Action: During a flood, no one expects us to walk on water. But it’s not a solution to trickle helplessly like driftwood with the current, because then what did we learn to swim for?
Brussels: A person swimming in the sea doesn’t long for water because they’re already in it. The one who longs for water is the one lying on an ironing board, face down, imitating swimming. The Brussels bureaucrats in their glass hives swim on ironing boards, and they even put on glasses, nose clips, and earplugs. This is how they would teach us, swimming in the Carpathian Sea, the correct arm and leg movements.
Citizen: The concept of a citizen is value neutral. That of a patriot is not. The former lives in a continuous present. The patriot lives in history.
Closing words: If our world is destroyed, it will be because humanity has matured for it. If we survive, it’s because – to the greatest surprise of the liberals of all times – people mostly make decisions rationally from their own perspective, based on common sense. Mostly.
Communism: A lived story: communists are always devoured by their own children; patricide is their mandatory coming-of-age ritual. And generations pay for all this because patricide is covered up with mass graves.
Communists: A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. Translated into the Hungarian fate: those communists who exercised power from the threatening shadow of Soviet tanks and stole irreplaceable decades from the lives of generations, walk among us. Those Hungarian communists who ruined lives, handed out heavy sentences with a light hand, who forced friend and brother to inform, those who informed, those who maintained the dictatorship out of self-interest, walk among us. They are our neighbors who take out the trash in worn-out sweatpants or loudly give their opinions in the corner grocery store. They are our friends who don’t look us in the eye. They are our relatives with whom we sit in great silences because they know that we know, and we know that they know that we know. They are those politicians who have no homeland, only a house, and they didn’t even build that. They are those ideologues who see the international as a gap to be filled. But what looks like insemination from there looks like violence from here.
Community: I don’t want to live in a metaverse. In social media, existence is truly unbearably light, you narrow in it until you actually become one-dimensional. Instead of fate, a timeline bespangled with images. To post one last time in a falling airplane – don’t give me such a death, dear God.
Conservatism: Non-binary, usually triangulates:
God, homeland, family
We were, we are, we will be
Contemporary: I heard from a young poet: to understand Esterházy, one shouldn’t read Esterházy first; rather, one should chew through the works that Esterházy read and from which Esterházy became. (Besides the necessary but not sufficient talent, of course.)
Creation: It’s not environmental protection, but creation protection that makes the Earth livable for us. Environmental protection that reduces humans to an ecological footprint is precisely a misunderstanding of the order of creation.
Cultural policy: It’s not all the same which statement is true: “I am the state” or “we are the homeland”. The difference we experience is national culture.
Cultural strategy: We live in our own culture. This is of utmost importance to us. Not because it’s better or worse than any other culture, but because it’s ours. Living in one’s own culture also means that we are our own contemporaries.
Culture: Those who think their comment posted on social media is the solution are culture consumers. Those who think, decide and act are culture bearers. Those who change the world are culture creators.
Culture war: The racially based class struggle proclaimed against Western, white, Christian culture is a combination of two ideologies that individually both led to dictatorships. We know this all too well, as we suffered through them. They’re telling us the new tale of good old fascist communism.
Debate: When the independent, objective journalist uses the politician as human decor to expound their prejudices.
Decision: With medicine, you try to avoid death. With herbs, you can make life better. And there are a few more such points of decision. It’s not a question of tactics, but rather strategy.
Divergent development: For us, detached parts of the nation, it was difficult to make the motherland understand what it was (is) like to love a country of which you are not a citizen, a homeland that has disowned you as its son – and how difficult it is to maintain a homeland in a country that is not your home. And how good it feels now to go home from home.
Diversity: From the motto “unity in diversity,” diversity has worn down today to fifty shades of gray – but at least through the mainstream’s glasses, it looks rainbow-colored.
Double vision: I am Szekler and Transylvanian and Hungarian. I am Szekler and Transylvanian, yet Hungarian. A linguistic difference that’s hard to grasp with the tools of formal logic. Both “and” and “yet” are logical operations of conjunction, yet they describe two completely different stances. To be an “and-Hungarian” means: it’s natural that I’m Hungarian. To be a “yet-Hungarian” means: I’m Hungarian despite everything. I’ve lived and am living both, sometimes simultaneously, it’s no simple feat, in double vision the focuses slip, one squints and the image doesn’t clear.
Education: The difference between teaching and education is just as big as between ChatGPT and the teacher. We send our children to school in the hope that they will be prepared for life there. Then they go to university to safe spaces.
