Writing poetry began spontaneously, with no dreams or expectations. I wrote poems, but all of them very bad. I was under the influence of Mayakovsky at the time, but managed to imitate only his “staircases.” The poems were most often occasional ones, and it was precisely they that introduced me to journalism, even during my school days. When the editorial office of Sztandar Młodych was being established, I was offered work. I said I had to take my school-leaving examinations; they waited for me. Literally the day after passing all the exams I began working in the editorial office. That I became a journalist I owe to poetry — not the best, but mine. What I dreamed of was to play for the Polish national team in goal.

I

I was born in Polesie. I am, in general, a rootless man. From my home town, Pinsk, I began my wandering. As a child I wandered throughout the whole war. We were constantly fleeing: first from Pinsk to the German side, and then from the Germans. I began my wandering at the age of seven, and I have been wandering to this day.

People used to ask me often — and it still happens — whether I intend to emigrate. And I answer: I have already emigrated. My home is elsewhere, in another country. I must travel, I must go. When I have stayed somewhere for a while, not necessarily in Poland, anywhere at all, I begin to get bored, I begin to feel ill, I must go on. I am terribly curious about the world. I have always regretted that I have not yet been here or there.

A reporter’s curiosity about the world is a matter of character. There are people to whom the world is of no interest at all. They regard their own world as the whole world. And that too deserves respect. Confucius said that the best way to know the world is without leaving one’s home. There is some truth in that. Travel through space is not absolutely necessary. One can travel into the depths of one’s own soul. The concept of travel is very elastic and varied.

There are, however, people who must come to know the world in all its diversity — that is part of their nature. Such people are not many.

There are different kinds of travel. Most people — statistics say as many as ninety-five per cent — travel in order to rest. They want to stay in luxury hotels on the edge of a beach and eat well. Whether it will be the Canary Islands or Fiji is of secondary importance to them. Young people enjoy adventure travel — they undertake attempts to cross Africa from north to south, or to paddle the Danube by kayak. They are not interested in the people they meet along the way; their aim is self-testing and the satisfaction of overcoming difficulties. Some travels arise from the nature of one’s work or from necessity — the movements of airline pilots and refugees are also a peculiar form of travel. For me the most valuable are reportorial, ethnographic, and anthropological travels whose aim is better understanding of the world, of history, of the changes that are taking place, and then sharing the knowledge gained. They require concentration and attention, but they enable me to understand the world and the laws governing it better.

The better one knows the world, the more the sense of its unknown-ness grows within us, and the conviction of its enormity — not spatial enormity, but the richness of culture, so immense that it cannot be catalogued. In the time of James Frazer, when he was writing The Golden Bough, when many nineteenth-century anthropologists thought there was a definite number of tribes and nations in the world, an attempt to classify or describe them was still feasible. Today we are aware that the cultural diversity of the world is infinite in its vastness, in its richness. I think that after more than forty-five years of fairly intensive world travel, I in fact do not know the world, though I know it far better than those who have travelled little.

My principal ambition is to show Europeans that our mentality is very Eurocentric, that Europe — or rather part of it — is not the only one in the world. That Europe is surrounded by an immense and constantly growing diversity of cultures, societies, religions, and civilisations. Life on a planet in which there are ever more mutual connections requires this awareness and adaptation to radically new global conditions.

In the case of a reporting journey there is no question of any tourism. A reporting journey demands hard work and great theoretical preparation. Acquiring knowledge of the area to which one is going. Such a journey knows no relaxation. It proceeds in full concentration, full focus. We must be aware that the place we have reached may be given to us only once in a lifetime. We will never return here, and we have an hour to come to know it. In an hour we must see everything, remember everything, hear everything, fix the mood, the situation, the atmosphere.

A reporter’s journey round the world, if one travels beyond the circle of Europe and the USA, is a difficult journey, at times killing, because the world is poorly organised in terms of communications. The reporter faces an enormous logistical, physical, and intellectual effort. Reporting travel exhausts and wears one out. On my last journey to Africa I lost ten kilograms. On my last journey to Asia, six kilos. If someone learns that a reporter was in Congo and says: “Oh, I was there too and visited” — they are speaking of two entirely different things. It is a completely different type of experience and perception of the world. That is why reporting travel requires a certain emotional surplus — it requires passion. Apart from passion there is no other reason to do it. Hence the number of people practising serious reportage on a global scale is small. Yet many are those who, after a certain time, say: enough, withdraw, do something else. Of the group of reporters who were travelling the world in the 1960s, I alone remain. The others are directors of television networks, radio stations, editors-in-chief of publishing houses and newspapers. They are now settled people. There is no point in reproaching this; such is the specific character of this profession. It can be compared to the profession of test pilot: one practises it only up to a certain point. (…)

source: kapuscinski.info