The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.

-Ernest Renan, “What is a nation”

Can we draw inspiration from this? We are heading to Romania and Hungary, to drink and study ţuică and pálinka, spirits which though different in the eyes of Hungarians and Romanians are all but indistinguishable from the perspective of outsiders and chemists.

This shared love is of course not enough to define  a nation in any geopolitical sense, particularly across languages and borders that remain controversial. These are two very different countries, with very different histories, and the things they have forgotten are correspondingly varied, perhaps even mirror-images of one another.

But we are seeking the borderless nation of brandy-drinkers and brandy-makers, people who do have these spirits in common, and who perhaps have all forgotten a bit of last night, or their own pain, or, for a few hours, the fact that friends and lovers and beautiful moments are all as transient as the perfect shape of a September plum.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under hungary, plum crazy book, romania, travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.