Béla Hamvas: To wake up in reality.

“EVERYTHING MUST BE HERE” Introduction Waking up in reality - Béla Hamvas. To the volume Stages of a Life in Narrative in Photos, Writings, Films “No one can fully understand the secret and uniqueness of the personality,” says Bergyaev. The human personality is much more mysterious than the world itself. ” - Indeed, it is hardly more elusive than this self-contained personal constellation at the moment, which is a human life with its innermost drawing, and in which the apparent mundane of external and public life often suggests nothing of the 'unheard-of variety of inner landscapes'. There are, Béla Hamvas writes in one place, whose life "seems lonely, quiet, uneventful, and whose wild adventures, dizzying dangers, bitter temptations, and bottomless abyss are greater than those of a conqueror who has been to three parts of the world and has taken part in three hundred battles." The inadequacy of all biographies, the distrust of every biography that runs through Hamvas's statements in his oeuvre, is rooted in this elusiveness of man's personal life, the external and internal incompatibility: “How one will become what one is,” or where one is, where one can reach “across countless horizons,” no one can actually speak. Just as no one lives in public space and time, and no one knows the “space” and “time” in itself, only the “place” and “moment” in personal experience that man, as Hamvas says, from infinite time. and torn off from boundless space, it is shaped into its own destiny. “Rilke says, Once. Never. Never again. Only once. Everything only once. ” “Hamvas often recalls this stage of the Ninth Duino Elegy, and then adds at one point,“ The moment. That's the personality. " But it is precisely this quietest and most fleeting feature of existence that permeates him with the image of a living personality that cannot be recorded in any external moment, from which, in Rudolf Kassner's words, radiance is radiated and saturated with the shock and sadness that a single how much everything and how elusive life a person, a single face, has to keep and hide. ” It is as if Béla Hamvas writes a comment on a page of his short book Weg des Menschen (The Way of Man): To be a legislator - God! - Even for that! Everything has to be here because there is no one. How good it would be for at least someone - ”. Not only being left alone, or, as he puts it elsewhere, "the excruciating absence of a real community," emerges from this remark, but rather a peculiar perspective of the human person in which "the weight is not on the production but on the intimacy of the human person." Again, a moment that resists not only all outward-looking life stories, but almost all forms of articulability. Can there be any public measure of this kind of perspective, or of the increased sensitivity to the original state of being? Being a person in this sense is more about touching from the ultimate things that permeate the lifestyle to the smallest moments, “behaving in reality,” but at the same time having an intense need and awareness that “in the effort to restore the original purity to a higher degree he must be personally and responsibly involved. " However, the restored purity of the primordial image of existence knows not only the order and weight of the ultimate questions, but also the light of a lifted and liberated life, the timeless presence of the intertwined experience of what it means to “play freely,” how good to be a child and the shining summer to laugh ”, what a joy to see with the pure, celestial blueness of the extent of“ the sea and the starry sky ”and when one“ lives like the brother of the trees ”. For Hamvas to stand for the whole of existence also requires the whole of the human person, the realization and presence of a “vigilant, universal person” whose center of gravity is already beyond all circumstances and weaves, the “fullness and truth of which rests on the golden age consciousness” from which nothing is missing, "he has not lost his life, his light, his smell, his aura are intact," and, as Hamvas says, he can accept it all because he himself is whole. What the present volume wants to evoke, therefore, is this “light and aura” of personality, and everything that can be found in it wants to be somehow about this indescribable thing: a picture, a word and a film try to draw a portrait of Béla Hamvas in this vicinity. and to give an account of the stages of his work, to conjecture and to bring closer how much everything and what elusive life this journey had to hold and hide within itself. Tibor Palkovics