Review of Ryszard Kapuscinski's "Travels with Herodotus"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“Travels with Herodotus” gives a wonderful taste of Kapuscinski’s travel writing. Those familiar with some of his earlier books – “Another Day of Life,” “The Emperor,” and “The Shadow of the Sun” – will detect his distinctive voice here. He even recalls visiting some of the same places in this book, including India, China, and northern Africa. 

As the title hints at, Herodotus is a kind of trope liberally interlarded throughout the book: he is source for meditations on the philosophy of history, the place of humans in relationship to the gods, and occasional thoughts on subjects as various and sundry as ethnography, the customs of local people, and the birth of the historian’s wanderlust. 

The book opens with Kapuscinski’s recounting of his discovery of Herodotus, remembering that when he was in school there was regrettably no reliable translation in Polish (his native language); he only discovers him later when he is given the book as a gift early in his career before beginning his travels. On the first page of the book, he immediately finds a kindred spirit. He is in awe of Herodotus, a man we know little of, but whose inexhaustible curiosity about people, their mores, history, and ideas obviously inspired him – and reminds him much of himself. 

The interplay of the Herodotus and Kapuscinski shed light on one another in unexpectedly beautiful ways. The stories of Solon, Croesus, Darius, and Xerxes, and many others, are retold and reexamined. Points of continuity start to appear between Kapuscinski’s travels and Herodotus’, each of which sing in tandem with one another. 

There seems to be some fracas regarding the author’s conscious mixture of reportage and literary writing, but I never got the sense that he was trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader or that he was “rewriting history.” I found his writing less fictive than imaginative. After all, what historian claims to write without the aid of imagination? 

I thought this was a great place to start to get a taste of Kapuscinski’s unique literary voice. It will certainly plant a seed of interest in both writers, if it isn’t there already.

Review of Henry Miller's "Colossus of Maroussi"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

On the recommendation of his friend and fellow author Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller set out for Greece in 1939. After a decade of frenzied writing in which both “Tropic of Cancer “and “Tropic of Capricorn” were composed, Miller’s intention was really nothing more than to relax in preparation for a journey to Tibet in which he planned to, in a popular phrase Miller himself would have despised, “find himself.” 

“Colossus of Maroussi” is pure prosopography, which isn’t of course to say that he does not give flashing insight into the individual lives of others. In fact, the colossus of the title – a Greek poet by the name of George Katsimbalis – has a personality which sometimes threatens to marginalize Miller’s. We also meet as a minor character the poet George Seferis long before he became the first Greek to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

At one point, while Durrell and Miller are staring up into space, Durrell calls him a Rosicrucian. This is no lie. Not only does Miller have a preternatural affinity for the mystical and transcendent, but the various meditative bits of philosophy and courageously inventive speculative prose that dot the book are beautifully conceived, written in a kind of ecstatic encounter with the holy. Speaking of Rosicrucians… 

“Saturn is the symbol of all omens and superstitions, the phony proof of divine entropy, phony because if it were true that the universe is running down Saturn would have melted away long ago. Saturn is as eternal as fear and irresolution, growing more milky, more cloudy, with each compromise, each capitulation. Timid souls cry for Saturn just as children are reputed to cry for Castoria. Saturn gives us only what we ask for, never an ounce extra. Saturn is the white hope of the white race which prattles endlessly about the wonders of nature and spends its time killing off the greatest wonder of all – MAN.”

To call this a travelogue is to tremendously devalue it. While its subject of the putative love of Greece and the Greek people, Miller’s approach is more reminiscent of Julian of Norwich’s “Revelations of Divine Love” or Thomas Merton’s “Seven Storey Mountain.” For him, Greece was a religious experience, and all the more precious because it was purely accidental. Miller was a mortal Antaeus whose powers seem like they would have been irrevocably sapped when he was finally compelled to bring himself back to the United States, something he only did because he saw the writing that Hitler was scrawling on the European political wall.