Gulliver's Fifth & Sixth Voyages 1732 Studios

Hungarian · Capillária

Levél H. G. Wellshez

Letter to H. G. Wells

274 sentences

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  1. 1

    How could man and woman ever understand one another?

    Férfimanférfi · noun, nominative, singularsubject of érthetnék
    ésandés · conjunctionlinks the coordination
    nőwomannő · verb, present, indicative, indefinite, third-person, singularcoordinated with Férfi

    Backbone tags this as the verb nő ('grows'), but every occurrence in this book is actually the homograph noun nő ('woman'); glossed per its real usage.

    hogyhowhogy · adverbintroduces the clause of érthetnék
    érthetnékcould understandérthet · verb, present, conditional, definite, third-person, pluralmain verb of the sentence
    meg(completive particle)meg · particledepends on érthetnék

    Verbal preverb marking completed/perfective action; often has no separate English word.

    egymástone anotheregymás · pronoun, accusative, singulardirect object of érthetnék
  2. 2

    Each wants something different — the man wants the woman, the woman wants the man.

  3. 3

    To the poet of A Short History of the World and the scientist of The First Men in the Moon.

  4. 4

    Dear H. G. Wells,

  5. 5

    I want to ask you to read carefully this small satire, which I wrote some years ago in a troubled state of mind and under bitter circumstances of life.

  6. 6

    Here in our little Hungary it was received with mixed feelings by critics and public alike — you would have to know my strange career as a writer, and my whole outlook, to understand why.

  7. 7

    Now that it is perhaps to appear in German, and perhaps in English too, I have read it again, and it occurred to me that I must speak with you about this work without delay.

  8. 8

    I shall explain at once why only now, and not earlier — not even when I wrote it — and why with you of all people.

  9. 9

    I did not want to write this book; I wrote it reluctantly and with distaste. In those days I would far rather have written a happy novel, a comedy to make people laugh, or beautiful verses for my own consolation and that of others.

  10. 10

    I took no pride in the thoughts and notions it is made of; I would rather have chased them off, forgotten them, thrown them out of myself — I do not like being a man full of content; I like being a living man, with content renewed at every moment.

  11. 11

    But these thoughts and notions were there all the same, and one winter afternoon, over tea, alone with her of course, I set out to tell a kind and charming and reasonably cultivated lady, for her amusement, everything that is in Capillária; had I been able to tell it then, I should never have written it.

  12. 12

    But something went wrong: the lady listened at first, then grew distracted, though there was talk of love in it too.

  13. 13

    Later she even jumped up — she had remembered some matter of a friend's, whom she had to telephone.

  14. 14

    By the time she came back, though she asked politely that I go on, I had lost the thread; the whole thing felt trivial and out of season to me, and I let it drop.

  15. 15

    It is true she had to leave soon after, in any case.

  16. 16

    But the thoughts and notions stayed with me, and later I mentioned them, in passing, to a friend of mine.

  17. 17

    With men it goes differently: he argued, he objected, and before long I fell silent, seeing that he was talking about something else.

  18. 18

    And because I always fall into the fault of being more interested in the person I am speaking to than in the subject of the argument, I let this drop too.

  19. 19

    And so, in this manner, I was reduced to what is called literature: to telling everyone at once what no one, taken singly, wants to hear.

  20. 20

    The book appeared, and I expected arguments, objections, replies.

  21. 21

    None of this came — a few tired and vain critics wrote some foolishness, and I received confused letters from adoring young men, in which they took pains to show that only they understood me, being finer men even than I.

  22. 22

    The women shook their little fingers at me in jest, and then there was silence.

  23. 23

    Now, in preparing the German edition for the press, I went over Capillária again.

  24. 24

    And, fertilized by my own self of three years before, a strange agitation and unease seized me; my heart began to pound, and I came near to fainting.

  25. 25

    Word for word it was so, believe me — and it brought to mind, not by accident, a passage from Rousseau's Confessions.

  26. 26

    The hermit of Geneva tells how, during one of his solitary walks — he loved, if you recall, to walk — he fell to brooding over a strange contradiction in the way human society lives together.

  27. 27

    — Suddenly, as though a light had kindled in him, in the shape of the recognition of some simple connection, he had to stop; there was a pear tree nearby, and he leaned against it.

  28. 28

    And half beside himself, with heart and brain standing still, the first outline of his discovery unfolded before him in the blinding clarity of mathematical law.

  29. 29

    "When I came to myself," the stern puritan writes, "I saw only that my waistcoat was quite drenched with the tears that had run down it, and that I had been standing three hours in one place."

  30. 30

    Thus was born the Contrat Social, the work without which — as you well know — the one successful revolution society has yet produced, the French one, might have broken out much later.

  31. 31

    It is not in my mind to compare the importance of my own ideas to Rousseau's, or his to mine — we truly have little in common with each other.

  32. 32

    But I know this agitation: it shook me with elemental force after reading my own work, Capillária.

  33. 33

    What I thought then, and set down hastily to myself, is a simpler and humbler thing than what Capillária speaks of — and yet it goes beyond Capillária, beyond even what I am about to speak of in this letter.

  34. 34

    Were I to write a book of it, its modest title would be: The Two-Sexed Human, or The Sexual Contract.

  35. 35

    I hasten to confess that I stand toward this book called The Two-Sexed Human just as I once stood toward Capillária — I would rather tell the whole of it to some kind, clever fellow creature of the other sex, but I know by now that she would not hear me out to the end; I shall be forced either to write it or to forget it altogether.

  36. 36

    And since I have as much reason to fear the latter possibility as the former, and since I hope something better will turn up for me than the writing of a theoretical study called The Two-Sexed Human, I have no ambition to be counted among the pioneers of the great revolution of marriage and love; I should be content if enough remained of the memory of this hour to excuse, defend, and explain this work of mine called Capillária, and to make it accessible to the one whose opinion I respect.

  37. 37

    It was a matter of opinions, of thoughts, of the search for truth, of basic concepts, of correct formulations: and I had to think of you.

  38. 38

    What you, and a few of you out there in England, are doing — I am certainly telling you nothing new here — in its outward form closely resembles something that has already happened here in Europe a few times before: first, perhaps, not even in Europe but for Europe, in Alexandria; last in the second half of the eighteenth century, in Paris.

