10th entry for 4th Dec

Mr. Hawthorne, at last, is talking about the novel's origin itself, so I guess I'm near the end of the introductory part.

This elongated introduction was the first thing to remind me I'm dealing with a classic romanticist novel, and here's the second one, the origin of the story. Mór Jókai once told someone he's a novelist, and the man inquired about the meaning of that. Then he told him, it's the one who guesses the whole of the story out of its ending. And that is an important feature of all romanticist novels I read, I'm wondering if there is any original fiction amongst these. Notre-Dame de Paris, as far as I know – I must apologize for not investigating that this time – was born out of a male and a female skeleton found embraced together, one of them being twisted, thus it got connected with the long deceased hunchback of Notre Dame.

Az arany ember (The Golden Man) from Jókai included the above mentioned conversation about a novelist’s job, in a “real-life” epilogue, which unveiled the source of the story. The whole novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra was stoutly stated to be totally authentic by its author, referring to a notable amount of detailed documents and confessions. The Scarlet Letter is midway between them, since Mr. Hawthorne possessed a semi-official, yet “reasonably complete” record about the life of the heroine, and even the remnants of the scarlet letter itself. Only the missing remainder is fiction, as he stated.

He – and most novelists of this movement – assured the reader, that the novels follow the known facts strictly, however, even if they do, the authors wouldn't mind if the fiction part is something most improbable to have happened; since it's the essence of romanticism. Apart from satisfying the demands of its age (being an alternative stream for the Enlightenment which didn't really succeed), I can't see much advantage of it. Many wrong historical preconceptions can be traced back to romanticist novels, thus they nourish illiteracy. On the other hand, it's about obscuring cruel reality, often with mere tales. However, we live in an age in which everything is faked, and the result is funny, to say it politely. Thus – though I'm still interested – I would consider romanticism less actual than ever.

9th entry for 27th Nov.

This week I’ll have to lecture about Victorian moral on our history seminar. All of us had to choose a topic from British history, and I knew at first glance it was for me. First thing, it’s a topic which, if worked out well, will be most appreciated by the audience. It’s one of the extremes of social morals in history, and its odd controversies make it even more fascinating. The other reason, I was somewhat aware already about this era and I also like it by some means, mostly in style and lifestyle, to be honest.

Despite this, and the fact that I fancy neither 21^st century morality nor its style (sometimes I wonder if they exist at all), I still couldn’t go back to those times. It’s disappointing to suffer a lack of morality, however, you are practically free to follow any moral code you’d like to, and the way you’d like to. You needn’t avoid getting suspicious about not following it, since most people don’t care.

You also worry less about who is supporting your comfortable middle-class life. The splendid side of a society has always been powered by some kind of slavery. In Victorian Britain, the working conditions of working class were sometimes as bad as actual slaves (until 1833, the complete ban of possessing slaves). Today, both the conditions and salaries of “slavery” are better.

Clothing was nice, but you had better not wear anything durable in front of others, so you always had to take care of your outfit, and you had to spend much on clothing anyway, which must have been awful. On the other hand, you still can wear those even today. Morning coat, for example, is still considered rather too formal than obsolete. To be honest, I even possess a full suit of a nearly authentic frock coat, yet without the cylinder.

8th entry for 20th Nov.

This week Mr. Hawthorne said to me it’s quite vital to a man’s moral and mental health to meet people with much different personalities than his. So different that you shouldn’t appreciate or be interested in each others’ pursuits and virtues at the first time. His experiences were totally restricted to his job, so we could call them brief, or at least one-sided and analytic, compared to my cases. Because I believe, I got somewhat further with this idea.

I find it very important in any kind of personal relationship how different are the two persons and by what means. We all tend to be happy finding friends, partners, consorts, etc. with whom we are so alike that we feel from the first moments as if “we came from the same distant planet.” I guess most people met someone like that. I would say, having one person like that can be dangerous, and choosing that person as a life companion could be fatal to your personality. Let’s see what the defect is here, studying the other extreme.

That is, of course, the type with whom there’s a complete emotional and mental incompatibility, providing a total communicational breakdown, if there’s not one already. With that person you would be each others’ perfect source to learn and experience new ways of thinking and living, and likely, you would excel in things the other does not, which would make you two extremely beneficial to each other. But certainly, there’s no way achieving that with such a person. So my choice usually is to find those who are so different that the relationship with them is not always comfortable and may consume a relevant amount of energy, yet at this cost we’re able to keep a clear and stable channel of communication both in the intellectual and emotional sense, having a constructive relationship rather than a supportive one. Of course you might get lonely a bit having only this type of people around you, that’s an issue to be careful about.

7th entry for 13th Nov.

I’m still looking forward that next philosopher to learn of, since I was ill this week and I didn’t feel suitable to attend the lecture on Tuesday.

However, I happened to get a Cannes-award-winning film from Romania. The title is Police, Adjective. English is a bit unfortunate language to give an exact translation for the title though, since in Romanian, the noun form means “policeman” instead of “police”.

The film would be quite miserable for the casual watcher. The plot is, there’s a young policeman, Christi, pursuing kids smoking weed, and is ordered to find out where is that coming from, but it turns out there’s no local dealer, so the kid supplying the other two is to be arrested and sentenced to a few years of jail. That’s what Christi’s conscience refuses to support (he’d better like to wait for one of his other suspects), and he ends up in confrontation with his seniors.

The film has real-time scenes, which can make one from the vicinity (from Hungary, for example) a little bored, there’s nothing romantic for us in seeing panel-buildings or their obsolete interiors minutes after minutes. The camera tends not to move, only turn, and there’s no music except when characters listen to it.

After all, it’s all about how obsolete the country is (we see Christi pursuing subjects as a detective, observing a house for hours, all on foot), and how frighteningly this obsolescence is stuck in the heads as well.

In the end, after a long discussion with the captain, he has no choice but agreeing the sting operation and putting the kid in jail, case closed - no reasonable or happy endings in Eastern Europe. Some critic said it's the "greatest Hungarian film" lately. He meant this film is not strictly about Romania.

6th entry for 6th Nov.

We have to attend philosophy lectures this semester, on which, so far, to be honest, I mostly learnt what particular thoughts made certain philosophers ignorant.

Don’t take me wrong, I was a (quite illiterate) philosopher at the age of twenty, until I realized the very barriers of logical thinking about the world. It’s not the classic adult discovery that you shouldn’t mess e.g. in your emotional world with logic, I guess you should, if you’re good at that. It’s just neither human thinking nor logic itself is sufficient to solve every single matter one can meet. It lies within the nature of logic, I guess.

Also, don’t take me wrong, I’m absolutely aware of the fact that it’s quite easy to notice the failures of those venerable old thinkers, provided you possess a heritage of two thousand years’ world-wide philosophy. I mean, you get fragments of this heritage even only by watching TV. If you also tend to read quality fiction, you can totally get pervaded by it, without reading a single book about any philosophy! It affects you indirectly.

As I mentioned I was quite illiterate in this topic back then, and I also knew some mistakes of modern thinkers. So I got quite surprised hearing that Immanuel Kant back in the late 18^th century actually realised those limits of philosophy as a science. He also noticed it was too bad philosophy had restarted with each dominant thinker, one refuting the other’s whole theory all the time. And, so far, it seems to me, after accepting those limits, he really managed to apply real scientific methodology upon this science, in contrast with those others before, who made up their theories of mere ideas and some unfounded inferences, practically.

The next surprise was Hegel (well, actually a direct follower of Kant), who, again, made unusually clever improvements on Kant’s work.

I got somewhat curious about the next ones.

5 1/2th entry for 30th Oct.

Then come the Sages. It's not yet discovered why are they giving a questioning call upon water shortage, since they are most aware of every happening in their vicinity. You can give them any explanation, they'll make you sure what you said is simply impossible. The issue you refer to can not exist, and even if it could (but again, it can't) that would have nothing to do with their problem. They're fond of offering to dispatch a TV channel to expose the Stone Age service we provide, or to send letters to the company HQ. I usually express my sincere sympathy for doing such funny things, but oddly, it ends up in some resigned frustration.

