Read a Master

Writing about his first experience abroad, the amazing travel writer Ryszard Kapuscinski. He died in January in Warsaw:

India was my first encounter with otherness, the discovery of a new world. It was at the same time a great lesson in humility. I returned from the journey embarrassed by my own ignorance. I realized then what seems obvious now: another culture would not reveal its mysteries to me at the mere wave of my hand. One has to prepare oneself thoroughly for such an encounter.
My initial reaction to this lesson was to run home, to return to places I knew, to my own language, to the world of already familiar signs and symbols. I tried to forget India, which signified to me my failure: its enormousness and diversity, its poverty and riches, its incomprehensibility had crushed, stunned, and finally defeated me. Once again, I was glad to travel around Poland, to write about its people, to talk to them, to listen to what they had to say. We understood each other instantly, were united by common experience.
But of course I remembered India. The more bitter the cold of the Polish winter, the more readily I thought of hot Kerala; the quicker darkness fell, the more vividly images of Kashmir’s dazzling sunrises resurfaced. The world was no longer uniformly cold and snowy but had multiplied, become variegated: it was simultaneously cold and hot, snowy white but also green and blooming.

Translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska
Photo: Scaffolding and the image of the Archangel in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul