p.146-148"Upon the desk, I have declared a silent war. It is, after all, a specific piece of furniture with particular properties. While many whole categories of furniture may be man's serviceable instruments, his slaves, in the case of the desk a contrary relationship obtains: man is its instrument, its slave. Many thinkers worry over the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free. The loss of his desk will strike him as a natural disaster, a catastrophe, a fall into the abyss. Notice how many people commit suicide at their desks, how many are carried straight from their desks to psychiatric hospitals, how many suffer their heart attacks behind desks. Whoever sits down behind a desk begins to think differently; his vision of the work and his hierarchy of values change. From then on he will divide humanity into those who have desks and those who do not, and into significant owners of the desks and insignificant ones. He will now see his life as a frenzied progress from a small desk to a larger one, from a low desk to a higher one, from a narrow desk to a wider desk. Once ensconced behind a desk he masters a distinct language and knows things--even if yesterday, deskless, he knew nothing. I have lost many friends for reasons of desks. Once they were truly close friends. I cannot say what demon it is that slumbers in a man and makes him talk differently once he's set behind a desk. Our symmetrical, brotherly relations fall apart; there arises a troublesome and asymmetrical division into higher and lower, a pecking order that makes us both feel uncomfortable, and there is now way to reverse the process. I can tell that the desk already has him in its clutches, in a full nelson. After a few experiments I give up and quit calling. Both of us, I think, accept the outcome with relief. From then on I have known that whenever one of my friends starts achieving ever more showy desks, he is lost to me. I avoid him to spare myself the lurch that marks every transition from symmetry to asymmetry in human relationships. Sometimes a man will get up from behind his desk to walk down and talk with you at the other end of his office, in a couple of armchairs or at a round table. Such a person knows what desks are and knows that a chat between people divided by one is like a discussion between a sergeant perched in the turret of a tank and a raw frightened recruit standing at attention and looking right into the barrel of the big gun."So even if the desk my editor had placed me behind had an inlaid mother-of-pearl top, I had to get out. The desk after all, has one more dangerous property: it can serve as an instrument of self-justification. I sense this in moments of crisis, when I can't get anything down on paper. Then a thought pushes into my mind: Hide behind the desk. I'm not writing because I've got something important to think about. What's writing? Writing doesn't mean anything. We are absolved; the desk makes up for everything: it compensates."pp.150-152"Every one of these apartments was carefully filled to the ceiling with an inventory of this junk, kneaded together, jammed into a vortex of knick-knacks and fiddle-faddle of which the ladies would say the most insignificant bauble was touching, beautiful and priceless.""In reality, however, the residences of these old ladies were simply a pathological and kitschy manifestation of Latin America--that is, the universal prevalence of the baroque: baroque no only as a style of aesthetics and thought, but also as a general commitment to excess and eclecticism. There is a lot of everything here and everyhting is exaggerated; everything wants to impose itself, shock, knock the beholder sideways. It is as if we had poor vision, weak hearing and an imperfect sense of smell; as if we would simply be incapable of noticing anything that presented itself in a moderate or modest form... An excess of wealth and an excess of poverty. Gestures full of pathos and a flowery language with a multitude of adjectives.... This is not a world you can walk through with a calm head and an indifferent heart. You force your way through with difficulty, powerless and feeling as lost as when you look at a Diego Rivera fresco or read the prose of Lezama Lima. Fact is mixed with fantasy here, truth with myth, realism with rhetoric."
I'm not completely sure how this book ended up on my reading list. I think I got it from a list of books about soccer (I'm a HUGE soccer nerd). But it's not really about soccer. In fact, the titular soccer war isn't discussed until more than halfway through the book. And yes, there really was a short war in 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras and it started over some contentious soccer games, although it wasn't actually about soccer.Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist assigned to Africa throughout much of the 1960s, where he bore witness to many of the revolutions and coups that marked the continent at that time. Really, when you think about it, it's absolutely astounding, the things this man witnessed (I encourage you to at least read the Wiki about him). This book is a series of vignettes covering the things he witnessed in Africa, and also in Central America and the Middle East.I found it a little difficult to get into at first. I would say that it has a "cold" opening, which was confusing, and his language is rather florid. I felt like, "What the heck am I reading?" But I decided to persist, and once I settled into it, I fell in love with it. It's rich in detail. He really makes Africa come alive. I learned so much about an area of the world that I frankly know little about. Plus, it's really beautiful and touching. Here's one of my favorite quotes (bear in mind that Kapuscinski experienced WII as a child/teenager in Poland) :"A person who lived through a Great War is different from someone who never lived through any war. They are two different species of human being. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war."It's not a book for everyone, but if my description intrigues you at all, you should give it a shot.
What do You think about The Soccer War (1992)?
p.145: The desk. "Behind such a desk, man resembles an invalid in an orthaepedic brace . . . Furniture divides man from man . . . Upon the desk I have declared a silent war. . . . Many thinkers worry over the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free."p. 190: "Today one hears about noise pollution, but silence pollution is worse. Noise pollution affects the nerves; silence pollution is a matter of human lives. No one defends the maker of a loud noise, whereas those who establish silence in their own states are protected by an apparatus of repression. That is why the battle against silence is so difficult."p.142 (excerpt from Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques: Facing difficulties on the field and second guessing his career choices, "Meanwhile, the more prudent of my former colleagues were beginning to climb the academic ladder . . . did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitable live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? . . . Through a remarkable paradox, my life adventure, instead of opening up a new world for me, had the effect rather of brining me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp."
—Petrina
Kapuściński, always brilliant, on what it is to travel and understand better yourself: "Suddenly I felt shame, a sense of having missed the mark. It was not my country I had described. Snow and a lack of colonies- that's accurate enough, but it is not what we know or what we carry around within ourselves; nothing of our pride, of our life, nothing of what we breathe... We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and powerlessness. We know its configuration, but there is no way to make it accessible to others. It will never be right. Something, the most important thing, the most significant thing, something remains unsaid."
—Leanne Cameron
This is the third Kapuściński book I've read...the others being The Emperor and Shah of Shahs. The two previous ones were about specific people (Haile Selassie and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi respectively) while this one covers wars and revolutions in a variety of places on four continents. The bulk of the book is spent in Africa with quite a bit about the Congo and Patrice Lumumba, but also a lot about Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, etc. Then it's off to Central America for the "Soccer War" between El Salvador and Honduras. That 100 hour war might have been triggered because of events surrounding a soccer game, but it wasn't at all about soccer (as Kapuściński explains in detail.)Towards the end of the book Kapuściński tells about his travels in Cyprus and Syria and the wars he saw there too.Kapuściński had to have experienced more in this life than 100 people put together have. I look forward to reading the rest of his books eventually.
—Joel
