CHAPTER 5
Mastery
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
—W. H. Auden
One summer morning in 1944, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, age ten, stood on a train platform in Budapest, Hungary, with his mother, two brothers, and about seventy relatives who’d come to see them off. World War II was raging, and Hungary, an ambivalent member of the Axis, was being squeezed from every political and geographic corner. Nazi soldiers were occupying the country in retaliation for Hungary’s secret peace negotiations with the United States and Great Britain. Meanwhile, Soviet troops were advancing on the capital city.
It was time to leave. So the foursome boarded a train for Venice, Italy, where Csikszentmihalyi’s father, a diplomat, was working. As the train rumbled southwest, bombs exploded in the distance. Bullets ripped through the train’s windows, while a rifle-toting soldier on board fired back at the attackers.
The ten-year-old crouched under his seat, terrified but also a little annoyed.
“It struck meat that point that grownups had really no idea how to live Csikszentmihalyi told me some sixty-five years later.
His train would turnout to be the last to cross the Danube River for many years. Shortly after its departure, airstrikes destroyed Hungary’s major bridges. The Csikszentmihalyis were well educated and well connected, but the war flattened their lives. Of the relatives on the train platform that morning,
more than half would be dead five months later. One of Csikszentmihalyi’s brothers spent six years doing hard labor in the Ural Mountains. Another was killed fighting the Soviets.
“The whole experience got me thinking Csikszentmihalyi said, recalling his ten-year-old self. There has got to be abetter way to live than this.”
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