Author: Tygodnik Powszechny. Source: Tygodnik Powszechny, No. 47 (2785). Date of publication: 24 November 2002.

Ryszard Kapuściński: I have a meeting with readers in Poznań. I speak about the contemporary world. After the meeting two people come up to me. It was interesting, they say, but in our opinion too pessimistic. And it does not help — the author of Heban writes — to explain that what I was saying was, compared with the reality of our planet, supremely optimistic, that I was looking for light colours and warm tones… People do not want truth; they seek consolation, they need encouragement. Also because any collision with the hard realities of the world immediately creates an ethical problem — it demands an active attitude, calls for a response, and the sense of helplessness that arises in such a situation is humiliating. Better, then, not to know.

Only a small group of people tries to encompass the entire planet in thought — we read elsewhere. The process of globalisation concerns the external world, fields such as communications or trade, but it has not yet reached our imagination. In reality the vast majority of us think about the nearest and most limited place; we think locally. Our planet is too large, the spaces enormous, the roads endless, and everywhere full of strangers with whom it is difficult to communicate and who, at bottom, matter little to us.

Kapuściński’s writing is certainly a lesson in the globalisation of imagination; though, by a paradox, it has its roots in locality and province. I come from Polesie, which was the poorest part of Poland and perhaps of Europe… Pinsk lay on the periphery… Perhaps that is why the peripheries of the world still draw me. The climate of the peripheries, the time that passes there slowly, torpidly, the lazy and drowsy atmosphere, the empty little streets, the motionless faces looking out through small windows, through half-drawn curtains. I remember the dead Bernardyńska Street and the black silhouette of a rabbi suddenly appearing on it. He walks hurriedly, looking around nervously, as though he has realised he has wandered into the wrong world and must quickly return to nothingness.

An impression from journeys to various countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the presence and influence of Europe on our planet are shrinking ever more…. The traces of its dominance on other continents are slowly vanishing, and Europe itself is closing in behind its own walls, governed by people of narrow horizons. It is also moving further and further away from America, with its self-assured practicality. Another feature of the contemporary world is the divorce between the circles of thinkers and reflectors and the institutions of power and the practices of politics. On one side the symbolic campus; on the other a clan of demagogues and opportunists, shaken ever more frequently by corruption scandals. For the democratic principle of civil equality and equal rights for all, reduced to caricature, can create a climate favourable to corruption. We are threatened — for the thing is not confined to the Philippines, Indonesia, or Taiwan — by the criminalisation of the political world.

These cheerless diagnoses are accompanied by a growing sense of estrangement. And it arises not only from following the processes unfolding across vast expanses of the globe. Also through observations made in Konstancin near Warsaw, where Kapuściński discerns symptoms of development along Latin American lines — enclave development, pseudo-progress that entrenches structural inequality. And this bitter note: Honour, dignity, honesty, conscience, truthfulness — when did I last hear those words spoken in my country in some ordinary, everyday conversation?

Indeed — in Lapidarium we will not find easy comfort. But is that what we should be looking for?

(Czytelnik, Warsaw 2002, p. 128.)

source: kapuscinski.info