Travels with Herodotus

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  It is at this point that the paths of Confucius and Lao-tzu (if he existed) diverge, or, more precisely, it is to the most fundamental of worldly questions—“How do I survive?”—that each gives a different answer. Confucius holds that man, being born into society, has certain obligations. The most important are those of carrying out the commands of the authorities and submissiveness to one’s parents. Also—respect for ancestors and tradition; the strict observance of the rules of etiquette; fealty to the existing order; and resistance to change. The Confucian man is loyal and docile vis-à-vis those in power. If you obediently and conscientiously hew to their dictates, says the master, you will survive.

  Lao-tzu (if he existed) recommends a different stance. The creator of Taoism advises keeping oneself at a remove from everything. Nothing lasts, says the master. So do not become attached to anything. All that exists will perish; therefore rise above it, maintain your distance, do not try to become somebody, do not try to pursue or possess something. Act through inaction: your strength is weakness and helplessness; your wisdom, naïveté and ignorance. If you want to survive, become useless, unnecessary to everyone. Live far from others, become a hermit, be satisfied with a bowl of rice, a sip of water. And most important—observe the Tao. But what is Tao? It’s impossible to say, because the essence of Tao is its vagueness and inexpressibleness: “If Tao lets itself be defined as Tao, then it is not genuine Tao,” says the master. Tao is a path, not a heading, and to observe Tao is to keep to that path and walk straight ahead.

  Confucianism is the philosophy of power, of bureaucrats, of structure, order, and of standing at attention; Taoism is the wisdom of renouncing the game, of contenting oneself with being only an insignificant particle of indifferent nature.

  In their message to the simple man, however, Confucianism and Taoism have a common denominator: the recommendation of humility. It is interesting that at approximately the same time, and also in Asia, arise two other intellectual disciplines, Buddhism and Ionian philosophy, which offer lesser mortals the identical advice: be humble.

  The paintings of Confucian artists depict court scenes—a seated emperor surrounded by stiff standing bureaucrats, chiefs of palace protocol, pompous generals, meekly bowing servants. In Taoist paintings we see distant pastel landscapes, barely discernible mountain chains, luminous mists, mulberry trees, and in the foreground a slender, delicate leaf of a bamboo bush, swaying in the invisible breeze.

  Strolling with Comrade Li along the streets of Shanghai and observing the passersby, I now ask myself whether each is a Confucian, a Taoist, or a Buddhist.

  But this is a pointlessly inquisitive stance. For the great strength of Chinese philosophy is its flexible and unifying syncretism, the way varied trends, views, and positions merge into a single whole while in no way jeopardizing the core integrity of each separate school of thought. In the course of thousands of years of Chinese history, many and different philosophies (it is difficult to call them religions in the European sense of that word, since they do not include the concept of God) held sway—Confucianism prevailed, or Taoism, or Buddhism, to name the most prominent; now and then a conflict or tension would arise among them; occasionally an emperor would throw his support behind one or another of the spiritual trends, at times fostering their coexistence, at other times inciting competition and strife among them. But sooner or later there would be compromise, interpenetration, accord of one kind or another. So much fell into the immense chasm of this civilization’s history, was absorbed by it, subsequently to emerge with an unmistakably Chinese shape and character.

  This synthetic transformative process could also occur in the soul of the individual Chinese. Depending on the situation, the context, and the circumstances, the Confucian element might take the upper hand in him, or the Taoist, because nothing in his world was determined once and for all, signed and sealed, written in stone. To survive, he would be an obedient executor. Humble and meek on the outside, he would as well be on the inside aloof, unreachable, independent.

  We returned to Peking and our hotel. I went back to my books. I began studying the life of the great ninth century poet, Han Yü. At one point Han Yü, a follower of Confucius, begins to combat the influences of Buddhism in China, on the grounds of its being a foreign Hindu ideology. He pens critical essays, fiery pamphlets. The great poet’s chauvinism so angered the ruling emperor, an adherent of Buddhism, that he condemned Han Yü to death and then, propitiated by his courtiers, changed the sentence to exile in what is today the province of Kwangtung, a place infested with crocodiles.

  Before I was able to find out what happened next, someone arrived from the editorial offices of Chungkuo bringing with him a gentleman from the headquarters of international trade, who in turn handed me a letter from my colleagues at Sztandar Młodych in Warsaw. Because our team had spoken out against the closing of “Po prostu” they wrote, the newspaper’s entire editorial board had been removed by the Central Committee and the paper was now under the direction of three specially appointed commissioners. Some of the journalists had resigned in protest, while others were hesitating, waiting it out. What was I going to do, my friends wanted to know.

  The gentleman from the international trade department left, and without giving it a second’s thought I informed Comrade Li that I had received urgent orders to return home. I would start packing right away. Comrade Li’s face didn’t so much as twitch. We looked at each other for a moment, then went downstairs to the dining room, where dinner awaited us.