And at last, this aristocracy has its decadent part, too, but local gentry are not as entertaining as one would suppose them to be. They're not spending their fortunes on goose liver, playing cards, stockpiling walking sticks, but on phone abuse. They are after this passion of theirs only when a malfunction occurs, just to avoid getting suspicious. Then, they almost convince you about their desperate dissatisfaction about Water, The Universe, and Everything, they blame you so authentically that you would love to believe them, but you certainly won’t.
The performance gets quite drowsy after a little while, so you should remain jolly anyway, as if you have never noticed they are trying to be angry. Then, realizing they failed to be the funnier guy, they get embarrassed and quit talking very quickly.
They forget the first lesson of phone abusers: never with a dispatcher or a receptionist!

5th entry for 16th Oct.

Today it's not going to be about The Scarlet Letter, since all I've read of it lately were 2-3 pages. It was interesting however, Mr. Hawthorne was discoursing about an inspector of absolutely perfect mood and health even after sixty years and horrific family life, getting to the conclusion that our man in question is simply an animal, having really nice instincts but no real mind or soul. (I'm afraid the introduction of the novel is still far from its end.)

But again, I can't append much to that. I'll rather talk about people, who don't certainly possess more than one of the three virtues mentioned above.

Those who are exposed to direct communication with all kinds of common people at work, will have mostly changed their judgements about folks. At the county's waterworks, one of my barren duties is handling or forwarding all incoming calls when I'm not engaged in other matters.

So who are the crème de la crème in Borsod county?
I'm glad to tell, in our splendid countryside, about third of people fall into this refined party.

Most common are the Hermits. These representatives of local aristocracy seem so independent that they simply don't need any speaking skills. There is not a simple issue they can express in sentences. It's still not clear it's a dialect preferring to restart sentences after every 1-3 words, or it's a revolutionary one fully rejecting any kind of grammar structures.
However, they're most kind providing me keywords like "billing", "last week...bill", "cheque.... problem", so we get on very well, as long I'm to redirect the call.

The other two are way too exclusive, so I’d better explain them next week, not mixing them here.

4th entry for 9th Oct.

There is a classic attribute of these ‘old books’, most particularly the ones written in the romantic era. Their authors don’t seem to care about the passing of time, and they seem to expect the same from the reader.

They don’t separate relevant and irrelevant, they don’t even seem to be aware of those concepts. Those books appear like experiments: will there be a reader who finds something essential in my garbage?

Don’t take me wrong, it’s not that these novels are imperfect by any respects, that garbage is nice and fascinating. It’s just the astonishment of mine from the twenty-first century. And it makes me wonder if I should be astonished about my era instead.

After getting comfortable with the style of romanticism (I almost always prefer old books for several reasons) you find today’s ‘accelerated world’ a mere illusion in everyday life. The acceleration itself really exists, however, it generates an unreality with an unhealthy urge telling people they haven’t got a minute to waste. Then, they force themselves in a causeless hurry about everything they can’t avoid doing.

It sounds reasonable, you certainly don’t want to waste your precious time on your daily routine. But then, actually there is no preciousness for many people.

In this strange world (well, in its cities in particular), being in an insane hurry, then wasting all the saved time on relaxing, but meaningless activities are accepted as normal. You need to relax because you are exhausted. But you’ve exhausted yourself only in order to have time to relax. What’s more, people spend much money both on accelerating their daily routine, and on making their relaxation more effective. Perhaps modern industry really overdone itself.

Again, the acceleration does exist. Now anything can happen in moments in contrast with these old times, when you just couldn’t help slow things. That makes people feel they’re missing opportunities constantly, which is true, anyway. But they usually aren’t preparing for them, they rather save up time instinctively, then loose it.

3rd entry for 2nd Oct.

I’ve read some more of the introduction, and I must admit the author’s enthusiasm about pleasing me with his impossible vocabulary already started to amaze me. I’m still not sure if I’ll be ’allowed’ to read a sigle sentence without a dictionary. He’ll run out of new words once, won’t he?
And all he was writing about were some simple things around a wharf and its custom house!