  39. 39

    The Parisians already called themselves, deliberately, encyclopedists; they already knew that the foundation of the great work of unfolding is analysis — that the terribly tangled complexes of concepts, whose false connections practical results and monstrous public conditions reveal, must be broken open, taken apart, smashed to pieces if there is no other way, so that the pure, simple elements of the concept can be found and then put together again in a natural, healthy manner.

  40. 40

    After their work, only half finished, weeds and thistles once more overran the garden — the nineteenth century came; Napoleon came: the basic concepts were joined together not by quietly musing reason and heart but by nerves thrown into disorder by terror.

  41. 41

    The result: Hegel and Darwin, Marx and Metternich.

  42. 42

    Universal conscription, a world war, a stillborn revolution: a century whose men of genius psychology showed, one after another, to have been mad to the last man — and no one thought to put the question the other way round: what a shameful, hellish century that must have been, whose men of genius went mad.

  43. 43

    Now you, a few of you in London, writers, are taking up the abandoned work again, even if not deliberately.

  44. 44

    Fastidious German aesthetics calls you intellectualists, with a certain condescending praise — it would somehow like to expel you from the sacred groves of literature, on the grounds that you sometimes, when the fancy takes you, busy yourselves with clarifying concepts too, and have thereby made yourselves unworthy of the rank and dignity of the artist who creates by inspiration, who of course, bypassing the central nervous system, working through the peripheral nerves, at best through the belly, brings forth the Great Mirror in which reality beholds itself.

  45. 45

    Never mind — let them all laugh!

  46. 46

    At worst it will turn out that literature is not an art at all — so much the worse.

  47. 47

    If it is not an art, it is surely something more — it represents the whole man, hide and all, heart and mind, eye and ear and all the rest.

  48. 48

    As against the true artist, who always represents only one organ: the painter the eye, the musician the ear, the sculptor the touch, the poet the heart, the philosopher the mind.

  49. 49

    Let them be proud of the anathema: it is as I say.

  50. 50

    If ever God, who has the leisure for it, since he has time, should after all pay a visit to the earth, and appoint himself an envoy to report on the doings of Man, that envoy will after all be the Writer — the painter and the musician and the poet and the philosopher will only accompany him on his way, to interpret him, to illustrate with similes the Universal Thought, which destroys and creates.

  51. 51

    It destroys and creates and tears apart and joins together, across time and space.

  52. 52

    Now, as I write this to you, in a small café in Buda, the newsboy has laid a copy of the paper before me: on the first page I read in large letters that Chamberlain, after negotiations with Beneš, means to bring before parliament a bill concerning the constitution of the United States of Europe.

  53. 53

    I do not know what it means, how much of it is true, what will come of it; I do not know how to stand up against the thought, I, the trampled, beaten, plundered, tortured child of a trampled, beaten, plundered, tortured country.

  54. 54

    I neither hope nor fear; I do not believe in the good faith or the seriousness of the proposal.

  55. 55

    But one thing is plain: if nothing else comes of it, this proposal will at least have done me the lasting service of giving me a convenient turn by which to come to my subject.

  56. 56

    For amid the confusion of so many great communities and allegiances, it has conjured before me the reassuring vision of a community smaller than any community, any Europeanism, any state, country, homeland, nationality, race, perhaps even family — therefore closer and deeper, one long since in existence, valid by a law and a constitution of its own unity even without any Constitution of the United States: the community, spread across Europe and across the world, of writers who believe and think in the continuity of life.

  57. 57

    This community's law is dictated by common joy and common grief — its citizens have one duty: to will and to seek the good and the right and the beautiful, in place of the bad and the wrong and the ugly.

  58. 58

    In space and in time, the living and the dead alike, the members of this community make and build the Great Encyclopedia, sometimes blindly, sometimes in despair, building it up, tearing it down again — had you already read Capillária, I would add, melancholically: Halvargó, the Tower of the Bulloks, which the Goncsargó lays in ruins.

  59. 59

    I well remember one of your projects, the New Bible — there was a time, it seems, when you pictured the Encyclopedia in that form.

  60. 60

    Well then — regard this letter of mine as the modest warning of an interested party who belongs, if to nothing else, to the community named above, and who would like to take part in the work at least with this warning: take care, for the time is ripe for this Bible to be finished imperfectly, with decisive and irreplaceable gaps, if you Englishmen mean to make it alone!

  61. 61

    The English encyclopedists, the English writers, at their head these days perhaps yourself, have already dug deep passages through the Babel-like confusion of tangled concepts — they have sketched the frame of the Work in broad strokes, they have concerned themselves with past and future and present alike, dreamed new histories, devised new utopias, studied politics and social philosophy, naively, with an inquiring eye, with the fresh spirit of Descartes's childlike heart, almost entirely free.

  62. 62

    They have written a great many beautiful, clever, above all honest books about man, each one fit to have its refined result explain some single technical term in the Great Encyclopedia, which speaks to everyone, to every man on the round earth, for only that enters it which is human always and everywhere, addressed to man, understandable by man.

  63. 63

    But for God's sake, gentlemen, there is one territory, one category of phenomena, if you like, of which you English writers — I mean the English, not the Scots and the Irish — simply understand nothing, where you move as a seal moves on dry land, for which you have no feeling, no eye and no heart, and do not even know of yourselves that you lack it — you take the suffering and unease these phenomena cause to be a delusion, a madness, a sickness, just as the inhabitants of Diderot's "country of the blind" took the cause of impressions of color and light.

  64. 64

    The cause of this blindness is climate, a particular temperament, an interest stunted and suppressed by isolated, haughty state and social laws — or perhaps it is truly that proverbial English prudery (hypocrisy) that the Scots and the Irish mock so much — I do not know.

  65. 65

    How am I to explain, how make you understand what I mean?

  66. 66

    I shall try to set an image before you.

  67. 67

    A mirror-image, the mirror-image of your own soul's face, from whose white patches invisible to you, from its negatives, you can at least judge quantitatively the importance of this territory that you have left unplowed.

  68. 68

    I take up an English book at random — two or three, the best, first-rate, representative works, novels.

  69. 69

    With a delighted soul I enjoy in one its quiet, deep wisdom, its sensitive understanding of everything human — another carries me away with its courage, the way it stares down the cruel truth of life — a third fills me with enthusiasm, shakes my imagination, with its dazzlingly sharp drawing of marvelous possibilities, of even more marvelous realities, with the lavishly rich searchlight of association, always describing a full circle.

