I know few concepts with which, in my time, they would have juggled so boldly, so inconsistently, as with the concept of "community feeling". People, who can be rightfully assumed to have never given twenty pennies to a beggar, used the slogan of community feeling on their lips for the prosperity of humanity, recited the on barrels and on the podiums of public meetings. This slogan was used to fill the front pages of newspapers by prominent public writers, whose actions in the interest of the community principle actually resulted in something in the end: a nice house or estate, which they acquired at the cost of their work to popularize the sense of community. They were the only ones not they talked about community feeling, those who gave their work, strength and life for the community at all times: the people were silent. It seems that the people, therefore the community, has no community feeling. It just lives, for each other and for the whole, without a password.
To the extent that people surrendered their individual sense of self with slavish humility, their professional sense of self increased. When I was my age, the vast majority of people tolerated the fact that the State, the Office, and the Institution regularly deprived them of their God-ordained prerogatives of their individuality. Have they tolerated the soulless, commodious and rigid order of a civilization ordering them how to live, dress, amuse themselves and enjoy themselves, yes, even dictated to them in this age how and when to walk the streets? They were tolerated to think and speak on command. They tolerated the fact that an artificially inflated power interest circle, called the Party, the Office or the Principle, interfered in all aspects of their private lives, and shaped and shaped their character and thinking. All this was tolerated without a word, without contradiction. The individual could be disciplined by everyone; he obeyed silently. But this same tamed, disciplined person, deprived of all human privileges of his individuality, began to growl if someone dared to criticize the profession to which he belonged. You could freely express any opinion about the coppersmith, he bore it calmly and with blinking patience; but if you dared to speak about the Profession of Coppersmiths, all the coppersmiths of the world immediately began to shout and protest. The situation was similar with clerks, writers, and doctors. A dentist silently tolerated you calling him stupid in private, but immediately appealed to the World Dental Association if anyone dared to publicly prove that dentists are not the most perfect, blameless people on earth. The individual pocketed everything, the profession gnashed its teeth. I experienced this too.
Make sure that the idea never gets carried away and does not prompt you to create prematurely. Because the idea is nothing. Even a dog has ideas. Each counter's notebook is full of the most excellent literary, social and political ideas. The "good idea" flashes because you read, heard or experienced something, because the surface of your soul was touched by some worldly phenomenon - and you sharpen your pencil and carve a work out of the idea, you swell into a work what is nothing more than an idea! Be careful, because this temptation is common in the life of a creative person. It's not only the works that need to be put to rest for years, but also the ideas. If the idea doesn't become an experience, throw it away, no matter how clever, seductive and appealing it is. The experience writes itself; you write the idea. And it's not good like that.
Love can be given and received. There's only one thing you can't do: blackmail love. And most of the time, the poor and unfortunate who are hungry for love do not know this.
It is clear that one either loves or is loved: this alternating current has been organized by nature with relentless consistency. The most perfect and most fortunate form of harmony is when one tolerates being loved by the other without much rebellion. After all, nature is kind: it is true that it never allows us to be loved by the one we hope for, but it gives us a way to love unlimitedly even the one who does not love us. It just doesn't give a way: to extort love from others by begging, accusing, attacking or pleading. Even tenderness and passion can be extorted; but love is sovereign.
You have set yourself up for a great deed. You decided to say what you came to know. You want to proclaim the secret, innermost conviction of your life to the world. You stand up in front of people and decide like this - you finally tell the truth. You take up the fight, you throw away your mockery, your house, your home. Yes, you've made up your mind to stand up to the world and tell the truth, regardless of the consequences. It's all very nice. This is man's business on earth, this is his real task. Just never forget one thing: the world is also a terrible distorting mirror. It is like those crooked mirrors in the panopticon, which show a tall person as a dwarf, and a fat person as a starving bream. You cannot expect that there is a single person in the world who will understand, understand and explain your words and actions exactly as you intended. Only you always know what you really wanted; the world only understands and sees so much of your intentions, which the mysterious distorting mirror of human reason perceives and reflects back. Therefore, never wail: “They did not understand me! How evil they are!" Just always say, "I want this and that, but the world meant it like this and that." Because this is the truth.
