in fact, to love the life.
The life. When I would go home, in between, exhausted and needing nurturing for a bit, people would always ask me the very same questions: Don't you get lonely? How do you pack? Isn't it hard being in different countries all the time, and alone? Don't you get tired of hotels?
It is just the opposite. I love hotels. I love the days. I love the mornings, the breakfasts alone. I love unraveling the mysteries around me. Once unraveled, I hold them for a moment, then pass them on, for if we correspondents are anything, we are couriers between cultures, carrying messages from people to people.
In later years I discussed my love for hotels with my friend, the great Egyptian writer, Ihsan Abdel Kuddous. Ihsan had a lovely wife, Lula, who liked to visit her grandchildren in California for weeks and weeks. "When my wife and I go to visit our son," he told me, "for three days I am very happy with the grandchildren. Then I need to move to a hotel--I need to--where I can watch people." I under stood so well. For people like us hotels are a microcosm of life. Life there is distilled; it is all there at our fingertips.
But being a correspondent is also very intricate work. You are called upon every moment and every day to exercise not only your romantic and adventurous propensities but also persistence and judgment. You have to judge constantly -- facts and people and why people are telling you things -- and you'd better be right. You certainly always need a healthy skepticism -- I have never found some one who believed in the perfectibility of mankind or of human systems to be a good journalist -- and you absolutely need a tough-minded reading of history, of political science, of anthropology, and of literature.
Intuition and training mingle in this work. You have to learn or sense what another person's "thing" is, what his or her interests are, how honest a man he is, why she is telling you things at all. You put things together, month after month and year after year, by going back and back and back to people and seeing how they change -- and then often judging the information by subtleties such as how that person has or has not changed. The whole process becomes narcotic, a little like a tournament in Riga for a chess maniac.
But actually there are basic journalistic questions that can be applied to and used in any society: "What is the nature of this regime? What is the present stand of the opposition? What is their policy toward national culture? Which are the groups that are trying to carry the country back to the past? How does the present military institution feel about the present as compared with the past? Who holds the real power? What is the position of women compared with the past? Who is the official leak?" I could go on and on.
One strange and compelling aspect of a correspondent's life is the way everything in life becomes speeded up. Because you are covering, day after day after day, things that other people might see only once in a lifetime or never, you live in a distinctly different "time." Sometimes I have felt as though I had lived five years in five weeks; by the time I was thirty-five, I felt as though I were 150. In a sense it is what the Old Testament scholars sometimes call "biblical time," the time that counts because it is so meaningful and so intense.
In this life friendships and working relationships -- and loves -- become speeded up, too. Friends and lovers tend to be people in the same floating-crap-game circle -- other correspondents, diplomats, men and women in international finance, missionaries, priests and ministers, and just seeking people who are curious about things. These people whom I like and love and count on were best described by E. M. Forster, when he wrote, "I believe in aristocracy, not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and
The life. When I would go home, in between, exhausted and needing nurturing for a bit, people would always ask me the very same questions: Don't you get lonely? How do you pack? Isn't it hard being in different countries all the time, and alone? Don't you get tired of hotels?
It is just the opposite. I love hotels. I love the days. I love the mornings, the breakfasts alone. I love unraveling the mysteries around me. Once unraveled, I hold them for a moment, then pass them on, for if we correspondents are anything, we are couriers between cultures, carrying messages from people to people.
In later years I discussed my love for hotels with my friend, the great Egyptian writer, Ihsan Abdel Kuddous. Ihsan had a lovely wife, Lula, who liked to visit her grandchildren in California for weeks and weeks. "When my wife and I go to visit our son," he told me, "for three days I am very happy with the grandchildren. Then I need to move to a hotel--I need to--where I can watch people." I under stood so well. For people like us hotels are a microcosm of life. Life there is distilled; it is all there at our fingertips.
But being a correspondent is also very intricate work. You are called upon every moment and every day to exercise not only your romantic and adventurous propensities but also persistence and judgment. You have to judge constantly -- facts and people and why people are telling you things -- and you'd better be right. You certainly always need a healthy skepticism -- I have never found some one who believed in the perfectibility of mankind or of human systems to be a good journalist -- and you absolutely need a tough-minded reading of history, of political science, of anthropology, and of literature.
Intuition and training mingle in this work. You have to learn or sense what another person's "thing" is, what his or her interests are, how honest a man he is, why she is telling you things at all. You put things together, month after month and year after year, by going back and back and back to people and seeing how they change -- and then often judging the information by subtleties such as how that person has or has not changed. The whole process becomes narcotic, a little like a tournament in Riga for a chess maniac.
But actually there are basic journalistic questions that can be applied to and used in any society: "What is the nature of this regime? What is the present stand of the opposition? What is their policy toward national culture? Which are the groups that are trying to carry the country back to the past? How does the present military institution feel about the present as compared with the past? Who holds the real power? What is the position of women compared with the past? Who is the official leak?" I could go on and on.
One strange and compelling aspect of a correspondent's life is the way everything in life becomes speeded up. Because you are covering, day after day after day, things that other people might see only once in a lifetime or never, you live in a distinctly different "time." Sometimes I have felt as though I had lived five years in five weeks; by the time I was thirty-five, I felt as though I were 150. In a sense it is what the Old Testament scholars sometimes call "biblical time," the time that counts because it is so meaningful and so intense.
In this life friendships and working relationships -- and loves -- become speeded up, too. Friends and lovers tend to be people in the same floating-crap-game circle -- other correspondents, diplomats, men and women in international finance, missionaries, priests and ministers, and just seeking people who are curious about things. These people whom I like and love and count on were best described by E. M. Forster, when he wrote, "I believe in aristocracy, not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and
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