Well, after finishing his funny-words-about-custom-houses collection, it seems telling about his "unhealthy connexion" with Salem, (his, and all his ancestors' natal spot) draws a much more reasonable amount of such linguistic treasure.

He has got an interesting point here, however. His very first ancestors, about 300 years earlier, have played an important role in founding the town and organizing its life, and thence, his family got more and more rooted in Salem.

That's not that fascinating, there might be a dozen of reasons to feel connected with your hometown. It could be the parents' effect, it could be that you had spent all your wonderful childhood there, it even could be said that the ghost of that first progenitor „who came so early, with his Bible and his sword” is having a spell on you.
They all could make you affected to an otherwise worthless place. But then, there's some resemblance with a theory from some other writer from the twentieth century, who was assuming some kind of genetical memory, adding up generation by generation. (As far as I know, it wouldn't fit today's genetical science, however, Darwin's original theory about the selection of random mutations is invalid already.)

Mr. Hawthorne told us that it wasn't any kind of appreciation, since the town in his time had the most faults you could imagine. Neither any kind of love, and it was joyless anyway. No, he called it instinct.

And I'm wondering if it could be else than geniune instinct.

2nd entry for 25th Sep.

Honestly, I hadn't been quite comfortable about choosing any topics for my journal, so it came to my mind to introduce something for this purpose. This something, this 'anything [what the journal should be about]' is going to be a novel (so far), The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I did not have the faintest reason to choose this one in particluar, I can't even remember how did its title took my attention last week. Usually that's the way I find good ones.

I'd like to tell I'm quite fond of handwriting (you'll be absolutely unsure about it upon having a look, though), but I would digitalize the journal anyway, and that'd be extra work. Certainly, I'm not going to write strictly about the novel, but about all the things coming to my mind while reading it.

The first surprise was its vocabulary. Ten new words per page! I've been concentrating, let's say, only on British English, ever since I've got seriously interested in English. That was when I had been studying at SEAS ELTE for two semesters, 4 years ago.

All the text is filled with words I'm not used to (however, they're definitely not solely AmE words), it's something I didn't experience with Bram Stoker, for example, I was fairly comfortable with his style. (On the other hand, I must admit I've never read a whole book in English.) It might be as well, that Stoker and some others weren't that demanding about their language, talking about a kind of 'quality pulp fiction' from the XIX. century.

I'm wondering if it's only a slight 'culture shock' for the beginning.

1st entry for 18th Sep.

About “What True Education Should Do” by Sidney Harris

I've always found it a shockingly ignorant custom of humanity to destroy the natural senses of youngsters while bringing them up. As if society wouldn't need anything but well-conditioned, well-informed brains to work in already built-up systems.

I've heard about people considering childhood merely as a state of insanity. It's just amazing how fast a single conception can occupy a whole human mind, which used to be wide open before. I'm talking about the conception of 'educated thinking', or 'being a regular adult', for example, but it applies to even more simple ones.

The article, however seems to point out there's not any need to educate people in the regular way.

So we've got two conceptions here about education, the first seems to tell us we were all born with rubbish in our heads, and the second seems to tell we carry the seed of perfection inside, which doesn't actually need to be expanded further.

I would say, neither view is balanced, but indeed, one is less unwise.

Vocabulary on this article:

to elicit: to extract some information/reaction from someone
controversy: public argument
succinct: brief and clear
dunce: a wrong student
to sift: to separate the rough from the fine, the necessary from the needless
to assent: to agree or approve something
oyster: a clam

ardour: enthusiasm

How to get from the Resource Center to the Rocky?

First, find your way out to the big hall with the nice flooring. Then you turn right, find the exit to the streets and cross the parking spot, you find yourself at the main road where the buses run. Now you've got two options. You can follow this main road passing B/1, A/1, and you have got the Rockwell in front of you on the left.

Or, if you'd like to walk less, you can go ahead, across the road, then a little left, towards the Library. You pass it to the left, follow the path to the main road, and if you don't get lost (which is fun anyway), you'll see the Rocky a little further on your right, at the opposite side of the road.