Environmental protection: Whether the Earth’s environment is suitable for human life is irrelevant to the Earth. It isn’t to humans. However, our common scientific and progressive knowledge about humans today amounts to this: humans are the most harmful living beings. It’s not hard to draw the conclusion from this, which is no longer an indictment, but a judgment. But can the mathematical set of individual humans pass final judgment on humanity?
Ethics: You can only act correctly in one way: if you look at things through your child’s eyes.
EU: In the first fourteen years of my life, they wanted to carve a “multilaterally developed socialist person” out of me. Now I’m supposed to be a multicultural European. And a second-class one at that. Romans, go home!
European: The competition of who’s the better Indian, Chinese, or Arab will be won by the Chinese, Indians and Arabs. Europe’s value lies precisely in being European. Hungarian culture is unique and special precisely because it’s Hungarian.
Faith: Only a God can save us now, said a philosopher almost half a century ago. As a first step to this, we should reach faith in faith in God.
Ferry country: The essence of the ferry country metaphor is constant back-and-forth movement. If we tie up the ferry and decide that in the future it will not cross to the other shore, then it ceases to be a ferry.
Fight: You can defend your homeland, nation and family in two ways: you fight where you need to, and you don’t fight where you don’t need to.
Freedom: We live in times when, involuntarily, every Hungarian is again a freedom fighter. Saying “I am Hungarian” is no longer a matter of fact, but a freedom fighter’s stance. This sentence goes against a different kind of freedom. The freedom they want to force on us was formulated in democratic societies against democracy. The origin and depositary of our freedom is community – in contrast, the other freedom proclaims the total liberation of the individual from all social and biological (!) constraints. Hungarian freedom has flesh-and-blood heroes. The other freedom has replaceable and disposable media clowns. Hungarian freedom also allows freedom of thought. The other freedom operates thought police. Our freedom is tolerant: we accept that others see the world differently. But we also know that this doesn’t mean we should see it that way too.
Future: After the outbreak of a suspected but unexpected global pandemic and a war deemed possible but unimaginable, we should draw the conclusion: it’s not the future that’s unpredictable, but we who are sticking our head in the sand. Don’t look up!
Gastronomy: Recipe for the future: take two hydrogen atoms, bind an oxygen atom to them. If you can’t do this in your kitchen, you’ll die.
Gender: The post-human gender has a meagre world. They’re not someone, but something else. The post-human gender is merely an ecological footprint, which can only be talked about in terms of its measure. It’s beyond good and evil, has no sin, its future is a number. The child of the post-human gender is therefore not a child, but an offspring, an increase in the ecological footprint.
God: Music is the direct proof that this world is created and that it is the best of all possible worlds.
History: If God exists, then world history is essentially salvation history. If there is no God, then a butterfly somewhere fluttered its wings at the wrong time. And it doesn’t matter whether it was Apatura metis (Hungarian Glider) or Melithaea athalia (Heath Fritillary) that decided your future.
Homeland: Lucky the one whose birthplace and homeland are within one country’s borders. Unlucky the one who has neither birthplace nor homeland, only a country.
Knowledge: It’s as if we’ve enclosed ourselves in a glass box under God’s free sky, and we’re painting thicker and thicker layers on the glass walls of what we could otherwise see if we washed off the paint. To break the glass cage and step out under God’s free sky – this requires intellectual courage. Because we don’t know, because it can’t be known, whether we’ll arrive at a clearing or a precipice.
Last Judgment: If you live in an end-of-the-world mood, plant a tree: there’s no more sensible response than to be the gardener of the apocalypse.
Liberal: One shouldn’t be opposition or pro-government, but free.
Literature: The reader disturbs the writer. Their absence doesn’t. That’s the problem.
Media: A journalist is someone who disregards the rules of the profession in the name of the profession, because they don’t say what’s real, but what’s (in their opinion) true. They forget that this is the job of poets. So-called independent journalism is therefore poetry, and bad poetry at that.
Migration: We cannot want a muezzin to call us to prayer in Csíksomlyó.
Mother tongue: Others get community from their mother, we get language. The Hungarian born of a Hungarian mother must say: I am Hungarian. And there will always be another Hungarian who doubts this.
Multiculturalism: We, Hungarians pushed into minority, know a lot about multiculturalism. For example, we know that multiculturalism is mostly monolingual, and this language is always the language of power.
Nation: We yes, you yes – they no.
National: Act not for the country, but for the homeland, and trust not in the power of citizens, but in the communal strength of the nation. Even the happiest resident of the happiest barrack is still just a prisoner.
Patriot: The global citizen only knows one thing for sure: where they came from. The patriot also knows why they are where they are.
Poet: The poet truly begins to exist after their death. They live in reverse: while creating, it’s as if they were looking back from beyond finite time. Then after their body becomes the earth’s, their verse remains the law, József Attila goes on to say. Earthly law, and that’s as it should be, the poet is not another God.
