slowly slowly

I received the highest grade in the class in Physics 402. boo-yeah! That also means I just earned my first two units towards my M.S. here.

Budapest I

Even I don't really remember that meek and mellow dictatorship, which melted away in front of our very eyes, around 1989. Just for your education, Gentle, Serious Reader, since the good old days are still here, in every cupboard, all over town, under every carpet—let me give you a short lecture.

You should know that this ancien régime was different from the others in Eastern Europe. Most Hungarians did not cry out against it every day after getting up; on the contrary, they had to remind themselves of what kind of a régime they were living in, at the weekend. They laughed at the ignorant "politicians," and—at least my class, the egghead dissident folks—detested money.

...

In this slightly cruel, utterly frustrating but only mildly totalitarian society almost everything was hazy and dreamlike; not only books, but life in general was cheap. There the Budapest egghead as a species grew up, ambitionless, avidly letter-writing, gadget-happy, slightly-privileged, with more and more contacts in the West, cosmopolitan, womanising, drinking semi-heavily, knowing that no real responsibilities would ever land on him.

Egghead society hinged very much on informal, clandestine information: everything that was "not available in books." It was important to know pwople in person—they were the source of knowledge, more than books, and much more than the media, which had no knowledge at all to give. Studying had some very archaic, even peripatetic characteristics. You followed Socrates into the cafeteria of the library of the Academy, and listened to his 20-minute lecture on some current issue, or on some eternal aspect of the arts. This egghead civilization tended to be based on verbal, face-to-face communication: it was archaic in this repsect; and much less alienated.

Archaic, human, verbal, metaphorical, funny, proud of itself, gossipy, idiosyncratic, experimental, self-destructive, enviably vigorous, friendly to talent. All that.

Of course, little of it is spotted now in Budapest—egghead society as it was.

The generation of eggheads that so wanted change, seems a bit taken aback that change doesn't stop. Things are not what they seemed at first. Liberty seemed at first to be destroying high culture, but later it turned out to be decentralizing and multiplying it.

— from András Török's book about Budapest