`Traces of Human Events'

Ryszard Kapuściński makes an excellent traveling companion. Like any good journalist, his curiosity is a powerful engine. He’s forever speculating about the behavior of his fellow humans but seldom coming to definitive conclusions. This is not out of laziness or lack of learning but humility. He’s bookish – the heaviest object he carries around India and China in the nineteen-fifties is a sack of books – but he knows that human beings are his principal medium. They are slippery and opaque, as Kapuściński is to himself, as we are to ourselves. In Travels with Herodotus, he quotes the opening of the Greek historian’s Histories, in the English translation by Robin Waterfield:

“Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.”

Clearly, Kapuściński sees himself as an avatar of Herodotus, and he notes that a more accurate title for the Greek’s great work might be “Enquiries” – precisely what a good reporter is always making. In 1957, after a particularly frustrating posting in China, and always accompanied by his copy of the Histories, a gift from one of his newspaper editors, Kapuściński wonders what motivated Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.:

“Herodotus admits that he was obsessed with memory, fearful on its behalf. He felt that memory is something defective, fragile, impermanent – illusory even. That whatever it contains, whatever it is storing, can evaporate, simply vanish without a trace…Without memory one cannot live, for it is what elevates man above beasts, determines the contours of the human soul; and yet it is at the same time so unreliable, elusive, treacherous.”

His identification with Herodotus, who “wanders the world, meets people, listens to what they tell him,” is profound. Kapuściński’s sensibility reduces the world of flux to essence. He calls the Great Wall of China the “Great Wall of Metaphor,” and digresses on the importance of walls to the Chinese psyche. He conflates memory, myths and history, and distills them all to: “People sit around the fire and tell stories.” He continues:

“Later, these will be called legends and myths, but in the instant when they are first being related and heard, the tellers and the listeners believe in them as the holiest of truths, absolute reality.

“They listen, the fire burns, someone adds more wood, the flames’ renewed warmth quickens thought, awakens the imagination. The spinning of tales is almost unimaginable without a fire crackling somewhere nearby, or without the darkness of a house illuminated by an oil lamp or a candle. The fire’s light attracts, unites, galvanizes attentions. The flame and community. The flame and history. The flame and memory.”

I find this unbroken linkage of modern humans with our Neolithic ancestors, with Herodotus and the Greeks, with all subsequent humans, this relation of story telling and fire, oddly encouraging. Perhaps we’re less diverse than we insist. I’m also reminded of Anthony Powell’s overture to A Dance to the Music of Time. In the first paragraph of A Question of Upbringing, the first of the 12 novels in the cycle, the narrator observes workmen at the corner trying to keep warm around a burning bucket of coke. In the next paragraph he writes:

“For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined."