By March, I had already bought my ticket to Mexico. I was making the final preparations, when a question unexpectedly hit me: Who is a reporter anyway? I quickly responded to myself: Somebody who travels to some place to describe its peculiarities.
But yet another question appeared: What is a place?
“A point in space,” I replied.
What is space then?
I scratched my head and consulted the appropriate specialist literature. According to Immanuel Kant, space is a category with which the human mind perceives reality and beyond which it cannot reach. The philosopher claims that we cannot imagine any object that would not exist in space, much as we cannot imagine any event that would not exist in time.
We cannot rule out that the world in itself – the ‘real’ world – is spaceless, yet we, possessing the mind we have, are not able to see it as such; it’s as if we’ve been permanently equipped with special glasses that we are unable to remove.
Let us consider this possibility from the perspective of the reportage. It turns out that any form of travel could indeed amount to nothing more than walking in circles, and our description of a faraway land could merely be a description of a faraway corner of the reporter’s mind.
So is a reportage still a reportage?
Perhaps it’s psychology in camouflage?
Reader, I beg you to forgive me that I am not reporting on events in some exotic land in this issue, and that I didn’t fly out to Mexico. Regrettably, these sceptical reflections have hunted me down and immobilized me at home. I still can’t rid myself of them – both as a reporter and as a human being.
Translated from the Polish by Mark Ordon