  70. 70

    I read and I enjoy — and then, all at once, the blindness comes.

  71. 71

    In all three at once, faced with the same phenomenon, at almost the same instant.

  72. 72

    A woman appears in the novel.

  73. 73

    And at that instant the English writer begins to bleat; his serious, musing, kindly face twists into a strange grimace, he wags his hips, he neither sees nor hears, he cracks stale jokes, he breaks into a bear's dance.

  74. 74

    One cannot believe one's eyes: one turns a page, and in place of the grand landscape of stern beauty that, say, the racing canvas of a Jack London novel had opened before us, a picture postcard grins out, a wretched oleograph, a chocolate advertisement.

  75. 75

    The author excuses himself: the bewitching smile of a fair-haired woman did this.

  76. 76

    Dear H. G. Wells, do not misunderstand me — I too know the smile of the fair-haired woman to be bewitching, and I bless God and the radiant sun for having created this too, among other things.

  77. 77

    But what sort of enchantment is it that turns the weeping of the violin and the swelling of the organ into the wretched, ear-splitting, stale bleating of a barrel-organ?

  78. 78

    This enchantment ought to run the other way.

  79. 79

    What happened, then — how could it have come about that it did not happen this way?

  80. 80

    Were the Germans right after all, that you rationalists are strong only in dialectic, but freeze at once, become comically helpless, the moment the wind of Life's Secret Depths strikes you?

  81. 81

    No, no — it is quite certain that they are not right.

  82. 82

    For the Fair-Haired Woman appears over there too, with them, in her proper place, and the enchantment sets in there too, with them, with this difference: that in place of the moonlit picture postcard, this time it is the wax figure of the horror-chamber of the Városliget waxworks that startles one.

  83. 83

    This same fair-haired woman now has black hair, her smile gives off a satanic enchantment, blood drips from her hand, her eyes flash ominously — she bears a striking resemblance to a mustachioed sergeant-major in a skirt, freshly emerged from hand-to-hand combat after cutting down fifty Cossacks, and would gladly bite my nose off.

  84. 84

    All this is very fine, and the philosopher nods: Ah, ah!

  85. 85

    This means that woman is devil and angel in one person, and that the female animal is both bitter and sweet.

  86. 86

    But what am I to do, what am I to make of the chocolate-box angel and the mustachioed sergeant-major, I who am neither devil nor angel but a living man, and would like a living...

  87. 87

    That is — let us stop a moment: what is it, exactly, that I would like?

  88. 88

    Before I came to know the double mirror of Reality, the Chocolate-Box Angel and the Mustachioed Sergeant-Major — that is, the nineteenth century's view of woman — in my childhood (as it happens I remember my childhood very well) I still knew things quite precisely.

  89. 89

    I did not see reality doubled; reality was something very graspable and compact: I called it: I, and I understood something very definite by this, though for want of any knowledge of the natural sciences I did not yet know how this something had become possible by way of the protozoon and the missing link.

  90. 90

    Probably for the same reason I did not know, either, that I was a mammal, that I bore living young, and fed them from my own breast.

  91. 91

    My first unpleasant experience was that the relatives brought a little girl, with whom, had we been left alone together, we should have got on very well.

  92. 92

    We would have played and amused each other — had we been left this way, the two of us alone (forgive the impropriety), I consider it likely that, without Darwin and without Haeckel, we should have discovered for ourselves that we were mammals, that we bore living young, and fed them from our own breasts.

  93. 93

    And no harm would have come of this; we should both have been equally glad of it, equally glad that we were able to give each other pleasure; on this account we should neither have quarreled, nor wished to get the better of one another: nothing hateful would have come of it, so far as I know myself and her.

  94. 94

    The little girl would have become neither a chocolate-box angel nor a mustachioed sergeant-major, but together we would have loved the angels and hated the devil — she would have become a dear companion in Mankind, resembling me at least as much as she differed from me, and I would never have written Capillária, but would have written her beautiful verses instead, and would have invented for her, on my own, the aeroplane and the wireless and the categorical imperative, and she would have invented for me, on her own, poppy-seed strudel and the caprice-cushion and God and the life to come.

  95. 95

    I cannot help it — even today I remain convinced that all this would have happened just so, had the relatives not existed.

  96. 96

    But the relatives did exist, and the relatives began by having me stand up and give my place to the "little young lady," and help her on with her coat, which she could very well have put on herself.

  97. 97

    And they said: are you not ashamed of yourself, what a fine gentleman you will make, don't you know one must be polite to women?

  98. 98

    And they laughed as they said it.

  99. 99

    And at that moment I began to hate the little girl, and I was right to hate her, for at that very moment she too began to put on airs, and sprawled herself in the chair, and expected me to help her into her coat, which she could very well have put on herself.

  100. 100

    And from that moment I hated her, because they told me to be gentle with her because she was the weaker — and it occurred to me at once that if I were to slap her face, she would fall off the chair — but then she may slap my face, and humiliate me, only because I, out of politeness, may not strike back?

  101. 101

    Of course I learned later that there is some other reason for politeness besides the fact that women are the weaker — but this changed little in the matter.

  102. 102

    And always again, whenever I met her, whether she approached me or I approached her, something came between us, some illusion I could not dispel.

  103. 103

    I studied a great deal, and taught too, while she studied nothing and taught nothing — and yet I could not get the better of her, nor remain beneath her: I was always defeated anew, before her and before myself, whenever I went into battle with her.

  104. 104

    I overcame difficult questions, I mastered the forces of nature, I subdued the instincts within myself.

  105. 105

    I lashed my will into action; I opened the hidden drawers.

  106. 106

    In vain: against the woman, nothing helped, save that I was a man.

  107. 107

    And yet I am truly something more than that, am I not?

  108. 108

    And all the while the relatives kept coming forward, encouraging me, explaining what I ought to do with her.

  109. 109

    One relative recommended romance — I did not care for it; there was too much sly flattery in it: I could not get into my head why she should be more mysterious, or less mysterious, than I.

  110. 110

    Another, a German relative, put a whip in my hand — I threw it away in disgust; I did not want what one extorts by such means.

  111. 111

    A third, the French cousin, advised me to face her, but not to touch her — to examine her closely and minutely, take her apart, and I would soon be disillusioned with her.

