Author: Ryszard Kapuściński. Source: Czytelnik Publishers, 7 November 2002, 17:30. Date of publication: 7 November 2002.

How Is a Lapidarium Written?

Speech by Ryszard Kapuściński at the launch of Lapidarium V Czytelnik Publishers, 7 November 2002, 17:30

I began writing the Lapidaria in the following circumstances. When martial law was declared in December 1981, I was working at the weekly Kultura. The weekly was closed, and all of us who worked there — because we belonged to Solidarity — were dismissed, cast out of the profession. As a result I had no occupation, and I asked myself: what is there to write about here, what is there to do? I turned first to my notes from earlier journeys, which is why the first volume of Lapidarium begins with sequences, fragments from my stays in Latin America. But I then moved away from that — from the idea that it should consist purely of reportorial notes — and began writing observations prompted by our Polish reality in those periods, and also everything that related to art, literature, sociology, and the other social sciences.

At a certain point I realised that it is impossible today to write any synthetic book about the world. This arises from the fact that we live in a world of mad, radical, and thoroughgoing transformations, which are moreover taking place with enormous speed. And consequently the attempt to construct some unified synthesis is simply impossible. We cannot grasp this world as a whole. We cannot, because our consciousness was not built for a global world. Our imagination was shaped over tens of thousands of years of our ancestors’ lives — over hundreds and hundreds of generations. Our imagination was shaped to a small scale. Archaeological discoveries indicate that the earliest human communes formed in groups of thirty to fifty people. A group could not be larger, because it could not feed itself; nor could it be smaller, because it could not defend itself. And it was in groups of roughly that size, in that kind of world, that our imagination was shaped. All of this has lasted hundreds, thousands of years.

And then suddenly, in the twentieth century — especially in its second half — an enormous electronic revolution takes place, an enormous revolution in communications, which turns the order of the world upside down for us. Thanks to this electronic revolution, the two pillars on which our imagination rested are demolished. One pillar was the barrier of time; the other — the barrier of space. And thanks to this electronic advance, these two barriers have been overthrown. Time has ceased to exist; space has ceased to exist. In our global world we can connect with any place in any second. And our imagination is not accustomed to this. Our imagination cannot function in such a world. So the human mind employs two tactics, two strategies. One is the strategy of attempting, nonetheless, to encompass this world. There exists in the world a certain class of people — growing but still small — who try to think globally. This is a new type, a new formula of thinking, a new way of defining the world. The second tactic of the human mind is the attempt to switch off — to hide in corners and niches, to hide in small communities, to hide in the circle of family, of acquaintances, to hide in the circle of one’s city or town, to hide in the circle of one’s profession. Not to see that other world. This is our rescue from admitting that we were shaped for a different era.

As far as writing is concerned, the initial rescue, the initial attempt to relate to this world, comes through the technique of the fragment — the attempt to describe the world by describing fragments of it. An admission that it cannot be described in its entirety, but that one must try to do what one can and as much as one can. This lies at the foundation of these successive volumes of Lapidaria. It is this seeing of the world through the prism of fragments — selecting a fragment that is often accidental, but that cannot tell everything. Here we find a quotation from someone, there we find a reflection, here we quote someone’s remark, some thought that came to us in passing. And from these we build the skeleton that we call a lapidarium.

For the word lapidarium means precisely — fragment. In all the great museums of the world, in the collections from various epochs including antiquity, there is usually a courtyard where all the remnants, fragments of ancient sculptures and reliefs — ancient works in stone that are no longer whole — are laid out. A fragment of an arm from some sculpture, a fragment of a torso, a head. On one hand we cannot display them in the museum halls, because this is not what we would wish to exhibit; on the other hand it would be a pity to discard them, a pity for them to disappear somewhere. These places are called lapidaria in museum parlance.

Lapidaria are precisely such fragments of thoughts and reflections out of which it was impossible to sculpt a complete figure. But they are fragments of the search for some idea, some thought — and sometimes we do not even know the search for what.

There are a great many quotations in them. I believe that in the contemporary world the quotation is a very important literary genre. And this arises from the fact that today there is an enormous production of the printed word. There are ever more books, ever more people writing books, ever more publishers publishing books. This flooding with books is a great affliction.

It is said that radio or television will finish off literature. No! If anything will finish off literature, literature will finish itself off. It will grow to such proportions that no one will be able to follow it, no one will be able to select from it, no one will be able to say what within it is good and what is bad. In these conditions of enormous abundance, the fragment, the quotation, acquires enormous significance. Because if we take some book of the usual four hundred pages, suddenly at some point, on some page, a brilliant sentence appears — a flash, an inconceivably illuminating fragment. But those four hundred pages killed that fragment. If, however, we extract it, if we illuminate it and give it new life, that fragment will help us enormously to define, to understand the world. And therefore whoever dedicated himself to reading those four hundred pages and to extracting that sentence performed a creative act — because otherwise that sentence would perish or go unnoticed in those torrents of words. And this is why the role of the quotation in this flood of words acquires enormous significance. And this is why I gladly make use of the quotation.

This is how Lapidaria are written. They are first written in A4 notebooks, then transcribed and recopied. Then cut into fragments, and then those fragments glued together. Then read once more and selected. It is a great process of selection, because what appears in the book is roughly one quarter of what I have written down. This process of selection is very continuous. And since Lapidaria appear in many countries and many languages, a further selection takes place there: translators choose what is most important in the book for them, and substantial selections of the Lapidaria appear in print in those places.

In this way an eternal selection of these fragments takes place, an eternal choosing of them. And therefore in the end, ultimately, only a few fragments will remain from this whole ocean that already exists now.

Ryszard Kapuściński

source: kapuscinski.info