Péter Nádas: All my life I wanted to finally die, and these two bastard doctors are bringing me back

According to his own admission, the writer, who died once, disenchants death with irony and makes death palpable with serious sentences in our podcast.

A 24.hu is a Hungarian Hospice Foundation his new podcast series, Nothing to say, openly talks about the end of life, death, and grief. Well-known people, civilians, end-of-life specialists (doctors, psychologists, nurses) share their experiences and feelings, and we also bring stories from the world of children’s and adult hospice.

It’s hard to find words for the loss. We alienate death, and thus we cannot resolve our fears, properly process our own and others’ passing away – even though everyone has been or will be affected. Instead of silence in this series Balázs Simonyi the Hungarian voice of the theme.

“From the moment I was born, I began to pass away. And at the moment when I pass away, the experience that my consciousness brings to help me, the greatest help, is that it shows my birth.”

“He was born in 1942 in Budapest, lives in Gombosszeg.” This phrase has been used consistently for four decades Péter Nádas on the covers of his books. We talked there and continued a week later because we had more to talk about death. And so much more! Especially with a person who has already died once. And who is available for death – who is always ready to march.

This is how it turned out to be a two-part interview, the second half of which you can listen to in two weeks There’s no word first season.

In this podcast, Péter Nádas walks and dances around touching on a number of topics, disenchanting them with enough irony and making them palpable with serious sentences. He recalls firsthand the figure of Alaine Polcz, the Hungarian hospice founder, her innovations, her “realizations”, her unparalleled spiritual knowledge and intuitive ability, which could have made her a holy monk of her profession, or, in Nádas’s words, “she was close to the sanctity of life, at a crossroads”, but she still preferred her husband, Miklós Mészöly decided on.

The writer talks about his first encounters with death, which for him is a phenomenon of life. About the symbiosis of death and birth, the fear of existence and his positive death experience following his heart attack in 1993, during which he died “not special, exceptional, but typical”. About learning to live again and learning to die. About the relationship between doctors and death, medical knowledge, ignorance, maintenance. About the responsibility of the dying.

About the suicidal urge and the act itself as a way of dealing with life. And about the parallel connection that work and writing represent on the axis of life and death. As he says: “I could neither kill myself nor die, I had to work”.

It will be about his view, which goes against the prevailing opinion, as to why it is good to be alone at the hour of death. About the value of suffering, about the angelic gaze on the threshold of death. About the image of God and the universe. On the objectification and abstraction of death. About funeral rites, about the practicality of things to do around death. About how Alaine Polcz died, who had dealt with death all her life.

In a word, about one’s own death and one’s own deadness. About what he says, “something very interesting is starting, something fantastic is happening, that’s actually what we should be talking about.” Let’s talk then!

Actress Móni Balsai participates in the broadcast.

“When we moved here, we found that a pre-Christian state, a kind of pagan rite, was preserved in Gombosszeg. Confrontation with passing and loss, but without any tragic aftertaste. Neutrality. An event of nature like anything else.”

It was presented this week My own forest The film is narrated by Péter Nádas’ broad, personal monologue Mór György Karpáti his contemplative nature film, which thus becomes an artist portrait at the same time. It was published recently Csaba Károlyi also a volume of interviews with the writer with a polyphonic structure, its title A whole year.

The Petőfi Literary Museum also has two temporary exhibitions until October. One of them The scandal of existencewhich seeks answers to life’s tragic basic puzzle Péter Hajnóczy and Péter Nádas’s writings, through their careers. In the next room, we can browse the life path and wide-ranging professional activities of Nádas’s former Kisorosi plot neighbor, Alaine Polcz, who was born 100 years ago. At the center of the exhibition is the presentation of the World Game method, the introduction and further development of which in Hungary was one of the most important achievements of Alaine Polcz, in addition to the founding of the hospice in Hungary, her psychological work in pediatric oncology and her writing.