When the squadron was young, I was young; and because we were young, of course we were both revolutionaries. Then time passed, and the century and its children entered manhood; and they wanted to grow old smartly. I already wanted to put on slippers or put on a dressing-gown; I already wanted to throw away all the slogans of the revolution, because time had matured the slogans in my heart and consciousness, and I already knew that freedom, equality and fraternity were not as perfect ideals in practice as I had believed when I was young, befitting a revolutionary. I already wanted to talk about how preserving is more and more difficult than throwing away the old and creating a new one from the pots; I already wanted to make peace with the people, to build order, to raise all the flags. But time did not allow for that. And I had to learn that I had to remain hopelessly revolutionary, because the generation after me, in a mysterious way, is not revolutionary at all; I have no one to deliver, according to the order of nature and human affairs, the flag; I must remain a protester and a barrier-builder, because I live in an age whose young people willingly accept all the restrictions that the century and I, when we were young, did not accept. Toothless and with graying hair, I am forced to remain a revolutionary who stubbornly repeats the words of freedom of thought, equality and fraternity, in which perhaps he no longer believes so unconditionally. Even in my old age, I must remain a sans-culotte *; although it would have been so nice to finally put on a living room jacket!
If you're traveling, don't try to make your hotel room your home. There are people who hopelessly carry with them on their travels the desires and accessories they live with back home, and would most like to take a canary, a rocking chair and family photos with them, so that they are not without the blessings of their home life in the room of the foreign inn. These people are fussy and childish, forever longing for the nanny and the cradle. Experienced people hope for a temporary, raw experience of freedom from travel, a kind of harsh unpredictability, the surprise of reality, and they do not wish to make a hotel room feel like home. And the man who knows his heart, the world and the nature of human things, lives in his home as in a reception room, and does not fill the room where his fleeting life is spent with unnecessary, emotional or vain laughter. Such a person lives in his home as in an inn; because what is needed for life? A bed, a table, a chair. And you are a passenger, a running wanderer, even in your main rental apartment. Always think about this when you stretch out, at home or abroad, in bed: you have to stand further away in the morning, the Owner may terminate you. That's why you don't need a canary or a rocking chair - never, anywhere.
And stay away from laxatives. And if an excruciating headache or an acute upset stomach forces you to live with them, wash them down - very rarely - with a glass of warm bitter water. All senna preparations have some violent intent, to artificially interfere with nature's order of life. Behind the looseness of the bowels there is usually narrow-mindedness, some kind of convulsive greed, chilling ambition; then there is also the Tunya lifestyle behind it; behind the sloppiness is the sloppiness of life and of a person, completely and utterly. If you yourself are sluggish, why do you hope that your digestion will be nimble? Behind every squeamishness lies the character of the whole person. Make peace with your character, and you will live in peace with your digestion.
I will never understand why the most beautiful memory of my life is the moment when - I must have been ten years old - I entered my mother's dark, empty bedroom one winter afternoon and, standing on the threshold, I saw the light shining on the furniture polish and the stove tiles in front of the window, on the street and on the roofs of the houses opposite bluish reflection of snow. I cannot forget the magic of this moment. The blue light of the snow in the dark room really shocked me, and at the same time filled me with a feeling of happiness I hadn't seen before or since. I had not known this complete enchantment of the secret, the fairy tale, the dreamlike, the Andersenian, the enchanted until then, and I never found it later in life, never, anywhere. What happened then in my heart, in my nerves or in the world? I can not explain it. The wonderful cannot be explained. And such a memory shines forever in a soul, with the same fabulous blue light as the snow on the roofs opposite my mother's net.
