An old town of crooked, winding streets, where the breath of the past can still be felt. Does the long view of history call for a certain attunement? I don't know, but to my mind history is interesting because it sets what still matters today in a perspective of proper depth – for the great tasks of life hardly change from one age of history to the next. On the wall of one of the houses, a memorial plaque: ‘Two hundred years ago General So-and-so, in the course of his campaign, set up his headquarters in this house.’
Two hundred years is not so very long, and it passes sooner than we think. We are probably not famous generals, with plaques to hold forth on where we were quartered, and yet it would be worth acting within this perspective of several centuries. How many generations have followed one another in two hundred years? And in two hundred years, who will read this plaque? Or who will remember my own deeds? Will they stand the test of time?
A lifetime is roughly seventy years, close to the average life expectancy at birth. A generation, however, is a shorter span, reckoned at thirty years. Hungarian has considerable riches in what it knows of the generations, too. We can probably form a notion of as many generations as there exist words for them. If we multiply these terms for the age groups by the thirty-year span of a generation, we arrive at the span of time that linguistic consciousness can encompass, the span in which we can think responsibly about our forebears and our descendants.
We are our forebears' descendants so that we may be our descendants' forebears.
So the terms for the generations in Hungarian are: great-great-great-great-grandfather – great-great-great-grandfather – great-great-grandfather – great-grandfather – grandfather – father – (I) – son – grandchild – great-grandchild – great-great-grandchild – great-great-great-grandchild. Looking back, that makes six generations and 6 × 30 = 180 years, and looking forward, five generations and 5 × 30 = 150 years. And if we take all the generations into account, ourselves included, that makes twelve generations in all, that is, 12 × 30 = 360 years.
When a father helps his son, both of them smile; when a son helps his father, both of them weep. But by the time I realised how right my father had been, my son was already old enough to contradict me.
Even where people marry young and are blessed with children early, a child generally knows its great-grandparents, and only in the rarest cases does anyone know a great-great-grandfather. And yet we have words for those beyond the great- and great-great-grandparents, that is, the boundary of consciousness is wider than personal acquaintance allows. Where ancestors and descendants are concerned, our language can span three and a half centuries, which is an immensely long time. Genetic research, too, confirms that a DNA test can trace certain genetic markers back 12–14 generations. This agrees with the time span of the Indian tradition, according to which the enlightenment, the liberation, of a single person brings blessing to 12 generations back and 12 forward. According to an old Hungarian saying, a child has as many ‘souls’ as the grandparents it can come to know. The chain of family tradition, handed down through the centuries, binds us to a great many people.
What has gone into your bundle? The heroism of your forebear, a general who lived two hundred years ago? Your grandfather's love of nature, your father's strictness? Whatever in your bundle is your personal burden, bear it and carry it. More than that, give thanks for it, but what is not yours, lay it down and carry it no further. Do not grieve over what went into your own bundle, but think rather of what you will put into your son's. The two greatest things you can give your child: roots and wings.