Recovered Budapest Fragments

Morning Thoughts #286

*Looking back through some notes/free writing from late August 2025, the following are some fragmentary words written on a Budapest balcony, 16 Nepszinhaz Utca, District VIII.

Let us write freely for a second. Oh Budapest morning, outside on a Népszínház balcony. The street alive, the air blown by its activity. Oh fresh awakening. Bricks worn down and ready for more wearing. A day that fits perfectly on my soul.

Street sweepers in yellow, dispatched to prove that even vicious notoriety is just another removable dust. A cigarette butt of spent reputation. Rust, deeply rusted iron, the now uncertain curtain. I love a people still a people. What shuffling lives, better at protecting something within themselves that belongs to nobody else. The mixing is a surface distraction, while a depth remains secure.

Oh traditional safes, what codes learned by heart and forgotten by busy, surface-shuffling days. And yet the fog burns off, that shining again, the inner sanctum. Candles are not lit so much as reborn or risen. Oh wick, alive only at the mercury of daily eclipse and retreat. Oh mercury, lightning and otherwise mercy.

The moments know what they bring, or at least offer a fair fight. There is no moment that contains more than our worries. Our worries packed, packed, packed full. The moment itself has only so much space.

We live in a strange era of wealthy pseudo-communists, the universalists who want to transform every particular. Oh particulars, unannounced, glory to your safety. We who never planted deep, but who do not think of those depths as foreign at all, do not aspire to paved-over progress. If we cannot slow ourselves down, we at least feel the loss.

The street is already built and in need of repairs. Realistically, tearing it all down and starting over is no longer an option. A refreshing of some facades, but many structures are sound, designed in an era with better taste. Designed then as they could not be now. Another reason not to tear it all down. You do not want wholly modern architecture in your soul.

Oh these classic designs, what brought you up is lifting differently now. Maintain the height, but patch the weathering. Today, old street, I see a hole in a roof. Openness, but hardly as soon as I notice it, two eyes peer through. Your childhood, the early days, like the self designed as a city before a world of cars, adult efficiency, streamlined design, souls on a grid.

Lived-in, they say. Oh history, layers of meaning. Tram lines set, jumping on and off these habits. So long as I get off at the right stop, they help me through the day. Novelties are not walkable, needing a personal vehicle. Reinventor of self, and outside it, a world seeming totally new.