Family … a big word. Yes, one’s family might sometimes be the whole point of life.
But that doesn’t solve anything. And in any case I never had a family in quite that sense.
So I kept listening and paying attention. I listened to fashionable sermons about how loneliness was a middle-class disease, sermons with twisted ideas that kept referring to “society”—that magnificent thing, society — a society that embraces and elevates the individual so that suddenly he has a purpose in life, because he knows he is not living simply for a narrowly defined family but for the far better, all-but-superhuman concept of society. I listened very hard to such tirades. I thought about their application not just in theory but in the here and now, where I could properly grasp their implications, in life itself. I considered the lives of “the poor”—they, after all, constitute the largest element of society, are in themselves a society. Did they enjoy a fuller, richer, more vital kind of life for the knowledge that they were part of a union — the steelworkers’ union, for example — or of a self-employed workers’ pension scheme? Were they happier for the knowledge that they had representatives in parliament, people who could speak, and write articles, on their behalf? Surely it is just as vital to know that there are an infinite number of steelworkers and self-employed in the world who would like to lead better, more humane lives; that their worldly condition improves only in gradual stages, after bitter conflict, after countless unsatisfactory compromises under which their pay is no longer 180 pengő but 210. Looking down, everything seems bottomless. When you’re near the bottom, you’re very glad of anything that improves your horrible condition. But that’s not happiness. Nor did I find happiness among people whose employment or vocation placed them at the heart of social affairs. No, what I found there was resentment, sadness, dissatisfaction, rivalry, fury, struggle, resignation, and idiocy: the clever and foolish constantly at war with each other. I found people who believed in amelioration: that, very slowly, after many unpredictable twists and turns, given time, there would be some improvement in human life. It’s nice to believe this. But believing it, or even feeling assured of it, doesn’t make anyone less lonely. It’s not true that it is only the middle class who feel alone. A peasant on a distant farm can be as lonely as a dentist in Antwerp.
Then I went on to read, and believed for a while, that it was the mere fact of civilization that created loneliness.
The idea was that joy had somehow drained from life in the process, though now and then it might emit the odd spark. Deep in the human heart there lay the memory of a bright, sunlit, happy world where even duty was pleasure, where struggle was delight and everything was worthwhile. Maybe the Greeks were happy — for all that they slaughtered each other, murdered strangers, and put up with extraordinarily long and terrifyingly bloody wars, they were nevertheless radiant with a cheerful communal feeling. They were happy in a deeper, preliterary way; even the tinkers were happy tinkers … But we, according to the idea, don’t have a proper cultural life: our civilization is uniform, secretive, mechanical. Everyone has a share in it, but nobody is truly happy. Everyone can have a tubful of hot water to bathe in, everyone can gawk at pictures, listen to music, make long-distance telephone calls; our laws defend the rights and interests of the poor as well as of the rich — but just look at our faces. Wherever we live, whether it be in small communities or in wider society, our faces are troubled. How suspicious we look, how tense; how much unresolved insecurity and furious antagonism there is among us. It’s all the product of anxiety and loneliness. You can offer various explanations for loneliness, and every explanation would address some specific associated question, but not one of these answers would give you a convincing reason … I know mothers with six children who suffer loneliness, mothers whose faces wear the same furious antagonistic expressions, and I know middle-class bachelors who take off their gloves with an affected, careworn laboriousness, as though they were somehow forced to do so. As for politicians and prophets, they divide us into far more artificial groups and subgroups, and the more they try to educate children in the ways of this new world, the more unremitting the sense of essential loneliness becomes. You don’t believe me? I know. I could talk about this forever.
If I had the gift of eloquence, if I were a priest, or an artist, or a writer, so that people listened to me, I would beg them, encourage them, to look for joy. Let’s forget loneliness. Let it go. It may be no more than illusion. It’s not a question of society. It is a matter of something we learn in early childhood. It’s a matter of awakening. People just look glazed: it’s as if they were wandering about in a trance. Glazed and suspicious. It seems I have no gift of joy myself.
But once, just once, I did come across a face without that glazed look, a face that did not wear that intense, dissatisfied, suspicious, sickly pall of tension.
Yes, it’s the one you saw just now. But the face you saw was only a mask, a dramatic mask for a character in a play. When I first saw it, the face was open, full of expectation and patience, radiant and open, the kind of face that must have been there at the world’s beginning, before people had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, before they knew pain and fear. The face grew more solemn later, graver and more solemn. The eyes became more watchful; the lips, those open lips she forgot to close, did close, and hardened. Her name was Judit Áldozó. She was a peasant girl. She came to us when she was fifteen as my parents’ servant. We never had a relationship. Do you think that might have been the problem? I don’t think so. People say such things, but life is not very forgiving of incidental comment, of wisdom after the event. In all likelihood it is no accident that we never became lovers before I took her to wife.
But she was my second wife. You want me to tell you something about the first. Well, my friend, that first one was a splendid creature. Clever, honest, beautiful, cultured. You see, I am talking about her as though I were advertising her in some column. Or as though I were Othello when he set off to murder Desdemona, “so delicate with her needle … she will sing the savageness out of a bear …” Should I add that she loved music and nature? Because I can talk about her and remain perfectly calm. It’s the way retired head gamekeepers out in the country advertise their younger sisters in the local press, small physical imperfections included. But this one, my first wife, had no physical faults. She was young, beautiful, and sensitive … So what was the problem? Why couldn’t I live with her? What was lacking? Sensual pleasure? I’d be lying if I said that. I had as much pleasure with her in bed as with any other woman, including those with a vocation. I don’t believe in the Don Juan ideal; I don’t believe it is right to live with several women at the same time. Our task is to create a perfect musical instrument out of just one, the kind of instrument on which any song can be played … Sometimes I feel sorry for people, the way they snatch and grab at things so stupidly, so hopelessly … one sometimes wants to smack their hands and tell them: “Don’t snatch! Don’t grab! Sit down properly and have some manners. You’ll get what you want if you wait your turn!” Really, they are just like greedy children. They don’t know that contentment in life is sometimes simply a matter of patience, that the harmony they are so feverishly seeking and which they think of, wrongly, as happiness, depends entirely on one or two points of technique … Why don’t schools teach you about relationships between men and women? Why not? I’m not joking. It’s a perfectly serious question. Contentment depends as much on such things as on morals and grammar. It shouldn’t be treated as a frivolous subject … I mean, there should be intelligent people — poets, doctors — to introduce one to the ways of joy, to the various possibilities of coexistence between men and women before it’s too late. I don’t mean “sex education”: I mean joy, patience, modesty, and satisfaction. If I do feel a contempt for some people, it is chiefly on account of their lack of courage in such things — the lack of courage that leads them to conceal the secrets of their lives, not only from the outside world but from themselves.