It has been a wet winter in California. The rain began in mid-November
and continued with few interruptions until early January. Water courses out of
vast canyons and collects in serpentine lakes behind unseen dams.
Then the
mountains show themselves under a think blanket of snow. I know from experience
that Yosemite Valley is probably visible from the south side of the airplane.
I’m on the north. Yet the canyons and valleys I see are a spectacular sight in
themselves.
After a few minutes, the Sierra slide effortlessly by and I am over
the light brown and apparently lifeless expanse of the great high desert to the
east. Since it is winter, this table land is now marked by what appear to be
trickles of water that must be raging torrents brought to life by snowmelt. What
in the summer would be dry riverbeds and mostly invisible are now dark blue or
gray undulations in the earth’s surface.
We follow Interstate 80, which seems to
attract secondary roads and railroads that converge and diverge from it. Then
the interstate moves off to the northeast and for about half an hour there is no
evidence of human habitation, not a road, not a house, not a power line. Finally
a tiny smokestack appears, a single road leading to it, but there are no
buildings anywhere near. Who works here? How do they get here? What do they make
here - mine and refine something? What else could it be?
An occasional broad,
brown valley streaked with wispy strips of snow divides the ranges of white
mountains from one another. I imagine that this high desert is something like
Central Asia, a territory best crossed on the back of a camel or accompanied by
a caravan of yaks.
Ice crystals form on the window. The tiny television screen
provided by Virgin America informs me that we are at about 35,000 feet and it is
60 below zero outside, Fahrenheit. Cloud cover. I pick up my new traveling
companion, Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of my literary
heroes and namesake, were I Polish. I bought the hard cover at Copperfield’s in
Santa Rosa for eight dollars. He begins with his first brief travels outside of
Poland in the 1950s, to India and to China. Only after these first chapters does
he say much about Herodotus, whom he began to read when he was still at home in
Poland, trying to write about countries he had never visited during those years
when communist governments were loathe to allow journalists to travel abroad:
“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.”
Kapuscinski follows this with an essay on memory and Herodotus as the first
journalist, who relied upon living informants, for there were almost no others:
no archives, no records, no books. In those days, if one wanted to know about a
distant place, as Herodotus did, one either had to go there or talk to someone
who had been there. Or talk to someone who had talked to someone who had talked
to someone . . . who had been there. Or so he claimed.
Land emerges from under
the clouds again and I put the book down. This bleak landscape is transformed by
snow into something beautiful, especially when the sun picks up the yellow, red,
and orange of these canyons below. I focus on one great canyon in particular,
bright red, dusted with snow, and sprinkled with tiny trees or perhaps
sagebrush. The whole landscape looks like it could be bent into a Christmas tree
ornament or a holiday confection covered with powdered sugar. Here and there a
line or two in the snow marks a highway, a railroad, a telegraph line. There is
an occasional copse of trees, a pond, an isolated farmhouse connected by a line
in the snow to another line.
Meanwhile Kapucsinski, by way of Herodotus, ponders
the nature of difference and conflict. Herodotus lived in the 5th Century BC, at
a time when the Persians twice invaded Greece, unsuccessfully, yet remained the
superpower on the Greek horizon. What caused the hostilities between Greeks and
Persians? Or among the Greeks themselves, or all the hostilities since? Why do
these people hate us? Why do we hate them? Why do the nations so furiously rage
together? One might say that Herodotus walked to the ends of the earth to find
an answer to these questions.
The Persians with whom he spoke maintained that
the East-West conflict of the day was all started by men stealing women. A man
stealing a woman was certainly the legendary cause of the Trojan War. Something
had to start it. Someone crosses a line, sometimes a literal line in the sand,
or soil and embarks upon a war of aggression; or someone crosses a metaphorical
line, a line demarking decent behavior from indecent, beginning a long chain of
stroke and counterstroke, aggression and revenge. Kapuscinski writes: “What
happened? Simply this: that you have been revenged upon for crimes perpetrated
ten generations ago by a forefather whose existence you weren’t even aware of. .
. . in Herodotus’s world, (as well as in various societies today) the eternal
law of revenge, the law of reprisal, of an eye for an eye, was (and remains)
alive and well. Revenge is not only a right – it is a most sacred obligation.”
Journalists and historians cover these stories well, for they, not to mention
their readers, are drawn to the exceptional and the dramatic. War and conflict
also demark both vast periods of time and huge expanses of earthly space from
one another, between Persian rule and Roman, between Arab and Turk, between
British and American.
Of course there are often vast periods of peace in between
conflict. This vast land below, compared in terms of history to Europe, is
remarkably uneventful. The conflicts of Europe have been well-chronicled for at
least eight centuries and chronicled in some fashion for two millennia before
that. There is no shortage of written records and old buildings and walls to
sift through. The center of the American continent under the clouds below has
been the subject of history for at most a few hundred years. There has been one
major conflict, the Civil War. There has been essentially one government.
More
clouds stretch out below. I doze off. When I awake, the rocky, arid west has
been left behind and we are over the well-marked fields and roads of the
Midwest. As far as the eye can see is farmhouses, roads and fields, with
occasional stands of trees. We are in the east; east of the longitudinal line
through the heart of North America that marks the border between farming and
ranching, west of which there is often neither farming nor ranching, nor much of
anything growing at all. Despite being east of this line, we call this the
Midwest, the land of Central Time, where I grew up and came to manhood, the
limitless grassland where, midway through Ole Rolvaag’s novels, the heroines go
stark raving mad.
