Trees

"Béla Hamvas was one of the most significant and distinctive thinkers and novelists of the twentieth century. he was thoroughly versed in intellectual traditions both within and without Europe, and in seeking the common ground between cultures located very far from one another in both time and space he strove to encompass the entire range of intellectual concerns. (...)
The opening essay in this collection provides a fine introduction to the world of this Hungarian essayist. Hamvas Writes about trees and as he does so, he is able, with an astonishing lightness of touch, to access meditative depths and eschatalogical truths. We read about trees and as we do so, we discover, almost unawares, vital truths about the feelings, the desires, the passions and the demons which form the very stuff of our lives and relationships. We are led to a better understanding of the troughs and peaks of love, of the giving of oneself and the yearnings of the self, of bonds and the breaking of bonds - and, at the same time, of the centrality to these of all-assuaging liberty.
An essay such as this can have issued from the pen of only the greatest of writers, one able to distil the phenomena of the world into the simplest of facts. That is to say, from one of the few who can mould the essay form into an organic fusion of philosophy and of poetry of the highest order." (Zoltán Danyi)