Speak Easy

This volume of the Hamvas Béla small library contains a previously unknown work by Hamvas Béla, which is now being published in its entirety for the first time. In the series of so-called "speak easy studies" that began in 1946 with his essay entitled The Philosophy of Wine, Hamvas developed four more essays with a similar tone from the spring to the end of autumn 1947. In his working notes, Hamvas Béla named the collection of these four essays Speak easy after the "English and American snack and drinking places". Although in his formulation, which is interwoven with a special irony, "speak easy" as a "superessay" was specifically created as a counter-genre to the "arrogant worldview study", the additional thing that connects the essays, in addition to their common tone and regardless of their subject matter, is the requirement of the "esprit de vigilance - the spirit of vigilance" in the concrete and direct human situations of the present day. In these writings with a special spirit, however, Béla Hamvas continued to experiment with that voice, in his own words: that "sky-blue Tao", which had been intensely preoccupying him since his "Balbérligetkönyv period", and he attempted to give final form to those linguistic formulas within the framework of which he could create the "absolute reading that man always thirsts for". In Béla Hamvas' oeuvre, Speak easy - according to the author's intention: as an independent collection of essays! - has remained undiscovered and unpublished until now, two writings from it have appeared in print, torn out of the entire volume. With this edition, for the first time, the writings have the opportunity to find their place in the oeuvre in their original context.