  112. 112

    But I did not want to be disillusioned — I had no inclination to take apart what I could not put together again.

  113. 113

    And meanwhile she stood there, facing me, smiling, now as the Chocolate-Box Angel, now as the Mustachioed Sergeant-Major, but calm in both shapes, waiting to see what I would resolve, whom I would listen to.

  114. 114

    Losing patience, I turned to a fourth relative, a Jew, who pointed to the sky with a transfigured face: forget the whole thing, said he, it is not a fitting matter for a man made in the image of God.

  115. 115

    Best that I go into the wilderness, to free myself of her temptation.

  116. 116

    This was the worst advice of all.

  117. 117

    Among the mystic ascetics I felt dreadful; every one of them had fled from women, and after a short time together it turned out that their way of life, their outlook, their wisdom, their whole conception of the world had been shaped far more by the negative fact that they had no need of woman, than mine had been shaped by the fact that I did need her.

  118. 118

    With deprivation I fared as Gautama Buddha did: my chastened body sweated out a chastened wisdom of its own.

  119. 119

    With them or without them — even in the wilderness the trouble was on her account, until I discovered that with my skin gone sallow I was a far more ghostly sight than she, the temptress, from whom I had fled — returning from the wilderness, I soon noticed that I was the tempter.

  120. 120

    The relatives went on explaining what sort of goods a woman was, what she was for, how one must treat her, and when, confused and embittered, I broke with them, understanding that they could not repair the relation between the two of us that they had spoiled back in our childhood: I turned directly to the woman, holding out my hand in peace — she no longer accepted it, but turned away sulking, or looked me over scornfully — perhaps she had been offended, and despised and looked down on me for my stupidity in not thinking of it sooner — or perhaps she had forgotten it all in the meantime, left to herself while I fought for her: having found in herself the happiness that I had not been able to give her?

  121. 121

    And now I began to suspect that the relatives, kindred spirits, my fellow men, were the cause of all the trouble — they who had wormed their way in between us, misled me, and spoiled her.

  122. 122

    My affair with the woman was a matter between the two of us; no one should have been permitted to have a say in it; no one should have been permitted to know of it.

  123. 123

    At the moment of birth, before I saw the light of day, already here on this Earth, and even Over There, some mischievous angel whispered something in our ears, a Secret, which I could confess to only one person in due course, to the Other, to whom he had whispered it likewise: but let us take good care that no one but the two of us should know of it!

  124. 124

    And I set out with the secret, not yet knowing who that other would be, only that she would be like me — not suspecting the ugly joke at which the unruly angel laughed into his fist: that he had whispered the very same thing to others as well, that he had misled others in the very same way — and others, these others, had talked her head full in advance, and mine too, of love, of sex, of the war between the sexes, of terrible and mysterious and essential differences between the two of us, of poles that can never meet, of a duality that splits the world in two, of the male atom and the female atom — and of the woman question, independent of love.

  125. 125

    Whoever can honestly recall the awakening of his own spring will find among his memories the first disenchantment, the first disgust, the first seed of injury to the desire for life: a corrupting, foul-smelling worm and a snail's slime in the very first rose-cup that opened before him — this worm and this slime were the discovery that others too knew the secret he had believed only he knew.

  126. 126

    And yet this was not mere jealousy.

  127. 127

    I was not angry at the one who purely and directly desired what I too desired — I was angry at the one who, slyly and by a roundabout way, perhaps out of envy, had taken love apart and spoiled it and soiled it for me before I could ever reach it.

  128. 128

    At the one I have reason to accuse of having falsified, adulterated, God's gift, the purest essence — not the knight arriving in a white cloak, who draws his sword for his beloved — but the trembling, bearded, bleary-eyed Two Old Men, who spied from a hidden place on Susanna at her bath, so that, winking at one another, they might dispassionately "sketch" her, and secretly circulate the sketch that could not, in the end, be kept secret even from Susanna herself.

  129. 129

    It was these two old men who then sat in judgment over Susanna before she could get a word in — it was they who invented the "woman question," they who determined the "natural history of woman" differently in every century, but always in the manner in which the excellent Brehm draws some peculiar domestic animal.

  130. 130

    And at the close of one century after another, amid ever more uneasy misgivings, the hair-raising suspicion took ever firmer shape in me that some error of sequence was taking place here.

  131. 131

    The Susanna sketched, well or ill, at the start of a century grew, toward its end, ever more like the drawing the Two Old Men had made: nor could that drawing have been so false, so distorted, so crooked and impossible and unrecognizable, that in the Susanna of the century's end, when I came to meet her, I should not have found, with a start and a skipped heartbeat, the very image of its original: the drawing.

  132. 132

    I will not name the two Old Men of the nineteenth century, who a little late, but never early enough, painted Susanna-Nora and Susanna-Satanella and Dorian Gray and Francesca, these improbable figures, at which the living, graceful little Manon bequeathed to us from the inheritance of the previous century once had a good laugh — I will only note that the painted-lipped, clean-shaven, breeched and booted Jockey, with her mocking smile and flashing eyes, who ran in first as the feminine ideal in the sexual contest of the last decade, confirms, with a frightening likeness, the very image inspired by the vision of the distinctly masculine Devil and Faun and Krampus that the apostles of woman-hatred, shuddering before the female demon, painted in the middle of the last century.

  133. 133

    Picture and model resemble each other to a hair: and the child of our century blinks uncertainly from one to the other, unsure which is the original, which the mirror, which to embrace if he does not wish to expose himself to walking into glass.

  134. 134

    The third old man, meanwhile, who does not draw but only nods wisely, shrugs his shoulders with a hesitant smile: here, on the other side of the page whose front announces the United States of Europe, Signor Pirandello has handed a journalist his summary: woman is illusion.

  135. 135

    Your own gifted Oscar Wilde alludes, with a light gesture, to the reciprocal action of art and life — the reciprocal action is true in a somewhat more complicated way, but far more deeply and far more really, than either of us would dare imagine.

  136. 136

    More real and more dreamlike: more than a reciprocal action: it seems that nothing less is at stake in this world than the fact that everything man imagines also comes to pass, exactly as in a dream.

  137. 137

    It was under the pressure of this oppressive misgiving, then, that I had reason to rebel against the Two Old Men, who had imagined a wicked, ugly, and useless Susanna.