The rule of the barbarians is always followed by the rule of Byzantium. A kind of human, historical, legality resulting from the peculiar order of human nature dictates that the raw invasion and conquest, the transition of chaos, is followed by an over-refined, corrupted and artificial order, full of servile ceremonies, poison, murder and smooth talk, bent double, stuffy politeness and with bragging cruelty. That's how people are: sometimes barbaric, sometimes Byzantine. And sometimes, in very rare periods, under the nurturing influence of an extraordinary individual who can reconcile the strictness of perfect laws with the unwritten laws of equity, he is tamed into a human being; but these are rare and fleeting periods.
Naturally, people always want the writer, the explainer, the expresser to speak according to their interests. The writer cannot fulfill this wish, because human interests are perverse and contradictory: the writer can always express only the truth, or at least that is his intention. But at the same time, when people eagerly and impatiently demand from the writer to say everything that interests them in their place and on their behalf, they also expect him to be unique and above-interested. That's why you should know that you can never do as they please: if you serve their interests, you will lose yourself, if you are impartial, you will lose people's favor, if you tell the truth, they will not examine and criticize what you said, but they will discover gaps in your work, object, that you didn't say this or that, and they will hold you accountable, why didn't you say it?
No one asks a hatter to make shoes, no one asks a cobbler to make hats: but everyone asks a writer for everything, with equal fervor and impatience. Therefore, never listen to anyone but your soul and the Angel.
Because when you speak the truth - the simplest truth - you should know that flames will immediately ignite around you: a blaze of passion, accountability, resentment. He who tells the truth passes through a sea of fire, and he does it right if he dresses in a kind of asbestos clothing, otherwise the flames will immediately burn him. This asbestos garment can never be anything other than indifferent and implacable calmness, the calmness of command and service: you cannot do otherwise, you must do so, even if you are burned. The writer is always at the stake. Sometimes it is roasted over a slow fire, sometimes over high flames. And just like the fakirs, who in their obsessive faith and cold self-absorption walk barefoot through the fire, uninjured and insensible, so the writer is protected from third-degree burns by nothing but his faith and his obsession, which is completely cold, relentless and merciless, with himself and others also against. Put on this asbestos suit, tell the truth, walk through the flames.
You don't believe in miracles, do you deny it? Look, I can't convince you, because the main characteristic of a miracle is that it's wonderful - it can't be proven, like a physiological fact, it can't be photographed, nor can it be predicted and calculated in advance according to quantitative laws. The manifestations of the miracle are not always easy to perceive either: it does not always walk on two legs, it is not possible to take photographs, there are no land registry or registry data. The miracle, quite simply, manifests itself - and sometimes only much later do we understand what the miracle was, how it intervened in our lives, and what was supernatural and wonderful about this intervention. I cannot show or prove the essence of the miracle. But perhaps think about how incomprehensible and wonderful everything that you feel is everyday and natural really is: how miraculous is the fact of existence! The fact that you were born, you live, and one day you will die! Do you feel all this is "natural"? Then you are blind and deaf. Reality itself is a miracle, incomprehensible, and even supernatural with all its natural ingredients and materials! Why would a miracle be more meaningless than this improbably complicated reality? The world soul is the miracle that manifests itself in everything. That's why I'm a believer: because the soul of the world manifests itself in me, in my everyday life, in my sad and doomed fate.
Every time you become less confident in your work - and how often you are tempted by the torturous feeling of fatigue, boredom, aimlessness! the self-accusation that this too is just vanity, the vague desire that it would be better to leave everything, to do only the most necessary, self-sustaining actions, to read and live, to live and pass away without a sign and without a trace! – you should know that this is the most serious temptation that life offers you. In such cases, one must remain strong, like true heroes, when faced with an impossible task. You should know that you have a right to everything rather than running away from the work that fate has assigned you.
