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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nick Hunt
Read between
June 9 - July 15, 2022
The simplicity of walking – the essential humanness of putting one foot in front of the other – made a deep kind of sense. The more I thought about taking that first step, and following it with another, and another, the more fundamental it felt.
Same Nick same.
‘A honk means just a cosy place.
The trick, as I would come to discover, was to ignore the destination and fill my mind with the journey – if I was in a hurry I wouldn’t have been walking in the first place – but this lesson would be weeks in coming.
Sort of good advice for life no?
an ugly map promises an ugly landscape.
understood that the delight of walking lay in the accidental finding of things, letting small wonders reveal themselves shyly, at the speed of travel. Research only spoiled the mystery of what lay around the corner.
Sleeping out produced a sense of enhanced connection with the land, a feeling almost akin to ownership: the paradoxical entitlement of the rough sleeper, whose lack of rights somehow grants him a greater right than anyone else.
Sometimes all you can do with loss is walk, and carry it with you.
Proof of EU residency got me free ultrasound therapy and even a course of acupuncture; the doctor went further, fixing me up with an ankle support and orthopaedic soles. I praised European integration.
Perhaps all adventures are like this: flirting with the wilderness but knowing we can’t truly enter it, wanting to lose ourselves in imaginary realms like we once did in childhood stories, in the part-remembered, part-confabulated landscapes of Paddy’s books, but being afraid to go too far in, so far we might not come back.
but essentially man-made. Ahead lay the first of the
Ybbs-Persenbeug Donaukraftwerk,
Been there . . .
Another mighty wind heaved me to Vienna. I crossed the bridge to the Donauinsel, a narrow island penetrating the city like a splinter; towers, bridges, radio masts, steeples, smokestacks and skyscrapers threw themselves up on either side as if I was watching fast-forwarded footage of urban growth. Flyovers and railway lines whooshed past, speeding towards some calamitous convergence. Graffiti in a mix of languages read ‘Vote Communist’, ‘Juden Schwein’, ‘All Coppers Are Bastards’, and then the city’s core unfolded into façaded squares, boulevards, tramlines, pitted fin-desiècle buildings
...more
Ah home sweet home.
Below Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, old-fashioned cabbies with bowler hats queued in a line of carriages while
Again the descriptors of a city that's become home.
horses with pointed ear guards scuffed their hooves on the cobbles.
Vienna was close to a halfway point between Rotterdam and Istanbul, a pivot on which so much turned, and a place of such natural convergence it felt inevitable we should meet here.
rented a shabby, delightful apartment on the eastern bank of the Donaukanal, on a street called Große Schiffgasse.
Literally blocks from me.
We slept in the incongruous setting of a guesthouse above a pirate-themed pizzeria, and in the morning the bus arrived to carry Anna to the airport.
Seen the pizzeria
I listened to the unfamiliar hubbub of Slavic, the treacly sounds full of sloops and chushes, inkys and ankas,
the letter c pronounced ts like the clash of cymbals.
The only thing everyone agreed on was a mutual hatred of Gypsies.
the Váh, a tributary of the Danube. ‘It’s the longest river in Slovakia.
‘In the flatlands each wave of colonisation displaces the one before. Only in the mountains do cultures hold.’
the effortless familiarity of men who had known each other their whole lives, who had been to school together, worked together, been to each other’s weddings, had fights and made up again, and drunk together every morning and night, and probably in between as well. These bonds were tribal, knitted so tight they couldn’t easily be picked apart;
verdigris
Szentendre.
without awareness of the transition I found myself in the city’s dirty heart, surrounded by the clatter and hum of millions of strangers self-absorbedly going about their daily routines, living
out unknown lives behind countless windows.
artist colony behind Kerepesi Street.
Dynasties of sculptors had lived there, the studios handed down from one generation to the next.
Memento Park,
SRLY, the ramshackle café on Király Street
‘csókolom’, ‘I kiss’, which Paddy had heard in Transylvania. It derived from the antiquated ‘I kiss your hand’, a throwback to feudal courtesy –
‘Gyalog,’ I said, ‘on foot’, a word I remembered because it sounded a bit like ‘dialogue’.
‘Lány?’ he enquired, ‘girl?’
Magyar vocabulary, which consisted mostly of geographical features: falu, ‘village’, erdő, ‘forest’, hegy, ‘hill’.
during the night a wind blew up; my dreams were of flash floods sweeping my tent away.
A Dacia, Romania’s national car, slowed to offer me a lift.
myths said their warriors underwent the ritual of lycanthropy
Once again, my preconceptions spun around in the air and fluttered down to land in different places.
No capitalist government wants its people to be self-sufficient – self-sufficient people don’t go shopping. They are trying to make us dependent, to take away our freedom, so we can be controlled.’
This mythologised affinity with suppressed ancient cultures spoke of a similar yearning for a long-lost age of greater freedoms, unbounded by rules, that bubbled under Europe’s surface like a buried river.
I became aware of a rattling rhythm sounding from somewhere above – at first I thought it was a woodpecker – a complicated paradiddle punctuated at intervals by the clang of a bell. A black-robed priest was drumming on a suspended plank with a pair of wooden sticks; this was the toacă, played every day from now until Easter. We sat and listened, sipping the sweet, achingly cold spring water, as the rhythm grew in speed and complexity, culminating in a frenzy of tapping before rather bathetically fading away. That
rhizomatic
his resting place was surrounded by lichened columns and vaulted with trees like a chlorophyll cathedral.
‘Hristos a înviat.’ ‘Adevărat a înviat.’
‘Christ is risen.’ ‘Truly he is risen.’
We passed Turda’s old concrete factory, closed in the 1990s. ‘It was so polluted here,’ Radu said. ‘The air was poisonous. Now the factory’s closed and the birds have come back. There’s good and bad in everything. Now we have no jobs, but we do have birds.’
Twenty-four hours would spin themselves into a lifetime, and thin mountain air, sharpened faculties, the piling-up of detail and a kaleidoscope of scene-changes seemed to turn the concatenation into a kind of eternity.
a settlement of terracotta rooftops slumped in somnolent calm, bright and lazy under the sun, its gardens loud with blossom.
moribund,
