Trees, a copse and a forest — a conversation with Kapuściński

Author: Jarosław Mikołajewski source: Gazeta Wyborcza date: 2004-09-30 ——————————————————————–

Jarosław Mikołajewski: Did you write a book that was then printed in instalments, or did you write instalments that in the end added up to a whole?

Ryszard Kapuściński: I always write in instalments. That is true of Travels with Herodotus and of the two previous books that were first printed in “Gazeta Wyborcza”: Imperium and The Shadow of the Sun. And I think I do not know how to write any other way.

Do you know the reasons?

I can guess at them. It comes, I think, from a journalistic habit and a sense of obligation. From the awareness that the text has to be ready on time, that the deadline for an article or a piece of reportage cannot be crossed. And that helps me.

In the fight against maximalism?

Yes. An essayist or a reporter with unlimited time to deliver a book feels the temptation to take on ever more reading. Filling in one’s knowledge, reading a little further — that is a danger which has finished off more than one maximalist. I am a maximalist too, and on top of that I very much like to read. For Travels I gathered 140 books; if I had had to devour them all it would have taken me about four years. And the temptation is great, because reading is the opening of branches. You go into a book, it refers you to another work, so you open that, because it seems indispensable, but in it you find new references that open onto further reading. One can flounder on like that for ever. And the obligation to keep to a deadline or a rhythm — a weekly one, for instance, as with the successive instalments of Travels — allows one to put some kind of dam in the way of that ruinous temptation. I have too large a library at home, and therefore too easy a way of looking into the sources I cite, to manage without deadlines. Sometimes I envy writers of fiction, because their territory is the imagination. Essayists and reporters, before they say anything themselves, need to listen to the voices of other authors. In order to understand better what they are to write about, to check whether they know everything, and also to make sure they are not forcing an open door — that they are not saying something others said before them.

Are there so many books about Herodotus?

A great many. What is more, these books are sometimes written with great passion, polemically against other work. But those who take up the polemic cannot themselves be sure they are right, because in the case of a figure like Herodotus, about whom we know little, we are condemned to move above all through vast spaces of uncertainty. And we often rely purely on intuition, which, as we know, can be a treacherous adviser. That is why editors and consultants play such an important role, watching our struggles with a cool eye and saving us from blunders and inconsistencies. Not counting my wife, to whom I show almost at once everything I write, the first reader of Travels was Jan Cywiński, an editor at the “Gazeta”. He is a classical philologist by training, so what I received from him was not only warm but also highly specialised help. I also had an excellent academic consultant — Dr Marek Węcowski. Thanks are due as well to Małgorzata Sydorczyk, the photo editor, who saw to it that the “Gazeta” first printing of my book appeared with the right illustrations.

What does Herodotus teach?

Among the thinkers who wrote, Herodotus was the first to see our cultural planet as a whole. There had been people before him who described particular tribes or lands, but they saw them separately. He was the first to see them not only separately but at the same time whole. He saw the trees and described their distinct features, but he also perceived the copse, and with the same gaze he took in the whole forest. So the thing that sets Herodotus apart, and that is so often forgotten today, is the awareness that context is extraordinarily important for understanding anything. That things and people do, indeed, exist for themselves and in themselves, but can only be understood within their culture. And that through context individual phenomena acquire depth. Herodotus understood that culture explains a person, that it is his commentary. That is why he collected observations about customs, beliefs and the organisation of societies so scrupulously. His book is the history of people embedded in culture, and that kind of description is his discovery. His way of thinking fits perfectly into an unusually interesting philosophical turn — the passage from the pre-Socratic to the Socratic age. From the age of Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, who ask themselves about the origin of the world, the cosmos, primal matter, to the age of Socrates, when the human being moves to the centre of interest: who he is, what he feels and why, what the motives of his conduct are. Only afterwards will Plato appear. Herodotus is a man of the Socratic revolution who combines the older tradition with the new philosophical questions. He concentrates at once on the human being and on his world.

Herodotus (c. 489–425 BC) raised history from the level of chronicle to the level of scholarship and of writing. He was born in Halicarnassus and travelled through Egypt, Babylonia, Syria, Asia Minor and Scythia, where he gathered an enormous body of material on the Greco-Persian wars, on the conflicts between Europe and Asia and on the peoples who took part in them. The knowledge he collected was not only political but also ethnographic. Twenty years before his death he settled in Athens, then took part in founding the Attic colony of Thurii in the south of the Italian peninsula, where he died. His “Histories” are a masterpiece of historiography and of literature — a rigorous account that is at the same time vivid and colourful, with strikingly drawn characters.