Straight Outta Szentendre

Willie Gevirtz and the romance of Hungary. Plus: Piccarda's lesson

Willie Gevirtz, from Brooklyn to Budapest

Last night my son Matt and I were walking to the subway from a restaurant, where we had had dinner with a friend visiting Budapest for the first time, from England. Matt was pointing out the sights, and said, archly, “And that’s the shopping street over there where tourists can go and see all the things that they have back home.”

It was a funny line, because it highlighted a paradoxical truth about modern tourism: so many of us travel halfway around the world, and when we get there, seek out the comfort of the familiar. My friend James talks hilariously about his American father coming to visit him in Europe, and defiantly eating at McDonalds, as if to spite the locals. I get the pleasure of encountering the familiar in a strange place. I never eat at McDonalds at home, but on my honeymoon, my wife and I had grown so overstuffed by Portuguese cuisine that we shocked ourselves by really wanting to eat just once at Mickey D’s, to rebalance our American chakras, or something.

Still, it is weird, if you think about it, how much so many of us want foreign places to be like home.

This item is about an American who is the total opposite of that. He has enthusiastically thrown himself into Hungarian life and culture, and has made his passion celebrating it, and sharing it with the world. I love people like this, wherever they live. He could be in Louisiana, or Lithuania, or Kuala Lumpur, and I would be dazzled by his passion for the local and the particular.

A Hungarian friend put me onto Willie Gevirtz, a New Yorker who has been living in Budapest for the past three years, and who has fallen totally in love with the city, and the country of Hungary. I love this guy! Watch this video:

I’ve watched a few of Willie’s videos about Hungary, and wrote to him to ask him when he’s giving his next tour of the city, because Matt and I would love to join him. I think it’s fair to say that Willie is an enthusiast. I’m like that too, but Willie’s enthusiasm is a purified form. Wherever I travel, I try to find the best in the local place, and celebrate it. But Willie — man, he’s a true lover. I like that.

I write in this space often about how living in Hungary has taught me so much about how little I knew about here, about my own country, and, well, about the world. This is normal: you can’t know everything about everywhere. A big reason I love travel is that I am often surprised and delighted by how unusual and delightful this big world is.

The other day I read Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, and was struck by this parenthetical remark:

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

This is why I find myself sympathetic to the Hungarians’ in their fierce defense of their national particularity. I come from a country where the homogenization of culture wreaks havoc. I keep thinking about what my professor friend told me many years ago about the pain of teaching college kids in Appalachia. He was an outsider who had come to love their bluegrass tradition. But, he said, most of his students had no love at all for it. They were raised on MTV and other channels that came to them via satellite dishes mounted on the sides of their house trailers in the hollers. The constant message from the outside world was: “Life is elsewhere.”

I got that message too as a kid growing up in rural south Louisiana, though this was mostly in the pre-cable, pre-satellite days. I could not wait to get out and see the world! You all know well my own tragic story of the failed nostos journey home — a journey that said everything about my family’s internal culture, but nothing much about the wonderful culture of south Louisiana — a culture that I had to leave behind in order to appreciate.

The thing is … life really is elsewhere, in a sense. This is a lesson that only really came into focus for me by reading Dante. In Paradiso, the pilgrim Dante discovers that the light of God’s love shines differently in different places. Diversity is God’s will, to reveal the varied splendors of His love. Dante is a man of Tuscany, but in writing about Tuscany, he wrote about all mankind. He teaches us to see the universal in the particular. When I first encountered Flannery O’Connor’s short stories as a high school junior, I was astonished to see that great literature could be made from the lives of people in the rural South — my people. The core reason I love traveling is to see and experience how God’s blessings of life refract through the experiences of these people who live here, in the way of life that came down to them over the centuries. In Canto II of Paradiso, Beatrice explains to the pilgrim Dante the reason for shadows on the Moon, which is to say, why there is so much diversity in the world. It all depends on how much the world’s peoples have received the divine light, and how it appears as it passes through them. The tensions between light and dark is what makes them real.

Here is a verse from Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

History is also now, and Hungary.