Not much time will pass, and not only will the world forget your name and person completely and completely, not only will the memory of your work be covered by the dust of oblivion, but the material of your work will also crumble to dust, the paper and canvas binding of the books will fade into nothingness, the pictures you painted, they are no longer visible anywhere in the world, and time has crumbled your marble sculptures and creations into fine dust. All of this will happen for sure, and only seconds will pass on the clock of time until you and everything you have meant in the world will be completely and completely destroyed. So what can you fear in life? What is so important or dangerous or deplorable that you turn away from the truth? I do not understand you.
Always and forever just think that the people who approach you are both guilty and innocent, and the same law works in their hearts as in your heart and in the pulsation of the universe, and they are just as mortal as you are. Human evil and human goodness are equally a current and part of the life cycle of the world. I can no longer look at the greatest evildoer - not even the one who tries to kill me - as an instrument of the great unity of life. He's trying to kill me, but he's also a victim - what can I hate about him?
Take care not to be seduced by the commonplace, secondary, more convenient solutions in life and work. There is always some chance that relieves the tension of the necessary effort, offers a detour, offers a cheaper option. Talk about what's important, write what's important, act important. This is always more difficult, it requires more vitality - and at the same time, when you decide to give your essential strength to the situation or the work, you find out that this was the simpler, yes, the only possible solution, the perfect one. The secondary, the half-solution, the cliché, the side talk, the evasion, the obfuscation require more and more evil effort than the essential, the simple, the perfect. When you choose the middle path, you waste. The essential is always cheaper, more useful, more effective. Live economically, create frugally, don't spend your energy on anything but the essentials.
You don't have to be a fakir and live according to the laws of yoga, neck-wrapped and violent practices: but I think he is doing the right thing if he stands by the open window in the morning, after getting up, and takes a few deep breaths through his nose, inhaling the fresh, morning air into his lungs. , washes and ventilates your lungs from the impure vapors of tobacco smoke and room air. You have to give something to the lungs too. The body is very grateful, it enthusiastically acknowledges the slightest attention. And I have found that honey is also useful: for your breakfast, which cannot be light enough, spoon pure honey. There is something in honey that is smuggled into it by the pure forces of nature; the organization gratefully accepts it.
The sovereign man, who has dedicated his life to proclaiming and practicing the truths he has learned and accepts with all consequences: naturally, he is always modest and polite. Even when he preaches the truth. The main characteristic of a sovereign person is that he is not afraid of anything, only his conscience, and at the same time he is not offended by anything. Because he who is offended is neither brave nor sovereign. Those who are afraid and offended cannot represent a truth consistently, to the point of death, in the world. He who is offended, quarrels. The sovereign man never quarrels, yea, he does not even argue. He speaks his truth, and then stays where he is, until the last moment, and accepts everything that follows from the truth and the impatient misunderstandings of the world. Everyone else is just talking. If you have rank, you should not be afraid. But only the cynics are used to being offended, and those for whom the world's opinion is more important than the truth.
What is evil? It is an extremely complex phenomenon. Cruelty is usually caused by childhood injuries - but there is, of course, something else behind it, the interplay of character, physical and mental constitution, bad examples. Thousands of years of education could not dissolve the tendency to cruelty in man. The animals, the beasts, are never cruel, except for the one cat. Evil feeds on discontent; then out of inactivity. A person prone to evil does not know the "owes" and "demands" column in the bookkeeping of his life: he only demands. I don't think that we can dissolve the evil and cruelty of such a person with kindness, leniency, and teaching. Those who are born evil - there are such people - or who have been educated by life's disappointments, experiences, and cruel twists not to patience and forgiveness, but to evil, are lost to all kinds of moral reasoning. It's smarter to get out of his way as much as possible. And you can feel sorry, because most of the time a cruel, selfish and stupid mother or evil father stands in the dark background of such a person's childhood.
