"A dialogue of chroniclers" — a review of "Travels with Herodotus"

Author: MAREK KUSIBA source: www.dziennik.com date: 2004-12-03 ——————————————————————–

“Reading Herodotus, I gradually found in him a kindred spirit. What set him in motion? What made him act? What made him take on the hardships of travel, risk one expedition after another? I think it was curiosity about the world. The desire to be there, at any price to see that, at all costs to live that through.”

Ryszard Kapuściński’s new book, carefully produced by Znak of Cracow, is one of the most important and most magnificent books in this author’s rich output. It disquiets and it fascinates. It is mysterious and extraordinary. It plays out on many planes, as every great literary work does. The author boldly reaches twenty-five centuries back into history in order to establish cruel truths about human nature and the order of the world. The book can frighten with its pitiless diagnosis. It was written independently of circumstances, but it “hit” perfectly the freshly kindled conflict of barbarism with democracy — as Herodotus might have put it — or the conflict of a civilisation of humiliation with a civilisation of exaltation, as Kapuściński might. It is at the same time an exceptionally personal book, movingly intimate, beautiful in the sincerity and courage of a writer recounting his own history and his fascinations to an accomplice and friend from two and a half thousand years ago. He wrote: “By now it was my Herodotus, and being mine — particularly close to me, one with whom I shared a language and could understand each other in half a word.”

Kapuściński sees himself in Herodotus as in a mirror. He measures his boyhood desires against the dreams of the young chronicler from Halicarnassus. He sets the experiences of what is probably the last reporter in the world of that kind — the solitary wanderer — beside the discoveries of the first. The master of reportage, without doubt the greatest contemporary reporter, reaches for the first chronicler of the ancient world, and also the first reporter in history, to help him dig out of human nature an answer to the question of what made and still makes a human being, a rational creature, drive the flywheel of history by means of cruelty, war and crime. After all, he has gathered in his arsenal so many beautiful gilded wheels of kindness, art and culture, which he abandons the moment he dreams of dominion over the world. He rises, goes to a soothsayer, listens to the prophecy, asks his gods for favour, and drives millions to slaughter, impales thousands, all the while explaining to himself that destiny cannot be escaped.

Herodotus and Kapuściński seem to agree in their findings, as alike as twins; their analyses, accounts and syntheses, separated by the darkness of thousands of wars and massacres, differ only in technical detail: Kapuściński visited more countries and saw more wars and conflicts with his own eyes. But their method of obtaining information, their instruments and their way of storing it are the same. The instruments of both are their own legs, eyes and ears. Both walk, roam, ramble, wander. They like to be in the field, in the city, in the desert — in person. Herodotus, in Kapuściński’s account, is “a restless, preoccupied, tireless nomad, full of plans, ideas, hypotheses. Constantly travelling. Even when he is at home (but where is his home?), he has either just come back from an expedition or is already preparing for the next. Travel as effort and enquiry, as an attempt to know everything — life, the world, oneself.”

Kapuściński, too, is constantly travelling, and he too “carries a map of the world in his thoughts”, except that he does not change and supplement it but tries to keep up with its changes. The passion and the mission of both is “to go, to travel, to find out and at once to broadcast it to the world”. Both are possessed by “a craving, a mania, an obsession with knowing”, both endowed with “reason and a talent for writing”. Both come to know “their worlds” with “the eagerness and delight of a child”. Herodotus’s most important discovery, five hundred years before Christ, was that there are many worlds. “And that each is different. Each important.” Kapuściński made the same discovery when he travelled for the first time to India, and then to China, from Gomułka’s Poland. Already in Rome he had an illumination — that the Other, so hated by the propaganda, is nonetheless so very close. Even if, in the café, they noticed a certain misfit in him, that he had come from behind the Iron Curtain after all.

Both have phenomenal memories. In Herodotus’s day history was transmitted orally. The chronicler must have had a prodigious memory to sit down for several years at the end of his life and set down, from his head, what was in effect the history of his own lifetime. Today we would call it participant reporting. Kapuściński does much the same all his life. He remembers. And then he writes down from memory. He notes only the more difficult place names and surnames. He goes in person to the places and the people he will write about. He writes when the subject has ripened in him like a citrus fruit in the southern sun. Before he begins to write he reads everything written on the subject. In this way he reproduces and develops the method of Herodotus, who could not read, because there were no books. He could only listen and remember. Kapuściński talks and reads; hundreds of books take the place of the thousands of evenings by the fire that Herodotus spent listening to stories.

He travels, of course. He sets out along the route of his twin and guide. He is in the places Herodotus visited. He has the Histories in his travelling bag. It turns out, though, that he had Herodotus’s Histories with him on his first expeditions to Asia and Africa, and on most of his reporting journeys. I am almost tempted to ask the writer the thing that most imposes itself in the course of this reading: whether his whole body of work, all his expeditions and pilgrimages to more than a hundred countries — that is, his one long, great book — did not have at its origins the idea of taking on the enormous design and effort of “adding” to Herodotus the contemporary history of the world? If not of the whole world, since that is impossible, then of the world of people like those who lived in the times Herodotus knew: people poor and forgotten, humiliated and driven to war with whips, ruled by the Stalins, Hitlers and Amins of their day.

Herodotus — “a visionary of the world, a creator able to think on a planetary scale”, “the first globalist”, as he is called by a writer kindred to him but two and a half thousand years younger — is concerned in his work with exactly the same matters that concern Ryszard Kapuściński throughout his own. The zeal of both these writer-chroniclers, historians, explainers, analysts and commentators of their times can be summed up in Herodotus’s opening sentence, in which he explains why the Histories came into being: “Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents the results of his enquiries, so that neither the deeds of humankind should fade from memory with time, nor the great and admirable works accomplished by Greeks or by barbarians pass without echo — and, among other things, explaining in particular why they fought one another.”