  138. 138

    Until, while reading Capillária, a light kindled in my brain.

  139. 139

    And I realized that the two old men are not to blame — indeed they cannot be, for, confound it, they were not born into this world with beards either.

  140. 140

    They too were once young, and, thinking it over properly, the young troubadour who caterwauls a serenade before the window instead of going in is quite as much of an old fool, and contributed quite as much to Susanna's degeneration, as the two of them together.

  141. 141

    Stammering, clearing my throat, after many a roundabout turn, I brace myself to whisper my discovery to you: I know well that in putting a spontaneous feeling into words, everything may hang on some small qualifier, a mark of punctuation, the relative position of two words, a single prefix, whether the gunpowder discovered proves to be a roadside commonplace or the most original truth in the world.

  142. 142

    I do not know whether the redemption of the world, the spiritual nourishment of two thousand years, the New Testament, is the final solution to our moral law — I, a Speaking Man of my own sort, regard it as a more precise, clearer, more general, and more perfect formulation of the truths contained in the Old Testament and in Buddhism, and in saying so I by no means rate its importance lower than does the Pope of Rome.

  143. 143

    But no one has ever known what it means to love the truth to the death who has only taken care that what he utters or writes down should be true: truth is unutterable, and sincerity is not yet truth — through a labyrinth of words we draw near to the center of the maze, where she dwells.

  144. 144

    For my discovery consists in this: that the human being is two-sexed.

  145. 145

    However strange it may sound, this fact has not yet been laid down with mathematical precision.

  146. 146

    I add at once that I am not speaking of the two-sexed human in the sense of that physical and psychological analysis which has shown that we all carry both male and female traits within us.

  147. 147

    Nor am I speaking of the fact that the higher animal is two-sexed.

  148. 148

    For I already knew that the horse is two-sexed, that it bears living young, and feeds them from its own teats.

  149. 149

    I knew this of the pig and of the ape as well.

  150. 150

    But that the human being is two-sexed in just the same way as the horse and the pig — this bold inference I am today obliged to reject emphatically, since I myself have neither borne living young nor fed them from my own breasts.

  151. 151

    I have not the slightest inclination toward this, and by all signs I shall not do it until my dying day — and yet I am a human being, indeed, according to King Solomon, I alone am a human being.

  152. 152

    There is some contradiction here: either Darwin was mistaken, or King Solomon was, or else the human being is two-sexed in some other fashion.

  153. 153

    At least as matters stand today.

  154. 154

    The human being is two-sexed, somehow, in such a way that it does not merge into one, as the animal species do, but retains its individual character in each of its two sexes.

  155. 155

    If I am alone in the room, then I am a human being.

  156. 156

    If a woman comes in, then I have become a man.

  157. 157

    And I am a man to exactly the same degree that she who came into the room is a woman.

  158. 158

    My formulation, then, is modified thus: a human being is either man or woman.

  159. 159

    Seen this way, these two words, man and woman, are not nouns but only relational terms.

  160. 160

    For if a woman is alone in the room, then — peep as they may, the two old men will observe nothing else — she too will behave exactly as I do: she will eat, or yawn, or muse.

  161. 161

    She becomes a woman only when a man comes in to her.

  162. 162

    But then again, they can know of each other's existence only if they meet — and once they meet, they already have a sex.

  163. 163

    In practice, it is the word human being that becomes relative.

  164. 164

    The final form of my discovery, then, is this: there is no such thing as a human being — there is only man and woman.

  165. 165

    Experience bears out my abstract reflection.

  166. 166

    In all my journeying through the world, I have never yet seen a human being, in the ideal sense of the word; what I have seen has always been either a man or a woman.

  167. 167

    And the more manly the man, and the more womanly the woman, the more human we call them.

  168. 168

    The more human, that is, the more perfect, the more chosen.

  169. 169

    I would draw your attention to a peculiar refinement of the Hungarian language (our tongue is full of such words that reach deep and reveal their meaning symbolically, just as it is also richer than the western languages in nuance of distinction — thus, for instance, for the noun love we have two separate words, according to whether it denotes the general human affection or the attraction between the sexes).

  170. 170

    We express the concept of nobility with the word nemes, and that of the ignoble with nemtelen: taken literally, these two words mean, respectively, endowed with sex and sexually indifferent — the measure of human nobility, of distinction, is thus how much of a man, or how much of a woman, the person is.

  171. 171

    And while we are on the subject of etymology, let us not forget that in the languages of the western peoples living at the summit of culture, the names of the concepts homo and vir are often used as a common designation — that the word man and the word l'homme, in common usage, mean both homo and vir in English and in French (whereas we, save in the one matter of marriage, denote homo and vir in every case by two separate words).

  172. 172

    This linguistic narrowness ploughs deeper into the essence of the sexual question than we should believe — for me, at this moment, it points with a luminous finger at the source of the sin from which all punishment has sprung.

  173. 173

    For six thousand years, with a peculiar stubbornness whose cause the developmental history of psychology is charged with investigating, philosophy, literature and art, and sociology too, have unconsciously always understood man to mean the male.

  174. 174

    The laws of thought, the standard of human honor, the rights and duties of human dignity, have been formulated in such a way as though, in practical application, all these ideals needed to hold good and be justified only in the life of the male human being.

  175. 175

    Honor, right and duty, the ideals of humanity, whenever a model was sought for them, whenever they were set before us as a principle to be followed: the human being to whom they referred was pictured, every time, in his character as male — just as the first framer of the concept of God pictured Him, in a perfectly natural way, as male, simply because that person happened to be male himself, and, in his absent-mindedness, being alone at that particular moment, forgot that woman too existed in the world.

  176. 176

    The first such absent-minded man was then followed by others — one fool makes a hundred — and absent-mindedness is every bit as catching as yawning.

  177. 177

    These men banded together, and in the course of argument forgot about women all the more thoroughly; they set about manufacturing, come rain or shine, the products of contemplation and will, the findings of Cognition and the laws of Morality.

  178. 178

    And every finding took on the smell of a man, and every law the shape of a man, into which women simply could not be crammed.

  179. 179

    Women were occupied with other things, and the manufacture of laws went merrily on.

  180. 180

    Of course it soon turned out that the whole constitution was worth nothing: the first primitive laws and findings could not be applied.

  181. 181

    Man must be brave, said the Law — but it turned out that woman, for instance, need not be brave, and often is not even permitted to be.