You have to burn like a bonfire. As someone who knows that they are being burned for some reason, and cannot or does not want to do anything about it. It's not enough to know the truth, it's not enough to write it down, it's not enough to say it bravely: you have to burn for it, burn, throw the substance of life, the fabric of the body, to the flames, which burn from the outside and the inside at the same time. This pyre, on which all people who want the truth must ultimately stand, is lit by two people: the executioner and the victim. You can't agree in the end. All practice, experience and caution are in vain. Nothing helps, in the end you have to burn if you want something to remain of what was the meaning of your life.
You have to be very careful about those people whom nature blessed with talent, but did not give them meaning for their talent. These are the most dangerous rivals of all professions and human coexistence in general. Because you can cooperate with a person who is not very talented but intelligent, but there is no agreement with someone who is talented but stupid for his own talent. A man thus blessed and beaten will forever suspect that something will be revealed; and his suspicion is justified. In the end, it really turns out that he is stupid, and this sad disability affects his work and his talent. Just as a very beautiful woman, who can smile wittily and grimace bewitchingly, is no longer so beautiful the moment, during a conversation, it turns out that this beauty is as stupid as the dark night. There is beauty without reason and there is talent without reason. These are distorted symptoms. Many Kőmíves Kelemen: what is built during the day, is torn down at night. And they are extremely suspicious. A man of sense, without special talent, can be of more use to the world than a man of talent without sense. After all, they will be prophets: this is how I experienced it.
Because talent is scarce. There is also little sense. Education is not enough to become an artist. All this requires a destiny that cannot be misunderstood and that no human power or intention can change. There are many talented people in every genre, who in lucky moments, with the effort of their talent, depth, and seriousness, ultimately create something useful, sometimes rare and beautiful. This is how world literature or painting, music as a whole is put together as a work. But these people are not creators, only executors; because they have no destiny. And if by chance they stray into medicine or engineering, they will still create something talented and useful. But the artist, the real one, cannot "go astray" into any kind of career, and there is no historical or situational force that could divert him from his task; he cannot be anything but a writer or a painter or a musician. He who is an artist in this way has his destiny. That's the most.
We have to educate our consciousness and our outlook so that we can see the unique, the wonderful and the visionary in the ordinary, the surrounding, the everyday. Because a miracle is not some thunderous moment when the heavens open, horns crackle, fogs rise, tombs open, and in the chaos the word of God is heard: no, most of the time the miracle is quite silent. He goes from one room to another, and you see something: a person's expression; placement of an object; and the true meaning and relationship of this object to the world will be revealed to you at the same time; you hear a man's voice like never before, and beyond the indifferent words you understand the secret of this man; the miracle is always that much. Not to be blinded by the reality, the everyday, to see what you have seen so often: this ability dies in most people, just as the ability to function of certain senses, such as the sense of smell, diminishes in a civilized person. See, smell the miracle, right where it is. It's always around. Most of the time, it's so close, so close at hand, that you can't even think of reaching out for it for the life of you.
Because don't count on anyone. You are no longer loyal to your work if you depend on anyone. You are no longer doing your life-or-death work, which your destiny has entrusted you with, if you accept anyone's help. There is no one to help. No one can protect works, people, peoples at the last moment, no one can help, only the work, and the person, the people themselves. The same force that creates a work, builds a life, only it can protect it. That's why it's best to stay alone. He who is truly, resolutely lonely, who does not suffer from this loneliness in the depths of his soul, is the only one who is strong. You shouldn't be emotional or hopeful. You have to die in the end, know that. So what are you afraid of? What can you hope for? If you are faithful to your work, even death cannot do anything against you until you have finished your work. Know this and stay bravely alone.
I noticed that even starting a fire is difficult. To start a fire in a tile stove with inflammable chips, newspaper and dry logs that ignites in the cold stove and stays alive: even this requires skill and practice. You think that this is some simple and menial task that every poor servant does. But just try it, you, with your wise and experienced hands, and you will experience what a tricky task it is, how much experience and dexterity it requires! I can't light a tile stove, no matter how hard I try. And how many things I still don't know: for example, how to play the piano, just like a sad music clerk at a party; and yet, how openly and proudly I dare to talk about music! And I can't drive a train. And I can't sew up a torn button. But all these little pieces of knowledge also make up the world. Learn respect for all human movements and skills.