What might a meeting between these two men look like? Kapuściński: “I imagined him coming while I was at the seashore, setting aside his staff, shaking the sand out of his sandals and beginning the conversation at once.” Herodotus sits down and asks: “Well then, old friend, you have read my Histories, you have written your books, in which you ask similar questions, you have knowledge of all the wars that came after me, including two world wars — so answer me: why did they fight one another, and why do they go on fighting?” Kapuściński meets Herodotus’s question with the only answer possible in the situation: “Why do you ask, since you answered that question yourself long ago?” A young Greek woman comes over to the table, refills the wine and asks in broken English whether they know that while they drink and eat, in Ukraine the world of democracy is once again grappling with the world of barbarism, the East is measuring itself against the West, and in Iraq, that is in the old Persia, they have freed a kidnapped Polish woman.

That conversation and this book by the author of The Emperor should be a lesson in humility for every journalist. Herodotus and Kapuściński are the best teachers. Both are constantly crossing borders, looking for what lies beyond the border built of prejudice, coming to know new cultures, teaching acceptance of the Other, describing their craft, their entry into a journey, their delight at the fact of coming to know. What concerns them most is the fate of the individual caught in the coils and nets of a world imposed on him. Both are poets of fact, both are enchanted by beautiful views and works of art, and both describe beauty and ugliness with equal curiosity. What matters to them is knowing, not judging or ranking. And then there is that fascinating breaking through into the world of the word, the overcoming of the borders of meaning. The author of Nobody Leaves: Impressions of Poland gives a capital lesson in persistence and in some extraordinary absorption in learning English; he shows the struggle through the bush of meanings, and teaches what delight in a book can be. What dominates his whole body of work is precisely a cult of the book, of the photograph, of the message from the past — a cult of the describers of the world mingled with a craving for knowledge.

Both are like the Athenian Sophanes described by Herodotus at the battle of Plataea: he drove into the ground an iron anchor fastened by a chain to his belt, so that the enemy could not shift him from the spot. For Herodotus and Kapuściński that anchor is their vocation as reporter and historian, a strong anchor by which they chained themselves to their work. They fulfilled their mission in the same way. Travelling with Herodotus, Kapuściński reached Africa at last, the source not only of the human race but of European culture. Kapuściński writes about conversations with colleagues from other newsrooms on the veranda of the Sea View hotel in Dar es Salaam, about the peculiar way of gathering information in a provincial city where nothing happened: “Out of (…) rumours, whisperings, conjectures, but also facts, we made our news and sent it out into the world.” Herodotus’s Histories, too, “are full of stories, digressions, observations, things overheard”. Herodotus, too, “meets a multitude of people, listens to hundreds of stories; he is an active, restless and tireless man, always in search of something, always occupied with something”.

This narrative has, on the one hand, the features of a biography of Herodotus and, on the other, of an autobiography of his contemporary counterpart, his spiritual brother. Kapuściński is in a direct line the heir of the idea of coming to know the world honestly. Including coming to know its history, plunging into that inexhaustible thicket of names, facts, names of deities, thousands of details. “Herodotus works hard on the road — he is a reporter, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a historian (…) Herodotus’s journeys have a purpose: in them he wants to come to know the world and its inhabitants, to know so as to describe afterwards.”

With relish and in detail Kapuściński writes, as Herodotus did, about the lives of nameless people. We know as much about the history of Xerxes’s eunuch as about Xerxes himself. Kapuściński’s commentaries on Herodotus’s stories have an ethical dimension: “Crime and punishment, injury and revenge, sooner or later always go in pairs. In relations between individuals as in relations between nations. Whoever starts a war first, and therefore in Herodotus’s view commits a crime, will in the end, at once or after some time, meet with revenge, with punishment. That relation, that feedback, is the deepest essence of fate, the sense of an irreversible destiny.”

Only on the surface is this a book about distant times. In each of his works the author of Imperium keeps his eye on the events most important to the world, and goes out to meet them with a different weapon of text each time. The harder it is, the further he reaches into history. In Travels with Herodotus he went back to the sources of the conflict between Asia and Europe. To the sources of wars. He writes: “A war is going on, after all, in which Persia is to conquer Greece, and that means — Asia is to take possession of Europe, despotism is to annihilate democracy, and slavery to make short work of freedom.”

That war continues to this day. And so, reading Kapuściński’s account of Herodotus, we hold in our hands a key to the hardest problems of the present. The universality of this work’s message places it among the most important books of recent years. Under Ryszard Kapuściński’s pen, Herodotus’s ancient world, seemingly a cosmic 2,500 years away, becomes tangible, real; it takes on familiar features, becomes close; it is ours. “Herodotus’s world is Mediterranean and Middle Eastern; it is a sunlit world of seas and lakes, high mountains and green valleys, of the olive and the vine, of millet and lambs, a serene Arcadia that runs with blood every few years.”

Indeed, nothing has changed, unless for the worse: our serene Arcadia, our Noah’s Ark of a planet of people, runs with blood every day.

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Ryszard Kapuściński, Podróże z Herodotem, Wydawnictwo Znak, Cracow 2004, 262 pp., price 18 dollars plus 6.50 dollars postage for mail orders (available from the Nowy Dziennik bookshop). Source: http://dziennik.com, Przegląd Polski on-line (New York cultural weekly)