One should write of Transylvania as one would write of a heavy fragrant wine of the Tokaj variety, slumbering in century-old casks in the depths of a long-forgotten cellar. One should write of Transylvania in terms that are impossible to express. How to describe frost's slow conquest of the damp earth? How to describe the command, the sign from above, the touch of light that turns the heads of ten million sunflowers at one time? Garcia Lorca dreams of the music of sap rising in the dark silence of tree trunks. This is what we should write of. Nothing else. The sleepy gaze of a buffalo lurching and rolling under its yoke. Transylvania could best be described not with prose but with song: by wordless song, as intoned by our prehistoric forebears outside their caves, in lamentations for their dead. Their bodies rocked and their eyes were blurred with tears as they fixed their gaze on the star-powdered sky, on the constancy of the Moon and the Milky Way. One should write of Transylvania as someone sings, who, having mastered all there is to know of their art, casts aside all convention. With no regard for technique, audience, taste or rules, their cries are as those who are flayed, their bodies thrown open before us. Transylvania is more than its hills and valleys, more than Hungarian cities such as Kolozsvár and Saxon cities such as Nagyszeben. It is Europe in miniature. The Earth in miniature. The World. Both the enchanted Garden of the Fairies and Hell itself. It is the past, poetry and the ever uncertain future. A desire never to be fulfilled. A reverie. Transylvania is our mother, our love; the lover we spurn, to woo again. It is our childhood and our history. Transylvania is ours: it cannot be taken from us, for as soon as it is no longer ours it ceases to be what it truly is, and we cease to be ourselves.