Avoid them as much as possible. Because they are worse than traitors. Because there really is no excuse for the traitor: he is obliged. But someone who, with the intention of careful self-preservation, hangs around you and around the common cause, and has neither the courage nor the morals to remain alone, nor to accept the consequences of action, betrayal or revenge: these are truly the worst. At least the traitor acts: he betrays. His actions have consequences, which are borne by both the betrayer and the victim. Betrayal was a vile act, but an act nonetheless. But those who are cautious, who stand by the common cause with a clear face, and are not brave enough to withdraw into the acting, the heroic, complete solitude, but they are not brave enough either to defend or to betray the cause, the watchword of which they lurk among the people, those whom everyone feels are on their side, and in reality are never enough men and heroes to stand up to all the consequences: these, who are cowards even for betrayal, weak for revenge and weak for loneliness, the most dangerous. You can despise the traitor. But do not despise such a person, do not even persecute him; look over it like through the air.
Two billion and a few hundred million people live on earth, so they say. So know: there is a two billion and a few hundred million chance that your words and actions will be misunderstood. As many people live on earth, there are as many chances and opportunities for misunderstanding. This is the great and the fearful in human life, this is the fatal in all human utterances and undertakings. You say "white" or "black." But there are whites and blacks in the world, right? And black in the eyes of a white person is different than in the eyes of a black person. And the world is reflected infinitely differently in every human soul. Each spoken and written word has a different resonance in the souls of two billion and a few hundred million people. You should also know this, and you should never be surprised by the echo with which a person responds to another person's words. Human life is the cycle of an eternal series of endless misunderstandings. The sum of these misunderstandings is the colorful, complicated, terrifying and magnificent miracle whose collective name is man.
Life - sometimes you feel like this - is almost unbearable. You are living in a moment of turning of fate and age, when everything shakes and changes, traditions, moral laws, known ways of life. It's as if you no longer live in houses, but in the primeval forest of life, where the sky is constantly ringing and the storm is raging. And you hope for change. You trust that once all passions in hearts burn to ashes, the ash and bitter smoke that spreads in hearts will dissipate. Sunlight again falls on the human landscape. The sea will be blue and the fruit of the trees will be fragrant. Change brings peace.
The change will naturally occur when the time is right: tempers will calm down. But one thing does not change: human nature. There is no morality, reasoning, or miracle that could truly and profoundly change human nature. Those who bring and live the change will be human again, therefore unjust, impatient, cruel, greedy and lustful. Change, the change of all human things, comes, but man does not change. All educational attempts have so far failed. Sometimes, a very strong character and individuality, for a short period of forty or fifty years of life, can enforce the moral demands of great human educators in practice. These short periods are sporadic and rare in the history of the human race. That's the most a person can do. But this is a very rare phenomenon. The man remains who he was. Human matter is hopeless, fire and alkali cannot change it.
Of course, you should always walk alone, at least one, but preferably one and a half, and if possible, two hours a day. Walking expresses the most human rhythm of life. Those who walk do not want to get anywhere, because if you set out with a purpose and a destination, you are no longer walking, you are just driving. On the way, at every moment, the walker has arrived at the goal of the walk, which is never a house or a tree trunk or a beautiful view, but just this airy and direct contact with the world. A person who slowly blends into the landscape, becomes part of a forest or a field, gradually surrenders himself to the eternal reality, the timeless worldly space among the great scenery of nature, feels at every moment that he has returned home while walking. Walking is complete solitude. In a room, there are books and objects around you that warn you about the tasks and duties of your life, work or profession. He who walks is freed from his work, he is alone with the world, he surrenders his soul and body to the ancient elements. Imagine walking on earth and walking under the stars. This is a great thing.