Everyone has a homeland dictionary. Or almost everyone. The vast majority of humanity can anchor themselves in space and time. Nine out of ten know where they come from; the tenth might just not want to say. This book is about why we, Hungarians, are where we are. And about why we stay when it would be easier to leave.
Recently, due to the Russian-Ukrainian war and the European Union’s response to it, an energy crisis has befallen us. Due to skyrocketing energy prices, a longer so-called “administrative break” was ordered in public institutions, including the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest, which I was leading at the time. We spent this unplanned holiday with my family in the mountains at our small rural farmhouse, purchased a few years ago. Since we hardly see snow in December these days, I spent my free time preparing our garden for the spring reception and planting of native fruit trees on the tractor I bought last summer. The tractor shook the city troubles out of me, my vision cleared and it became more obvious what’s important and what’s not.
It was then that I decided to finish the unfinishable, that is, to shape my snippets into a book, as one works in that momentary silence while the firing squad reloads. Because on the tractor, Babits spoke to me: “Only I can be the hero of my poem, / first and last in each of my songs: / I long to take the universe into verse, / but I haven’t gotten further than myself. // […] I remain: a prison for myself, / for I am the subject and the object, / alas, I am the omega and the alpha.”
There are several ways to escape the prison of the self. The first and most obvious is prayer. But prayer is a private language, and as such, incommunicable to others. I, however, have been working as a public servant for years, so I felt I owed this much to the phase of life that was given to me before the tractor.
I incorrectly call this book a dictionary; as such, it’s really quite unorthodox. Since I moved into the director-general’s office of the Petőfi Literary Museum, I inspect our ingenious poet Attila József’s typewriter every morning, located to the left of Áron Tamási’s fortress-like desk, thus closer to the heart. I sit behind the Tamási fortress, looking at the typewriter, I have the same finite set of keys at my disposal as Attila József did – and it really matters in what order you press them.
Yet it’s still more accurate to call this string of texts a dictionary than to claim it’s a kind of inventory, with motifs and quotes recurring like underground streams, which have proven to be good handholds over the years in our thought-poor age. Because we all close the inventory of our lives at the moment of our death, with this we will appear before the Lord. Anyhow. I’m arranging my affairs, with all the contradictions of recent years, so I can sit back in the saddle of my machine with a lighter heart.
Pessimists say we are living in the final days of Western civilization and culture. I don’t know if this will happen, or what will happen at all. But if they’re right and this whole mess really collapses, then I can’t think of a more sensible response than to be the gardener of the apocalypse.
Homeland Dictionary 