  182. 182

    Man must be strong and muscular, said the Law — and it turned out that women, for instance, must be weak.

  183. 183

    Man earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, said the Law — and it turned out that women, for instance, do not earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.

  184. 184

    Man is a bloodthirsty animal, said the Law, and it turned out that women, for instance, are not bloodthirsty.

  185. 185

    Man searches out the secrets of nature, said the Law, and it turned out that women, for instance, do not search out the secrets of nature.

  186. 186

    The whole faulty lexicon ought to have been torn down; instead, to save the old error, a newer error was constructed.

  187. 187

    Since the male's findings about himself as human being could not be applied to woman, she was instead thrust out of the inner world of the intellect that knows itself through itself, and shut out into the outer world, which we know through observation, by way of the experience of our senses.

  188. 188

    She was transformed into a concept of natural history, classed among external nature, as a phenomenon or an appearance whose secret (woman is a mystery! Dreadful! Then what in God's name is man?) the human — alias male — mind was appointed to solve.

  189. 189

    And little by little it became a natural first principle of philosophy, that hair-raising assumption, that wooden iron ring, that it is the male who is appointed to understand the being of the twofold human, through himself, from within — and the being of woman too, the male, through his view of nature, from without.

  190. 190

    The final result may be read in Signor Pirandello's interview: woman is only illusion.

  191. 191

    Why, of course — the outer world, if I please, is pregnant, if I please, is not pregnant — for there has been another philosophy too, according to which only man exists, and there is no world.

  192. 192

    Strange, that the possibility of this permutation of concepts — that there is only world, and no man — never occurred even to a metaphysician!

  193. 193

    Someone once said of me: there is something womanish in you.

  194. 194

    I answered him, in my fright: perhaps I inherited it from my mother — for my mother, as it happens, was a woman.

  195. 195

    But Signor Pirandello, the child of an illusion, of a shadow, imagines himself to be a man who is dreaming a woman.

  196. 196

    Now at last I may say it: Capillária was born, a nightmare dream, out of the disquieting sense of a recognition: how woman answered her expulsion from her own kind, from the tyrannical arbitrariness practiced upon her in society; how she avenged, with a more legitimate, more healthy, and more effective selfishness, the crazed, senseless, sickly selfishness of the male, by which he had denied her the secure, joy-giving sense of the self that recognizes itself in the other self, in her fellow man.

  197. 197

    I cannot help it, let them call me a coward and ignoble: I am incapable of seeing, in the fact that men fight, slaughter, and destroy one another, that in a gasping bodily and intellectual struggle they root out of themselves the very soul fit to grasp the joys of life, instead of cultivating the appetite for life, while women meanwhile occupy themselves with themselves, with their own bodily and spiritual well-being — I am incapable of seeing in this an exemplary symbol of human nobility, goodness, valor, self-sacrifice, intellectual superiority and strength.

  198. 198

    No, the whole business does not please me; I sense something sly, something sanctimonious, something dirty and cowardly and degraded reeking behind it that I cannot put into words.

  199. 199

    The fashionable modern dramas are full of the exalted figure of the generous and noble-hearted husband who, after long inward suffering, forgives the unfaithful wife, after she has caused him unspeakable suffering — he forgives her because he understands her weakness and loves her.

  200. 200

    I do not care for these dramas; I am suspicious of a goodness that forgives only pretty women, and never, by any chance, the less pretty ones, still less men.

  201. 201

    I am suspicious of the whole age of chivalry, forever defending the female honor of the human being, while no one defends the male honor of the human being.

  202. 202

    I am suspicious of the rapture, preached by men on the subject of woman's love, and never preached by women on the subject of man's love, that hides behind the exalted mask of the idea of motherhood.

  203. 203

    I sense some wretchedness behind it, which disgusts me, as all wretchedness does.

  204. 204

    The European man languishes in sexual wretchedness, in sexual oppression: this is the whole foundation of the false cult of woman.

  205. 205

    In vain does the natural-scientific romanticism croak in my ear, the raven-bird of the natural-scientific committee, that this is no social phenomenon, no symptom of the age, but an eternal law of nature — that man is of necessity a subordinate instrument of woman, in the service of the species; that woman is the center around which the world swarms; that woman is the axle, man the wheel; that woman is the flower and the cup and the fruit, man only the gray stamen; that woman is the seducer, man the seduced; that woman exists for herself, man for woman; that man wages war for woman against other men, while woman wages no war for man; that woman is the body, man the soul; that woman is beauty, man is strength.

  206. 206

    In vain does it cite the queen bee and the termite female and the peacock moth of the night to prove all this, instead of citing, at the very least, the rooster.

  207. 207

    For man is neither bee nor ant nor peacock moth of the night; whatever they may do, man cannot be explained by his natural-historical being.

  208. 208

    For against every comparison drawn from the animal and plant kingdoms stands the fact that man, such as he is, is a living, evolving reality defined by his living social relations.

  209. 209

    And in his formation, everything that has happened to him since his origin — his social life, his self-awareness, a human will independent of animal will, his soul, his desire, his design, his joy and his grief — is just as decisive a factor as the given traits he has inherited from his animal descent.

  210. 210

    Natural history's favorite image is that certain egg-cell in which everything is given, the whole life of the species in miniature, down to its death.

  211. 211

    Well, in that egg-cell from which our species descends, not everything was given after all — we ourselves later acquired something further.

  212. 212

    And if this is unworthy of the sublimity of our animal nature, then at most we renounce that sublimity, and we are not animals.

  213. 213

    We are not animals, we are not males and females, but we are men and women.

  214. 214

    And our love is not compulsion and fate, but the happy recognition of the happiness we are able to give one another.

  215. 215

    And woman is not only body, and man not only soul, and woman is not the seducer and man the seduced, nor axle and wheel, nor sun and moon, but twin stars, each circling the other, both of them seducer and seduced together.

  216. 216

    There is no beautiful sex and ugly sex; they are equally beautiful to each other, if they love each other and themselves, and they fight equally for each other, when it is needed, and when it is not needed, they do not fight.

  217. 217

    And if it is not so, but instead there is wrong, and curse, and unhappiness, and humiliation and degradation, and oppression and tyranny, and wretchedness — the cause of this is not nature or fate, but the cowardice and stupidity of the one side, the selfishness and abuse of power of the other.

