Greetings,
The title comes from "Travels With Herodotus," by Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist, poet, photographer and travel writer. Herodotus wrote, "The Histories," 2,500 years ago. Ryszard is a student in Poland. It is a repressive time. Stalin is in power.
He writes, "My route sometimes took me to villages along the border. But this happened infrequently. For the closer one got to the border, the emptier the land and the fewer people one encountered. This emptiness increased the mystery of these regions. I was struck, too, by how silent the border zone was. This mystery and quiet attracted and intrigued me.
"I was tempted to see what lay beyond, on the other side. I wondered what one experiences when one crosses the border. What does one feel? What does one think? It must be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension. What is it like, on the other side?...I wanted one thing only - the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border. To cross it and come right back - that, I thought, would be entirely sufficient, would satisfy my quite inexplicable yet acute psychological hunger."
Ryszard worked as a journalist for the Polish Press Agency. He wants to go abroad. A year passes. It is 1964. One day his editor-in-chief tells him, "You're going to India." He is astonished. He panics. He knows nothing about India. She gives him a thick book with a stiff cover of yellow cloth, "Here, a present for the road."
It was "The Histories," by Herodotus.
For the next ten years he is responsible for fifty countries. He reports on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. When he returns to Poland he has lived through twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed 40 times and survived four death sentences.
Two more excellent reads by him are: The Shadow of the Sun about Africa and Imperium about Russia. They're listed on Turn The Page, Amazon resource for your reference.
The mystical and transcendent act. Crossing the border.
Metta.
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