  I was leaving China, as I had India, with a feeling of loss, even of sorrow; but at the same time there was something purposeful about my flight. I had to escape, because a new, hitherto unfamiliar world was pulling me into its orbit, completely absorbing me, obsessing and overwhelming me. I was seized at once with a profound fascination, a burning thirst to learn, to immerse myself totally, to melt away, to become as one with this foreign universe. To know it as if I had been born and raised there, begun life there. I wanted to learn the language, I wanted to read the books, I wanted to penetrate every nook and cranny.

  It was a kind of malady, a dangerous weakness, because I also realized that these civilizations are so enormous, so rich, complex, and varied, that getting to know even a fragment of one of them, a mere scrap, would require devoting one’s whole life to the enterprise. Cultures are edifices with countless rooms, corridors, balconies, and attics, all arranged, furthermore, into such twisting, turning labyrinths, that if you enter one of them, there is no exit, no retreat, no turning back. To become a Hindu scholar, a Sinologist, an Arabist, or a Hebraist is a lofty, all-consuming pursuit, leaving no space or time for anything else.

  Whereas I had the urge to submit to such seductions, I also remained attracted to what lay beyond the confines of their respective worlds—I was tempted by people still unmet, roads yet untraveled, skies yet unseen. The desire to cross the border, to look at what is beyond it, stirred in me still.

  I returned to Warsaw. The reasons for my bizarre situation in China, my lack of real purpose, my senseless suspension in a vacuum, quickly became clear. The idea of sending me to China arose in the aftermath of two thaws: that of October 1956 in Poland, and in China, that of Chairman Mao’s One Hundred Flowers. Even before I arrived in China, an upheaval was under way in Warsaw and in Peking. The head of the Polish Communist Party, Władyslaw Gomułka, initiated a campaign against the liberals, and Mao Tse-tung was launching the draconian politics of the Great Leap Forward.

  Practically speaking, I should have left Peking the day after I arrived. But my newspaper was mum—fearful and fighting for its survival, it had forgotten about me. Or perhaps the editors had my interests in mind—perhaps they reckoned that away in China I would somehow be safe? In any event, I now think that the editors of Chungkuo were being informed by the Chinese embassy in Warsaw that the correspondent of Sztandar Młodych is the envoy of a newspaper hanging by a thread and it is only a matter of time before it goes under the ax. I think, too,
that it was traditional Chinese principles of hospitality, the importance the Chinese ascribe to saving face, as well as their highly cultivated politeness, that kept me from being summarily expelled. Instead, they created conditions which they assumed would lead me to guess that the models of cooperation that had been agreed to earlier no longer obtained. And that I would say of my own accord: I am leaving.

  MEMORY ALONG THE ROADWAYS

  OF THE WORLD

  Immediately upon returning home I left the newspaper and got a job at the Polish Press Agency. Because I had arrived from China, my new boss, Michał Hofman, concluded my expertise must lie in matters of the Far East and decided that this would now be my beat—specifically, the part of Asia to the east of India and extending to the innumerable islands of the Pacific.

  We all know a little about everything, but I knew nothing about the countries I had been assigned, and so I burned the midnight oil studying up on guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Burma and Malaysia, the revolts in Sumatra and Sulawesi, the rebellions of the Moro tribe in the Philippines. The world once again presented itself to me as something impossible to even begin to comprehend, let alone master. And all the more so because, given my work, I had so little time to devote to it. All day long, dispatches arrived in my office from various countries, which I had to read, translate, condense, edit, and send on to newspapers and radio stations.

  In this manner, because news reached me daily from places like Rangoon or Singapore, Hanoi, Manila, or Bandung, my travels through the countries of Asia—commenced in India and Afghanistan, continued in Japan and China—went on uninterrupted. On my desk, under glass, I had a prewar map of the Asian continent, over which I often wandered with my finger, searching for Phnom Penh or Surabaya, the Solomon Islands or the difficult-to-locate Laoag, places where there had just been a coup attempt against Someone Important, or where the workers at a rubber plantation had just gone on strike. I transported myself in my thoughts now here, now there, trying to imagine those locales and events.

  Sometimes, when the offices emptied in the evening and the hallways grew quiet, and I wanted a respite from telegrams about the strikes and armed conflicts, the coups and explosions convulsing countries I did not know, I reached for The Histories of Herodotus, lying in my drawer.

  Herodotus begins his book with a statement explaining why he set out to write it in the first place:

  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.

  This passage is the key to the entire book.

  First of all, Herodotus informs us therein that he carried out some sort of “enquiry” (I would prefer to use the term “investigation”). Today we know that he devoted his entire life to this—and it was, for its time, a long life indeed. Why did he do it? Why, still in his youth, did he make such a decision? Did someone encourage him to conduct these investigations? Commission him to undertake them? Or did Herodotus enter the service of some potentate, or of a council of elders, or of an oracle? Who needed this intelligence? And what for?