  218. 218

    The cause of Europe's dreadful sexual wretchedness, its sexual unhappiness, is not a degeneration of female morals, but the suicidal decline of male self-respect.

  219. 219

    I am saying this to a fellow man — an unusual, an unmanly thing to do, is it not?

  220. 220

    — for men are accustomed to speak to each other of politics and science; a thing as small and foolish as happiness counts as a marginal subject of conversation.

  221. 221

    Yes indeed, I adore female beauty with rapture, and yet, believe me, if I turn to look after a fresh, laughing woman's face in the street, it is not the eternal Eve, not the seductive power of my opposite and my adversary, that has stopped me, but wonder and respect, perhaps envy too, that my fellow man, my fellow self, the human being made in the image of God, truly wishes, behold, to resemble God: she smiles, and rejoices to be alive.

  222. 222

    For as I walk the street, men come toward me from whose faces I can read neither joy nor God: their gaze, clouded, brooding on quarrels and plunder, in the fever of degrading work unwillingly performed, in unsatisfied lust, glances at me with suspicion — their faces slack and tired and worn and threadbare, from the World War, from revolution, from economic crisis.

  223. 223

    Ah well, replies Mr. Kovács, a man need not be beautiful; it is enough if he is muscular and strong — perhaps you have some morbid inclination, to expect beauty of men?

  224. 224

    Not I, Mr. Kovács, but women, imagine, women have just such a morbid inclination.

  225. 225

    And even if I do not expect beauty, I do expect human dignity to be reflected in their faces — and I swear to you that this human dignity, neither male nor female but human, resembles in its expression a smiling joy in life: and in this age I have found it, more than anywhere, on the faces of children and on the faces of women — it is to be seen there, alas, more truly, alas, only there — the face of the fresh and healthy woman, which the sour natural scientist can see only as a sexual magnet, a signboard of sexuality: in me it awakens the suspicion that it resembles, far more, the human face created in the image of God, than does, say, your own face, Mr. Kovács, reflecting deep thoughts and magnificent achievements — perhaps it is not even sexual attraction that draws me toward it, but that attraction with which sickness and unhappiness are drawn toward health and joy, independent of sex.

  226. 226

    My suspicion is confirmed by the fact, Mr. Kovács, that beautiful and healthy women please one another more than you please them — the striking phenomenon of our bourgeois society throughout Europe, the immoderate friendliness of women toward one another, their interest in one another, their mimicking of one another in fashion and custom, the cult of the woman friend, ought not to be regarded with the superior wave of the hand of the lordly male, or with the sly, lascivious wink of the sniffing old man — we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, Mr. Kovács, that women do not make friends with us, but with each other.

  227. 227

    But how can it be that the woman of our century is happier than the man of our century?

  228. 228

    Simply because her clever selfishness defeated man's stupid selfishness.

  229. 229

    Cast out from the species, on account of the denial of her self as our equal, exalted into a "consumer good of pleasure" and debased into the "center of love," she drew from this misunderstanding not the consequence disadvantageous to her, but the one advantageous to her.

  230. 230

    If I am a consumer good, said the woman to herself, then let me be a consumer good — and she took care not to betray the simple truth that Opula, the queen of the oihas, raises in the form of this question: how can something be a consumer good, that itself enjoys?

  231. 231

    But then you shall pay for this pleasure.

  232. 232

    Woman's physiological arrangement secured favorable advantages for her in this contract.

  233. 233

    And man, in his boundless selfishness, failed to notice the essential difference between the two capital consumer goods, woman and beefsteak: that the beefsteak does not bite back if I bite into it, but the woman bites back.

  234. 234

    And blinded by natural-scientific images, by bullfights, by the queen bee, by the rose-stem, he was willing to pay for love exactly as he paid for his daily bread — that is, by the eternal law of supply and demand, always exactly as much as he needed of it.

  235. 235

    If he did not need it very badly, a little; if he needed it at all costs, his life.

  236. 236

    He was willing to go along with the absurdity and stupidity that woman's love could have a different price and a different reward than man's love — that the man himself receives something other from the woman than what the woman receives from the man: and there appeared on the stage of life the Self-Respecting Woman, this sexual swindler, who was celebrated and admired at the very moment when men who swindled with their own sex were despised, held in contempt, and cast out.

  237. 237

    The true woman, meanwhile, who needs the man just as much as the man needs the woman, in her own interest, held her tongue wisely: she played the roles the two old men assigned her, the chocolate-box angel and the mustachioed sergeant-major, the jockey — the angel, and the devil too, the Spirit of the Earth, Original Sin.

  238. 238

    The last of these unwillingly — after all, it is not pleasant to be forever reviled while one is desired; luckily, strength was given to woman for this role by the compensation that, while her husband paid her the homage of calling her a devil and a bloodsucking vampire, her little son, with whom she came to an understanding without any contract at all, called her mother.

  239. 239

    And she looked on, musing, marveling, at how man played the fool, how he ruined his own chances, how he threw off every instrument of seduction from himself, how he decked the woman out with them instead — how a man will quarrel with the whole world to possess one woman, while a woman joins forces with everyone in the world to conquer one man.

  240. 240

    And in exchange for the peace and quiet she thereby obtained, in which the soul that rejoices in its own body, that beautifies and delights its own body, has leisure to develop, she willingly bore man's contempt, the male accusation that she is selfish and petty, and occupies herself only with the small joys of life — with just those things that man too would like to occupy himself with, had he but the leisure.

  241. 241

    Dear H. G. Wells, I shall not tax your patience much longer.

  242. 242

    The learned basic idea of your History of the World, that the human race is still living through its childhood years — that the strange, already superfluous, atavistic movements of our infant, even embryonic age, are still clearly recognizable in its habits, in its instincts — this thought, this intimation, has often comforted me too, showing as a passing ill what pessimism calls an eternal doom, an immortal fate.

  243. 243

    That the blood sacrifice, the practice of Totem and Taboo, still flourishes today in a hundred forms does not necessarily mean that these are eternal and unchangeable things, appurtenances of man's construction; it may mean, instead, that we still stand very close to that source we believe to be far off, out of which, mingled with much dross and refuse and amniotic fluid, the Form is unfolding that will afterward truly be lasting and constant and characteristic of man.

