Tag: slovakia

MEDITATION 73

This evening the candle beside me is not lit in imitation of Marcus Aurelius writing his own ‘Meditations’ far into the night. Nor is the candle there on my table in an attempt to create a relaxed ambiance conducive to writing. It is kindled for the people of Ukraine who at this moment are suffering a horrific invasion with heroic endurance.

I have struggled to write a meditation in the last week or so. It has been a while since my last one. The ideas in my head have been mown down by the relentless onslaught of  events in Ukraine and Russia, which I have found myself compulsively following on the BBC News, so courageously reported  by their correspondents. 

But then, the peace of Europe has suddenly become precarious after nearly eighty years, a peace I have been fortunate to enjoy all my life and a peace and a freedom I have flourished in. It is a peace and freedom I have taken for granted, until these recent days. So perhaps I can be excused if my thoughts have been too distracted to put into words.    

Once again refugees are shuffling across Europe carrying their suitcases. Once again they rush to climb aboard overcrowded trains, holding children aloft to make sure they find a space however small in a carriage to freedom. Freedom from fear: fear of shelling and bombing; fear of the onslaught of the enemy at the gates and freedom from the potential fear of living under a new repressive regime. 

 In the faces of the children I see my own father and his sister, aged 8 and 5 when German troops invaded Poland in 1939, who became refugees themselves through the Second World War.  After the end of the war in 1945, when over 11 million people were homeless in Europe and no longer living in their native country, the phrase ‘displaced person’ was used rather than the term ‘refugee’. In the last few days in Ukraine, with the conflict and ensuing evacuation both escalating, the numbers of ‘displaced persons’ heading for the West is fast approaching a million. They have become displaced so quickly that I wonder if their minds have become displaced too, though not their hearts, which remain in their homeland.

As refugees, Ukrainians have already found or are discovering a temporary refuge in neighbouring countries: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania and opportunities for further sanctuary are swiftly emerging in Europe. The welcome and generosity of these countries is staggering, heartwarming and humbling. In these dark days we are seeing the worst of human nature and the best. The U.K. government must play its own part and in the same openhanded spirit of goodwill, rather than letting open hands be bound together by red tape.

It is difficult to know how to respond to the deeply tragic events we are witnessing, except to make a donation to relief agencies.  So much has already been said in the last days and the international response has been at all levels generally supportive of President Zelensky and Ukraine and condemnatory of President Putin and Russia.

Perhaps a Ukrainian lady can comment. She was interviewed on the BBC News about twelve days ago, when Russian forces were amassing on the borders several days before the invasion began. The interview was filmed at the rudimentary checkpoint between Ukraine and separatist Donetsk. The woman, who was middle aged, had to go through the checkpoint to Ukraine for her regular cancer treatment. Originally the checkpoint wouldn’t be there of course. She was understandably fearful and could not understand what was happening. It seemed senseless to her. She opened her arms and said ‘I only want to love everyone: I want to give the world a big hug.’  I am sure many Russians do too. But sadly not their leader.  As Shakespeare says in his play ‘Measure for Measure’:

                                                ‘but man, proud man,

                        Dressed in a little brief authority,

                        Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,

                        His glassy essence, like an angry ape

                        Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

                        As make the angels weep.’

In my numbness and emptiness I turn to another poet, W.H.Auden (1907-1973) and his poem ‘September 1 1939’ which he wrote in New York, when war was imminent in Europe. He is perhaps now best remembered for his poem ‘Stop the clocks’ which featured in the romantic film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. 

‘September 1 1939’ was reprinted in ‘The New Yorker’ and then some newspapers after the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in 2002. It became a kind of anthem associated with that other horrific event. It is a long poem but the last lines suggest a response to the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine:

                                    ‘Defenceless under the night

                                    Our world in stupor lies;

                                    Yet, dotted everywhere,

                                    Ironic points of light

                                    Flash out wherever the Just

                                    Exchange their messages:

                                    May I, composed like them

                                    Of Eros and of dust,

                                    Beleaguered by the same

                                    Negation and despair

                                    Show an affirming flame.’    