  Or maybe he did everything on his own initiative, possessed by a passion for knowledge, driven by a restless and unfocused compulsion? Perhaps he had a naturally inquiring mind, a mind that continuously generated a thousand questions giving him no peace, keeping him up at nights? And if he was gripped by such an absolute private mania—which after all has been known to happen—how did he find the time to satisfy it, year after year after year?

  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. His whole generation, everyone living on earth at that time, was possessed by that same fear. 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. It is precisely what makes man so unsure of himself. Wait, wasn’t that …? Come on, you can remember, when was that…? Wasn’t it the one that…? Try to remember, how was it …? We do not know, and stretching beyond that “we do not know” is the vast realm of ignorance; in other words—of nonexistence.

  Man does not obsess about memory today as he once did because he lives surrounded by stockpiles of it. Everything is at his fingertips—encyclopedias, textbooks, dictionaries, compendia, search engines. Libraries and museums, antiquarian bookshops and archives. Audio and video recordings. Infinite supplies of preserved words, sounds, images—in apartments, in warehouses, in basements, in attics. If he is a child, his teacher will tell him everything he needs to know; if he is a university student, he will be informed by his professors.

  Of course none, or almost none, of these institutions, devices, or techniques existed in Herodotus’s time. Man knew as much, and only as much, as his mind managed to preserve. A few privileged individuals started to learn to write on rolls of papyrus and on clay tablets. But the rest? Culture was always an aristocratic enterprise. And wherever it departs from this principle, it perishes as such.

  In the world of Herodotus, the only real repository of memory is the individual. In order to find out that which has been remembered, one must reach this person. If he lives far away, one has to go to him, to set out on a journey. And after finally encountering him, one must sit down and listen to what he has to say—to listen, remember, perhaps write it down. That is how reportage begins; of such circumstances it is born.

  So Herodotus wanders the world, meets people, listens to what they tell him. They speak of who they are, they recount their history. But how do they know who they are, and where they came from? Ah, they answer, they have it on the word of others—first and foremost, from their ancestors. It is they who transmitted their knowledge to this generation, just as this one is now transmitting it to others. The knowledge takes the form of various tales. People sit around the fire and tell stories. 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. Heraclitus, who lived before Herodotus, considered fire to be the origin of all matter, the primordial substance. Like fire, he said, everything is in eternal motion, everything is extinguished only to flare up again. Everything flows, but in flowing, it undergoes transformation. So it is with memory. Some of its images die out, but new ones appear in their place. The new ones are not identical to those that came before—they are different. Just as one cannot step twice into the same river, so it is impossible for a new image to be exactly like an earlier one.

  It is this principle of an irreversible passing away that Herodotus understands perfectly, and he wants to set himself in opposition to its destructive power: to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time.

  Still, what boldness, what a sense of self-importance and mission: presuming to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time. Human events! But how did he know that any such thing as “human events” even exists? His predecessor, Homer, described the history of a single, specific war, the one with Troy, and then the adventures of a solitary wanderer, Odysseus. But human events? That term in itself represents a new way of thinking, a new concept, a new horizon. With that sentence, Herodotus reveals himsel
f to us as anything but a provincial scribe, a narrow-minded lover of his own little polis, mere patriot of one of the dozens of city-states of which Greece was then composed. No! From the very outset, the author of The Histories enters the stage as a visionary on a world scale, an imagination capable of encompassing planetary dimensions—in short, as the first globalist.

  Of course, the map of the world which Herodotus has before him, or which he imagines, differs from the one confronting us today. His world is much smaller than ours. Its center consists of the mountainous and (at the time) forested lands around the Aegean Sea. Those lying on the western shore constitute Greece; those on the eastern, Persia. And so right away we hit upon the heart of the matter—Herodotus is born, grows up, and just as he starts to figure out everything around him, one of his very first observations is that the world is sundered, split into East and West, and that these halves are in a state of dissension, conflict, war.

  The question that immediately suggests itself to him, as well as to any thinking human being, is “Why should this be so?” And it is this very question that informs the foreword of Herodotus’s masterpiece: Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus…. in particular, the cause of the hostilities …

  Precisely. We can see that this question, oft repeated since the dawn of history, has vexed humankind for thousands of years now: Why do peoples wage war against one another? What are the origins of wars? What do people hope to accomplish when they start a war? What drives them? What do they think? What is their goal? An unending litany of questions! Herodotus dedicates his life, diligently, tirelessly, to finding the answers. But from among the many issues, some quite general and abstract, he selects the most concrete to investigate, the events that took place before his very eyes or of which memories were still fresh and alive or, even if slightly faded, still very much available. In other words, he concentrates his attention and his inquiries on the following subject: Why does Greece (that is, Europe) wage war with Persia (that is, with Asia)? Why do those two worlds—the West (Europe) and the East (Asia)—fight against each other, and do so to the death? Was it always thus? Will it always be thus?