12th - A town’s blurred vision – by an American tourist

Unfortunately, we’ll be quite unable to debate the actual topic of miss Marton’s writing; however, it would have been a much more reasonable thing to write about, since she could have been right. Regrettably, I couldn’t peel of out much of this block of subjective experiences of an uninformed American citizen, who seems to be troubled even with deciding who she’d like to blame (other than everybody).

Being unable to find a usable guidebook – I am a qualified guide, and I’d better tell the Synagogue is an important piece when it comes to sightseeing, since Miskolc actually lacks sights compared to other Hungarian cities – she ends up blaming an international publisher first. Then come the local residents, who had no idea about this glorius edifice. It’s quite shameful and somewhat unbeliveable, but who is guilty about not mentioning it? People know about things they hear about. Having the guidebook at hand, why didn’t she ask people about the Forestry Directorate or the wonderful Orthodox church? Maybe it would have turned out that locals are also malicious enemies of both forestry and Greek orthodox religion, fraudulently ignoring the establisments of those.

The interlude with the peroxide-blonde barmaid could be a joke either: how do you expect someone like that to know anything? But then, even the poor Jewish congregation couldn’t get away with it; the ’villains’ just padlocked their own gate with no sign, schedule or whatever, and hid the marble plaques about their dead in their Miskolc-ish ignorant seclusion, if I get it right.

So the old lady hopefully flew back home, and we all may continue our sorry lives in our sour and soulless homelands. Hungarians will roam in darkness forever for ’being devoted nazis’ in the War, like all other peoples formerly being part of the Axis (it’s a way too funny idea to get bored of it in 65 years, as it seems), while peoples in allied countries of World War I. will do the same for their ancestors provoked without fail the whole Second World War-thing by composing some funny ’peace treatries’, and forgot to say sorry about it.

11th entry for 19th February

I happened to read two short stories of Edgar Allen Poe last week, just after finding him in a web gallery of literary drunks and addicts. It wasn’t a reason to look after his inditing, but somehow I found out ’Murder in the Rue Morgue’, which I’ve known as a song before, is one of his short stories. (The song’s story turned out to be seriously altered in order to match the album’s atmosphere.)

It wasn’t long before I realised I’m quite unable to fully comprehend a single sentence of it. I had to find a Hungarian translation to study some of the text at least, which surprised me a little. I thought I’ve found something tough to read last semester, but now I ended up finishing the Hungarian version only. Frankly, the thing I appreciated the most was the introduction about comparing chess and draughts. I never really appreciated chess, nor I had the faintest talent for it. Perhaps I tried to play in a way which, according to Mr. Poe, is useless in this game. I find it quite a clever remark that chess takes attention in 1^st place, and usually the more concentrative player wins.

I downloaded a chess game later from the generation which securely beats any human opponent. I tried it and found it’s still not the game for me. Computers seem to have verified Mr. Poe: winning over humans in chess takes no actual intelligence. I’m going to check draughts next, however, I’m afraid the same type of algorithm – checking all the possible moves in advance – works for it as well, after all.

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.