May we all show an affirming flame. And may we remember with St Francis that ‘All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.’ Or an affirming flame.

Ave atque Vale! Hail and Farewell.

PS: The quotations in this latest meditation may have appeared in earlier ones. I make no apology – they express my response at present. 

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Now I have returned from Budapest and I am writing this beside the steady flame of my customary candle. The Cafe Dumas on the Danube embankment, where I last wrote to you, dear reader, seems far, far away now. My travels are over for a while and I am ‘home for good and all’ as Fan, the boy Scrooge’s sister, says to him, when she comes to the boarding school to take him home for Christmas. But I should not be mentioning Christmas yet as we are only into September!

While I was away, I did not spend all my time in Budapest. I went with friends out of the city several times. One of the places I visited was Esztergom, in Upper Hungary, which, like Budapest, is on the river Danube. You can look down on Slovakia on the other side of the river from an elegant promenade. This is behind the imposing Basilica, the largest church in Hungary and one of the largest in Europe, and the remains of the Royal Palace. For Esztergom was where the Hungarian Kings first lived before the royal residence was moved to the Buda hills overlooking Pest. St Stephen, their first King was crowned there and baptised into the Christian Faith on Christmas Day 1000.

Centuries earlier, according to my guide book, it was also where Marcus Aurelius had an army encampment during the Romans’ reign over the territory. It was here, on the banks of the river Hron, which runs into the Danube, that Marcus wrote his Meditations. Sadly I did not have time to write one of my own there myself. I did discern a quietness and stillness about the castle area and the town, however, which was conducive to reflection.

It is that stillness and quietness of the towns we visited that impressed me most, aside from some beautiful buildings and piazzas large and small. As I sit here by my candle it is is the lamps that I remember: ornate and brilliant, beaming on stucco walls of yellow ochre, pink, grey, green and blue.

I was staying at my friend Adam’s apartment in the Taban district of Budapest at the back of the Royal Palace. Behind the block is a road where he parks his car with the Palace towering above it on the other side. There are similar lamps all along the road in the walls, elegant and warmly inviting, making me feel at home as I get out of the car. They remind me of the lamps in chapel quad at Pembroke, my Oxford college. I didn’t notice them much when I was an undergraduate there but I do now when I occasionally return.

Yes it was the lamps that I noticed as I sat one evening in the main square of Szekesfehervar, with my friends and a glass of wine. They slowly became brighter as the twilight faded into evening, their beams warming the yellow stucco walls until in the darkening sky, the square became blanketed in one incandescent comforting glow.

The great French novelist Marcel Proust commented in his masterpiece about memory ‘In Search of Lost Time’ that he would like life to be a series of happy afternoons. For myself, I would like life to be a series of mellow twilights. I image that Marcel was thinking of summer afternoons and I am certainly thinking of summer twilights, for it is only in summer that afternoons and twilights seem to stretch forever.

The square was quiet and quite still with a relaxed atmosphere. There was the low hum of conversation and music playing somewhere, perhaps in another street. The square was pedestrianised so children were running about, playing with their cycles and with water in a fountain.

People were quietly enjoying the evening and each other, sitting in the cafes and restaurants dotted about the square. There I was, in a town in Central Europe, enjoying the peace and quiet of a twilight evening. “Isn’t this what people really want?’ I reflected. To lead peaceful quiet lives enjoying being with their partners, their lovers, their friends,their children; enjoying being with each other? Life can be difficult enough after all. Is not this what the so called ‘European project’ is all about? It is not the ‘European project’ but the ‘European Peace.’ A peace we have shared somehow and not without problems. for seven decades and with which we have also embraced our ex-Soviet block neighbours. In abandoning the European project we should take care not to abandon the European peace.

‘The lamps are going out all over Europe’, said Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary at the start of the First World War. We must do our utmost to make sure they do not got out again.

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Many thanks
Neilus Aurelius