The long-awaited fifth volume of Ryszard Kapuściński's personal notations. The highly original form of these remarks has placed Kapuściński's work among the finest Polish literary achievements of recent decades.
Lapidarium I was first published by the "Czytelnik" publishing house in 1990. Since then, subsequent volumes of the series have been garnering an ever-growing group of readers and admirers, even though it seemed that the author's penetrating yet critical view of the world, his cautious but mostly pessimistic diagnoses would not allow the Lapidarium series more than a narrow readership. Most of the notations in volume V focus on the problems of globalization, multi-cultural identity, and various aspects of contemporary development and culture, including the related ethical and moral questions. Kapuściński's voice, however, is not that of an enlightened European or self-confident American. It is noteworthy that he devotes only a fragment of the work to the attacks on America on September 11th. His voice is the voice of someone who has turned the provinces of the world into his intellectual center and looks from this vantage point at the great and minor issues of today's world. Kapuściński is critical of the voices that view globalization as salvation or at least as a positive influence. The problem, he states, is the growing alienation between people:
"in spite of advances in communication and communication technologies, our knowledge of each other - contrary to the common myth - remains highly superficial, most often non-existent. (...) We do not live in a global village, but rather in a global metropolis, a global train station inundated with a 'crowd of loners' (...) anxious people who would wish to know each other and develop close relationships."
Globalization thus becomes not only an economic problem, but also a spiritual one that links into a variety of ethical dilemmas.
- Ryszard Kapuściński
Lapidarium V
Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza "Czytelnik", Warszawa 2002
128 pages, hardcover
ISBN 83-07-02905-8
