Autor:David Dastych
Źródło:Canada Free Press

“Why am I a writer? Why have I risked my life so many times, come so close to dying? Is it to report the weirdness? To earn my salary? Mine is not a vocation, it’s a mission. I wouldn’t subject myself to these dangers if I didn’t feel that there was something overwhelmingly important–about history, about ourselves–that I felt compelled to get across. This is more than journalism.”

--Ryszard Kapuscinski interview by Bill Bufford (“Granta Magazine”).

 Rick, why did you have to die yesterday, only 74, while Augusto Pinochet could die at 91? Do you know he died on December 10, 2006: on Human Rights Day? We don’t miss him at all, but we all shall miss you. Your loving wife, Alina, who was so kind and wrote letters to me in prison in the 1980s, your daughter (whom I never met)–she lives in Canada, hundreds of your friends, of whom I am a humble friend of yours and an admirer of your unique personality and of your books for 45 years, since your first collection of journalist reports with a very strange title “Busz po polsku” (The bush, Poland’s style) published in  1962, when I was in America. But, first of all, poor people in the whole world, in Africa, Latin America and Asia, people of all human races will miss you, as you were their best advocate, who took them out of the negligence and oblivion, the man, who told the 20 percent of the world’s well-to-do nations that there was still 80 percent of the poor, sometimes sick and hungry human beings to be considered and helped. Yes–humans, not just statistical ‘units’.

Do you remember how we were discussing about China, twenty years ago (now you remember all, in heaven!)?. Then I told you about my strange encounter with a million of poor, badly smelling and all dressed in grey dungarees young Chinese, shouting in support of Mao Zedong in the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and about hundreds of corpses scattered in Wuhan after a military charge. In 1967, China was a ‘chaos under Heaven’ and in 1986, when we were talking, it was emerging from poverty and dictatorship to be hit again by a massacre of students and passers-by in the same huge Beijing square on June 4, 1989. At that time I was still in a communist prison, but already happy and rejoicing the victory of Solidarity in the first Polish half-free elections held on the same day. Twenty years ago, you told me that China would become one of the leading world powers. And there it is.

Rick, you have told a Polish reporter (I don’t recall when): “My main ambition is to show Europeans that our mentality is highly Euro-centric, and that Europe, or rather part of it, is not unique in the world, but that it is surrounded by an immense, ever increasing diversity of cultures, societies, religions and civilizations. Life on this planet, where there are more and more interconnections, demands awareness of this fact and adjustment to radically new global conditions.” And on some other occasion you said: “I write from on the move. I am not an inventor. I don’t describe any imagined or purely personal world. I describe the world that really exists.”

This world, you described for almost 50 years, was not a safe place. Our journalist colleagues and also your friend, well known to me–Professor Wiktor Osiatynski - remembered in a TV chat yesterday that you had witnessed 27 revolutions in many parts of the world, and you had personally reported on 12 wars. I also know, from you, that four times you were captured and walked to death. Polish Radio remembered your description of how a person feels being brought to be shot. You told how one’s body becomes ‘detached’ and ‘impersonal’, like a piece of wood. Did I tell you how some mafia thugs wanted to shoot me in the woods, in the early 1990s? I went with them (there was no choice but to obey them) and I thought of my whole life, I was calm and stiff, I couldn’t speak and my reactions were like in a dream. You have known this, haven’t you?

But there are things that survive beyond the human life. Your books and other writings, recordings of your voice and face in lectures and interviews, also your thoughts, which are body-less but circulate freely among people. You once said: “any kind of creative work requires concentration and solitude. People who write poetry [and you did that too, Rick] or paint pictures [you preferred to take photos] do it alone. And if that’s how we understand getting to know the world, then while traveling you also have to be alone.” “Who goes with you on your journeys”–somebody asked. “My thoughts and no one else”–you answered.

Rick, the good thoughts and remembrances of all of us will accompany you on your last journey. Mine and Sophie’s, too. So leave this Earth in peace, leaving to us your noble thoughts, perfect writings and noble deeds. Excuse me, if I wouldn’t come to your funeral. You know I broke my back twelve years ago and hardly can walk. Other friends will throw lumps of dirt into your open grave, in my name. But when the sun will melt snow, I shall go to this lovely graveyard and I shall put flowers and little stones on the place of your rest. Adios, Rick!

źródło: kapuscinski.info