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There is a fantastic description of a crowd scene by one of the Russian journalists of the 19th Century. The Czar had a military parade outside of Moscow in a large open field. As a big crowd gathered there the army started to hand out some free bread. There was such pressure when the huge mass of people moved that many individuals were crushed. But the crowd was so big the dead people were moved along together with the living. In this crowd, it was of no importance if you were dead or alive.
Crisis is always represented by crowds. In a crisis there are such important things involved that no one pays attention to the individual. History is always bigger and more important than individuals. History is the master, but not as Marx said, ‘created according to man’s will.’ Rather, people are always faced with a situation where they don’t know what they’re creating. This is the paradox of history.
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Ryszard Kapuscinski, One World, Two Civilizations (1986)
“Only then did we dare go in without attacking the crumbling walls of reinforced stone, as the more resolute had wished, and without using oxbows to knock the main door off its hinges, as others had proposed, because all that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampier during the building’s heroic days gave way. It was like entering the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power, and the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light. All across the first courtyard, where the paving stones had given way to the underground thrust of weeds, we saw the disorder of the post of the guard who had fled, the weapons abandoned in their racks, the big, long rough-planked tables and plates containing the leftovers of the Sunday lunch that had been interrupted by panic, in shadows we saw the annex where government house had been, colored fungi and pale irises among the unresolved briefs whose normal course had been slower than the pace of the driest of lives, in the center of the courtyard we saw the baptismal font where more than five generations had been christened with martial sacraments, in the rear we saw the ancient viceregal stable which had been transformed into a coach house, and among the camellias and butterflies we saw the berlin from stirring days, the wagon from the time of the plague, the coach from the year of the comet, the hearse from progress in order, the sleep-walking limousine of the first century of peace, all in good shape under the dusty cobwebs and all painted with the colors of the flag.”
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch
“Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn’t write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will perish when he does. This is when it seems everyone wants to write a book. Singers and football players, politicians and millionaires. And if they themselves do not know how, or else lack the time, they commission someone else to do it for them…engendering this reality is the impression of writing as a simple pursuit, though those who subscribe to that view might do well to ponder Thomas Mann’s observation that, ‘a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others.’”
- Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, Travels with Herodotus