  244. 244

    Sliding along in time, as the future grows ever clearer, the past too grows ever clearer — whoever sees far into the future sees further into the past as well: the light of consciousness, as it strengthens, casts its glow both forward and back — this is why the man of today remembers his Stone Age ancestor better than the Roman citizen did, though the Roman stood nearer to him in time.

  245. 245

    The mounting disclosure of the past is decisive proof that we are advancing toward the future, that we are developing, that something is happening, that we are drawing near to some distant mountain ridge, from which we shall at last catch sight, all at once, of our cradle and our coffin together — from which we may take our bearings by eye and by heart and by reason.

  246. 246

    Until then we are guided by the compass of some obscure feeling, some peculiar balancing instinct, which always tells us: this is good, this is not good, this will make me feel well, this will make me feel ill, this points upward, toward life and awakening, this points downward, toward sleep and death.

  247. 247

    This instinct answers with a firm, resounding yes to the idea of love, and with a firm, resounding no to the fashionable slogan of the sex war.

  248. 248

    It may be that whoever wants peace must wage war — but that love and the sex war are not identical concepts is a thing the sorcerer of the "ancient and eternal sexual law" denies in vain.

  249. 249

    Perhaps this law is not so eternal as it is ancient.

  250. 250

    We see clearly neither the eternal nor the ancient part of it, but it is likely that man took on the shape of man and woman in order to arrive at the joy of life, at love — not because he could find no other means of multiplying.

  251. 251

    This much of the woman question belongs to the two of us, to men: the rest is already the concern of women, for it is now a man question.

  252. 252

    The formulation that the human being is either man or woman has, for man too, one great advantage and one great disadvantage.

  253. 253

    Its disadvantage is that man must give up something of his human pride; its advantage is that it gives him a means of coming to know himself from without, through woman's view of him.

  254. 254

    Woman does not much concern herself with the human being — but of man, of ourselves, she can give us such report, hand us such a picture of man as an object, the feminine genius at work upon him, as we shall never be able to compose of ourselves, just as no woman, only a man, has ever given a true picture of woman.

  255. 255

    But only if we are equal parties in love, if the one side does not declare war upon the other under the banner of sacro egoismo.

  256. 256

    In our declining century this war is being waged, with apparent success, by the woman who does not support the man but exploits him — but she is bound to lose it the moment man takes up the gauntlet thrown down before him, and takes up the fight with woman not in the sphere of the intellect and of economics, where woman does not fight, but on woman's own ground, in the art of seduction and falsehood, with weapons resembling her own.

  257. 257

    Only a revolution that openly lays bare our sexual wretchedness could make this ugly war avoidable.

  258. 258

    In this revolution it is the woman who must support the man: it is women who must raise the slogan of masculinism, of male emancipation, of the liberation of man.

  259. 259

    After the revolution of daily bread must come the revolution of daily happiness, of the daily kiss.

  260. 260

    Love is bondage, if one side rules over the other — and let every woman note this well: we men glorify love, and are enraptured by it, because we see in it the road that leads toward freedom — let every woman note well the immortal words of our own Petőfi:

  261. 261

    Freedom and love — these two I need.

  262. 262

    For my love I would sacrifice my life; for freedom I would sacrifice my love.

  263. 263

    I set two male figures before women, just as the Two Old Men set before us, before us men, the figures of the Chocolate-Box Angel and the Mustachioed Sergeant-Major, of Manon and of Nora: — Petruchio and Lohengrin.

  264. 264

    Which do you want?

  265. 265

    The cunning, clever fellow who fights for your conquest, against you, and with you, who, if need be, can be more cunning and more mad and more unpredictable and more of a liar than you yourselves, and who takes possession of you, rightly, because he will not abuse his power over you as you abuse yours — or the mysterious knight in the white cloak, who fought for his own honor with another man, who expects no other reward than that you should regard him as the reward — but who takes offense and walks away and leaves you standing, if you wound his delicate male pride.

  266. 266

    What do you want, then — love, or power?

  267. 267

    This is what I ask of the woman of our century — and you I greet warmly and with great respect, and I ask you to pass on my regards to your friends.

  268. 268

    Budapest, July 1925

  269. 269

    Sincerely yours, Frigyes Karinthy

  270. 270

    It affords me peculiar pleasure that the good fortune should once again have fallen to me of publishing, and presenting to the public, Gulliver's sixth and hitherto unknown travel journal.

  271. 271

    My excellent predecessor in the searching-out and preparation for the press of the Gulliver manuscripts and remains, Jonathan Swift, two hundred years ago brought four complete travel journals before the public, under the title Gulliver's Travels, drawn from the material of impressions gathered in Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the country of the Houyhnhnms.

  272. 272

    Some two years ago I succeeded in coming upon — in fragments only, unfortunately — a copy of the fifth original Gulliver manuscript, which I put together under the title Voyage to Faremido; the friends of this excellent traveler, and the admirers of his gentle, God-fearing ideas, will no doubt still remember that book, which, granted that it cannot be measured, on account of the slight importance of the geographical and ethnographic data it contains, against the immortal works of Stanley or Nansen, or even Vámbéry — is surely, by virtue of the pious and honest fidelity of its observations, and that ardent love of country which illuminates the whole, to be numbered among those works that any schoolmaster may confidently recommend for the instruction of youth, for the furthering of their knowledge, quite as much as for the nurturing of social fellow-feeling: such being the virtues to be found in every one of Gulliver's writings known to us thus far.

  273. 273

    The travel account that follows here, which treats of Capillária, that is, of the country of the female sex, setting aside the landscape descriptions it contains, and, though modest in its pretensions, its faithful and reliable topographical and natural-historical observations — is distinguished chiefly by that warm and pure love which makes it a work that cannot be recommended highly enough to all those who seek not hair-raising and gaudy fantasy, but sincerity and simplicity, with which our author praises the idyllic beauty of family life, the happy joys of the relation between man and woman, and all those wisely established human and divine laws which, in the society as it stands, make it possible for man and woman to live together in noble harmony, for the development and prosperity of the glorious human race.

  274. 274

    Frigyes Karinthy

The particulars

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Utazás Faremidóba / Capillária, Frigyes Karinthy. Capillária.
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Public-domain Hungarian (Karinthy, d. 1938; published 1916 and 1921). English translation © 2026 1732 Studios, LLC.
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Two whoopie pies and a pine. An inside joke.