I poke some buttons in front of me and the little red airplane
appears in northern Iowa near the Minnesota border. Usually the plane follows
Interstate 80 most of the way across the country. Some weather and wind pattern
must have made the pilots wander a couple hundred miles north. A carpet of
clouds again gains command of the landscape. After a few minutes the first
shadows of evening appear on the undulating surface as we traverse Lake
Michigan, whose waters accentuate the blueness.
A few seats in front of me an
infant begins to cry, gurgles, then carries on as if it were being wantonly
strangled. Then just as quickly as the fuss began, it goes back to sleep and all
is quiet aboard the jetliner.
As the clouds below carry on their dominance, I
return to Herodoscinski and his Niebuhrian meditations on the nature and madness
of man, about Croesus and Cyrus settling their differences and embarking upon
the conquest of the Massagetae, who lived east of the Caspian Sea. Cyrus wanted
to rule over this land, cooking up some story of Massagetaean trespass from
generations earlier to justify his invasion. What must the two kings have talked
about as they rode along in a golden carriage drawn by horses while the soldiers
plodded along, often driven by the lash? Did they talk at all? This Cyrus, whom
the Greeks dreaded and despised, whose son and grandson the Greeks despised even
more, was nonetheless beloved by the Judeans. Isaiah referred to him with great
praise and many commentators claim that Isaiah believed Cyrus to be the Messiah.
Cyrus, for all of his faults, was a monotheist and took pity on the Judaean
monotheists his Babylonian enemies had taken captive. On the theory that an
enemy of his enemy was his friend, he returned these captives to Jerusalem along
with a check for their temple restoration and neighborhood rebuilding fund. I’m
not making this up.
The years of Persian domination, roughly 500 – 320 BC, were
good years for the Jews. They were good years for the Greeks as well, but in
spite of the Persians, not because of them. The Persians ruled Judea benignly.
It was after Alexander took over on his way to conquer the world that things
really deteriorated in the lands of the Bible. Alexander died of drink – and
various other excesses – before he was thirty, leaving a vast empire for his
generals to quarrel over. Quarrel they did. Civil wars resulted. Nonetheless,
great cultural exchange and development ensued. In the middle of it, Jesus of
Nazareth lived and died. Thanks to Alexander bringing the West to the East, his
message spread around the world through the common language of the day, Greek.
Cyrus’s expedition ended in disaster. He and his army were slaughtered near the
banks of the River Oxus, in the heart of Central Asia, by the Massagetae and
their warrior queen, Tomyris. She found his corpse on the battlefield afterward
and shoved his severed head into a wineskin filled with blood, saying, “I warned
you that I would quench your thirst for blood, and so I shall.”
An occasional
glance at the many tiny television screens aboard reveals news of demonstrations
in Egypt. Kapuscinski takes me there on a brief trip in 1960: “My initial
glimpse is in the evening, as my airplane approaches Cairo. From up high, the
river at this time of day resembles a black, glistening trunk, forking and
branching, surrounded by garlands of streetlights and bright rosettes defining
the squares of this immense and bustling city.” He explains recent Egyptian
history: “In 1952, Nasser, then thirty-four, led the military coup that
overthrew King Farouk; he became president four years later. For a long time he
faced strong internal opposition: on the one hand Communists fought him, and on
the other the Muslim Brotherhood, a conspiratorial organization of
fundamentalists and Islamic terrorists. To combat them both Nasser maintained
numerous police units of all sorts.”
Kapuscinski reports in magical
realist fashion what it was like to live in this police state. He arrived with a
bottle of Czech beer, drank it his first night there, then faced the disposal
problem: what to do with an empty beer bottle in a country where alcohol is
strictly forbidden? He dared not leave it in the waste paper basket in the
hotel, for it would be discovered and reported. He decided to walk out in the
morning, bottle wrapped in a paper bag, and drop it into the first garbage can
he could find. Unfortunately, there was someone eyeing him at every corner,
lurking in the vicinity of every garbage can, watching everything that moved.
“The street now turned, but beyond the turn everything was exactly as before. I
couldn’t throw the bottle out anywhere, because no matter where I tried, I
encountered someone’s gaze turned in my direction. Cars drove along the streets,
donkeys pulled carts loaded with goods, a small herd of camels passed by
stiffly, as if on stilts, but all this seemed to be taking place in the
background, on some plane other than the one on which I was walking, caught in
the sightlines of perfect strangers, who stood, strolled, talked, most
frequently sat, and all the while stared at what I was doing. I grew
increasingly nervous, and as I started to sweat profusely, the paper bag in my
hand was getting soggy. I was afraid that the bottle would slip out of it and
shatter on the sidewalk . . . “
Eventually, he returned to the hotel, bottle
still in hand. He went out again late that night, whereupon, under cover of
darkness, he quietly deposited the sanctioned bottle in a garbage can, returned
to his room and fell exhausted into bed.
Why did Kapuscinski read Herodotus,
whose information was so dated? He provides numerous clues throughout his
journey. Perhaps the most intriguing comes at the end, when he quotes T. S.
Eliot from a 1944 essay about Virgil:
“In our age, when men seem more than ever
prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to
try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into
existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a
provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the
chronicle of human devices which have served their turns and been scrapped, one
for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which
the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we
can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together . . . ”
Ryszard
Kapuscinski traveled in order to escape the provincialism of space and read
Herodotus to escape the provincialism of time.
The sky fills with color as we
approach Washington. We descend through the clouds and the lights of suburban
Virginia appear below. There is snow on the ground. The streets glisten, framed
by bare trees. The plane makes one big turn as it approaches Dulles Airport,
once considered impossibly far from Washington, and we feel the reassuring
impact of the wheels hitting the runway. We have traversed in five hours what
Herodotus in his day could not have completed in a lifetime.