Politics: Three guiding quotes for daily politics: “Freedom requires at least two people. Alone, a person cannot be free – only lonely.” “Whoever looks at the world in Hungarian sees with the eyes of Saint Stephen.” “If we hack through the trunk of the tree of life, its root system becomes meaningless, its crown is rolled like tumbleweed by the storm of history.”
Pop: For a few decades now, our primary culture has not been the so-called “high” culture, but pop culture. Let’s put our hand on our heart: if we randomly asked ten people about what cultural support they have in borderline situations (their love left them, someone important to them died, etc.), nine out of ten would mention either pop music or films. And we’d look quite oddly at that one person who draws strength from poems, Bach, or an exhibition.
Present age: No sooner had the hundred years of Hungarian solitude ended than we were hit by an avalanche of boundless rights’ proliferation and the cancel culture that sees everything in black and white. In this madness, it’s not so self-evident to greet the European among whites, the Hungarian among compatriots.
Progress: If you follow a GPS programmed in some distant head office, it’s not called progress, but blind flight.
Progression: Progressive space: from the duality of “homeland and progress,” the homeland has worn out today. Progressive time: we can consider it progression when we behave as if we start every blessed morning without a past, with a clean slate, though medical science doesn’t call this progression, but amnesia.
Reality: The teaching of the 20th century: freedom is bound, and the boundaries of freedom are marked by a lack of freedom. Freedom can be based on the “is” and the “was”. Whatever Bolyai says, we cannot create a new world from nothing. Because it may be that in mathematics parallels meet at infinity, but reality is finite, and in finite reality parallels only meet if I misjudge the right angle during the everyday bustle.
Resurrection: If you trust in resurrection, keep in mind: only those who have already died can be resurrected. Those who live in hell can only hope for redemption. But redemption cannot be brought about by the death of just anyone.
Salvation history: Salvation history has gone awry somewhere. What we’re living in: Covid instead of the Way of the Cross. “Awakening” instead of resurrection. The day after instead of redemption.
Socialization: Government involvement won’t make A major right-wing, but it makes it sound in as many places as possible. And if someone wants to write a song in C-sharp major, well, let them bear their seven crosses. It would be really desirable for every reader to understand this last sentence.
Space-time: The essence of the freedom of anywhere: anyone can consume anything, anywhere, anytime. In contrast, the freedom of somewhere is anchored by a special time and place. Streaming platform versus church.
State: A state without citizens is like a house without inhabitants: a meaningless structure. And it’s not all the same whether we are tenants or owners of a house.
Strategy: Let’s not dance at the revelry of little men of the moment, but at the funeral of our enemies.
Sustainable: Main rule: to see the wood for the trees in both the literal and figurative sense.
Tolerate: I tolerate you. You don’t tolerate me because I don’t tolerate him, who tolerates neither me nor you.
Tolerance: Its meaning: forbearance, patience. (The Latin ‘tolero’ means endure, bear.) It’s also translated as long-suffering. We endure so that there may be peace. But if I tolerate something, it doesn’t mean I approve of it. Tolerance therefore means that if you want to live your own life, then you accept that I live my own life too.
Tool: The tool with which you build something is also suitable for hitting anyone who wants to take away from you what you’ve built.
Transgender: They want to win a running race by having a third leg surgically attached.
Transylvania: Transylvania exists in a way that it doesn’t, although there would be a need for it.
Typewriter: In my office, next to my desk is Attila József’s typewriter. Not by accident. Every morning it reminds me that I have the same finite set of keys at my disposal as AJ did – but it really matters in what order you press them.
USA: Anyone can be an American, but you have to be born an Indian.
Vision: You are what you see in the world. If you look in Hungarian, others look back at you as Hungarian. If you’d rather live elsewhere as a second-best option, then you’ll be treated as homeless. The freedom of anywhere means exactly this: you’re at home nowhere.
Vision of the future: Falling can also be called flying – just as impact can be called an unsuccessful landing attempt.
War: When someone feels enough strength in themselves, they no longer want peace, but to defeat the other.
West: The further west we go, the more eastern we look to them. This either frustrates us or we’re proud of it. Third option: you adapt until you cease to be who you are. You don’t become western, you become nobody.
Woke: Our national awakening more than two hundred years ago was qualitatively different from what we hear about from overseas these days. We didn’t cancel, we created. We didn’t attack from a victim’s stance but confronted the world as freedom fighters. It’s a very different posture.
Work: One of the guarantees of human freedom is that we are able to make tools from materials found in our environment that we can also repair. Can you sew washable diapers?
Homeland Dictionary 