The ‘Last Home’ Program
a financing suggestion
OBJECTIVE
'Petrila Literary Colony’
Based on
what Ion D. Sîrbu said, that ‘Petrila was neither a village, nor a commune, not a city.
It was a Colony.’;
ascertaining
that nowadays Petrila is not even a Colony anymore.
And there is nothing if there isn’t a Colony!;
Being happy
for the fact that a certain number of enthusiastic (endangered human category) inhabitants of Petrila
(NB – enthusiasm does not derive, cross my heart!, from this geographical position),
take it as their personal mission to keep alive the memory of the
writer Ion D. Sîrbu,
a rare, endangered species belonging to Petrila;
being sorry
for the fact that for the past twenty years the local authorities have been acting carelessly with the opportunity that Ion D. Sîrbu becomes the icon of the city
(we suspect a paradox at this point: all inhabitants wish they become icons and no icon wishes to become inhabitant!);
WE,
‘The Colonialist Civil Society’,
initiate this project that aims to turn Ion D. Sîrbu Memorial House and the surrounding area into an European Cultural Centre.
We intend to re-shape the memorial house into a cultural institution that comprises a small museum and a Sîrbological study centre.
We envision both these new-born babies as living artistic organisms, emphasizing the fact that the entire work of the writer is unbearably topical nowadays.
Likewise, we intend to set up an ‘agora’, for discussing writer’s posterity within cultural events contemporaneous to ourselves, in the area surrounding the actual building of the memorial house.
Our vision also comprises the building of an open air art gallery and the set up of a theatre in the same open air, both of them within the area that once belonged to Ferdinand Colony.
As Petrila is a sole child and, moreover, an orphan, we may add, we even dare to think to the establishment of a union between our literary colony and twin literary institutions from abroad.
It is true that Petrila is a city without a hotel, but our open, warm and welcoming arms can wrap around folks such as Elias Canetti, Luigi Pirandello and, why not, cousin Shakespeare.
The ground stone of our temple is already in place. We’ve managed, through the ‘door to door’ method combined with the ‘one penny-um for the Athenaeum’ method, to turn a large mass of Petrila’s amorphous population into shareholders of ‘Sîrbu Memorial’. We’ve used the resulting money bag for the interior re-construction of the house; and we are proudly reporting it, with righteous applauses to ourselves, as almost ready.
Unfortunately, as every bag has its own, well-deserved patch, we hereby write down the naked truth that we’ve come to the bottom of this bag.
An old and renowned song in our places says that ‘I’m oh so thinking of/ selling my house and land oh-oh’. Our good though is to keep the house and our even better thought is to sell the land.
You can find out more in the following pages about the brilliant idea that crossed our head and our tiny railway station.
We close here, but not before swearing that all the deriving benefits of this project will be used for the above-mentioned end.
The end justifies the means and forgives the ways.
God helps us, but doesn’t stash the money in our bag.
He has outsourced His services and is expecting Your Highnesses to do it for Him!