally true.
It kept happening.
Every time I let myself be seduced by someone else’s dream, by a sentence that shimmered or an idea that wore its madness like a tuxedo—another graft took hold.
Myself–Bob Woodward–Gogol–Céline–Jerome K. Jerome–G.K. Chesterton–Kafka…
A procession of borrowed selves, walking arm-in-arm through my bloodstream.
And with each new addition, the self–myself—the nucleus I once presumed indivisible—contracted a little further.
Shrinking.
Thinning out.
Until it became nothing more than a pretext.
A vanishing point.
A grammatical fiction around which other people’s obsessions, sorrows, and salvations continued to proliferate.
Then came Zadie Smith — with that ironic lucidity that makes you feel smarter than you are.
Like you’ve understood something, even if you haven’t.
(Especially if you haven’t.)
David Foster Wallace followed, with sentences that doubled back to eat themselves — syntax as Möbius strip, thought as nausea, consciousness as recursive trap.
Then Ottessa Moshfegh — with her bodily nihilism, the kind that stitches itself beneath your skin like an invisible thread, making you aware of every pore and misplaced desire.
And Ferrante…
Ferrante!
Reading her is like surviving a workplace accident in slow motion.
Emotional blunt force trauma — but somehow you’re grateful.
You limp away thinking: at least it was artful.
And that’s when you begin to see it.
You realize that identity isn’t fixed.
Isn’t noble.
Isn’t even personal.
It’s modular.
Biological.
A structure built like a tapeworm — segment after segment, endlessly replicating, each one autonomous yet parasitically dependent on what came before.
Not exactly a soul. Not quite a self.
Culture, then, is not enrichment.
It’s a form of contamination.
Beautiful. Voluntary. Intoxicating.
But contamination nonetheless.
And we — the readers, the watchers, the haunted — are just willing hosts.
Wearing our literary infections like perfume.
Myself-BobWoodward-Gogol-Céline-JeromeK.Jerome-G.K.Chesterton-Kafka-ZadieSmith-DavidFosterWallace-OttessaMoshfegh-ElenaFerrante.
We are born of intelligent forgeries—of borrowed gestures and approximations of those we regard as the gods of our inner lives. Through the choices we make, we validate them, until they become permanent residents of our fate.
In a sense, they are the ones who choose for us, who fall in love in our place, who read our books and watch our films. And the more cultivated you are, the more inescapable this dilemma becomes.
Myself—the hyphen between all the names that dwell within me.
Myself—the spiritual void clothed in everything others have said better.
Myself—the faint watermark beneath the bold fingerprints of other lives.
And so I wonder: have we falsified our destiny?
Each time we fall in love, we do so with our fate. Some loves become professions; others crystallize into tics, quirks, stubborn convictions, a taste for danger, or a fondness for particular fetishes.
I am a composite of words, revelations, confusions, and revolts that are not my own; my mind is assembled from other minds, my soul from affections and aversions that predate me.
I am Alex from A Clockwork Orange when I flirt with sociopathy.
Buster Keaton in the guise of the inscrutable clown.
Tom Joad whenever I wrestle with injustice and want.
And among so many extraordinary characters, the true “me”—unfiltered, unborrowed—is likely the least remarkable of all.
After all, who can compete with Fantastic Mr. Fox?
Who am I, then, when—in an honest act of intellectual striptease—I strip away everything that isn’t truly mine?
Where do I exist in this amalgam of characters, both real and fictional, of marketing exercises, dead geniuses, and borrowed mythologies?
Can one still locate oneself beneath these sedimentary layers of others?
And why do we continue to call it “self-awareness” when its formation requires the entire weight of human culture—yet, by the time it reaches maturity, what’s missing is precisely the self?
In this state of mild metaphysical nausea, I can’t help but ask:
Is culture an assault on identity?
If the answer is yes, then what we’re living isn’t progress—it’s a reeducation program.
Not unlike the Gulag.
Or the Laogai camps.
Or the labor units of communist Romania.
Except now, Lavrentiy Beria, Liang Botai, and Eugen Țurcanu have been discreetly replaced.
Not by new torturers.
But by directors, curators, and Stanford PhDs whose voices echo with soothing clarity in hour-long podcasts.
Today, reeducation comes via The Atlantic’s op-eds, through mindfulness retreats with Björk, and the 20th anniversary edition of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
It’s administered by Warhol, Elia Kazan, Gil Scott-Heron, and Brâncuși.
It’s the Pitești experiment, globalized.
Only this time, the machinery is elegant.
And the engineers are brilliant.
We’re being reprogrammed to lo-fi beats.
With the best UX on the market.
Via an economy of intermittent dopamine rewards.
Through content that holds us captive ten hours a day—happily.
We are brutalized, gently.
Rewritten through Instagram filters and hashtags like #PersonalGrowth.
Our reformers have understood a terrifying truth:
To reshape a human being, you don’t need violence.
You need frictionless interfaces.
Premium Pornhub.
A Kindle.
And Oprah.
We are softened, sculpted, sublimated.
And our accomplices are Franny and Zooey, Black Mirror in 8K, and Do I Wanna Know, sung by Dua Lipa.
Everything is soft.
Everything is beautiful.
Everything is final
The Gulag was unnecessary.
The New Man is not forged through torment and suffering, but through bibliographic excess, endlessly gratified temptations, and contemporary horrors like decaf almond milk caramel moccacinos.
Had communist Russia been ruled by a triumvirate consisting of the Marquis de Sade, Elton John, and the head of marketing at Burger King—appointed as Director of Public Utilities—Leninism might have flourished.
Because anyone moderately informed knows you can conquer the planet over a single weekend with My Year of Rest and Relaxation and two well-placed emojis (💊📚);
that obesity is obedience in physical form;
that a Big Whopper can calm even the most existential political unrest;
and that a nation can be stupefied with something as rudimentary as Minecraft.
Which is why all geniuses—regardless of their domain—are merely paramedics of fate;
our minds, hotels overrun by self-impressed intruders;
and individuation, a complex and strangely elegant process of self-mutilation.
Andrei Jebeleanu 