Yesterday Barnaby attended a lovely tribute to the great writer and reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski in the equally lovely Celeste Bartos Room in the New York Public Library. (The one sour point was when the writers toasted Kapuscinski with vodka on stage. At the Believer event, too, participants drank on stage, and the audience laughed delightedly, as if at a charming transgression, and Barnaby, himself no teetotaller, squirmed—he cannot help thinking it augurs badly for the Republic when people are willing to applaud other people drinking.) Salman Rushdie talked of being forced by Sonny Mehta to concede the excellence of Kapuscinski's book The Emperor; and he recounted that he had once asked Kapuscinski how he had escaped from so many life-threatening situations, how he had waded into innumerable violent, murderous anarchies and walked out again. "I made myself unimportant," was Kapuscinski's reply—he conducted himself in such an unprepossessing manner that it would not have seemed worth anyone's time to shoot him. Later Philip Gourevitch expanded on this point, or rather recast it: in the violent anarchies into which Mr. Kapuscinski went, as a writer, he was unimportant, Gourevitch said—life was cheap; but being unimportant did not bother Kapuscinski.

Barnaby did not know Kapuscinski, although he, like many of the panelists, was greatly impressed and influenced by his book The Emperor, which he came to through a friend's recommendation and an unrelated interest in Ethiopia. But judging from the recollections of his friends and from the brief video clips shown, he seemed to have been, indeed, a charming and wonderful man—a good and humble man. Polish newspaper editor Adam Michnik told another story: He was going to Mexico, and Kapuscinski asked him to say hello to another Polish journalist who worked there. But when Michnik did so, this reporter replied, "Oh! Kapuscinski! I'd love to meet him." Michnik said, "But Kapuscinski says you have met!" The reporter denied it and denied it, but finally remembered that he had once met a skinny young Communist reporter named Riszek. "But he was not yet Kapuscinski then!"

It seemed to Barnaby that this humility was important not only because, as Rushdie said, it allowed Kapuscinski to survive the dangerous places that his work took him to; it was important also because it was only his humility that allowed him to really see those places. He may have been terrified, but he was not preoccupied with his own fear—and so because he had no distracting idea of his own importance, of the significance of his fear or the importance of his safety, he was able, even when afraid, to look with interest and attention at what was going on around him. Such humility, moreover, enabled him to find beauty even in what terrified, disgusted, and appalled—only the addition of a humble and disinterested faculty of wonder could have made something beautiful of Haile Selassie's corruption.

Barnaby, as it happens, spent all of the PEN World Voices festival wrestling with the question of humility and self-importance. He has listened to writers from a dozen nations boast and preen; and he has watched other writers, on the same panels, tacitly allow the boasting and preening because they did not like to combat it with boasting or preening of their own. No one likes to listen to boasting; but at the same time, writing does not take place in a vacuum, and it is no one else's responsibility to investigate whether you might be doing something wonderful—you must tell them. How to go about it? Over the course of the week, Barnaby observed several approaches. There is the Bugs Bunny Defense—tell the audience how many hundreds of thousands of books you have sold in France, but say it with a smile, as when Bugs Bunny turns to the camera and says, "Ain't I a stinker?" (This one works quite well; only the more sophisticated listeners will shudder at the artifice.) There is the Modest Screenwriter Defense—mention a successful movie you have written and modestly suggest that the audience may or may not have heard of it. (This one works perfectly; but it breaks down if you casually but not-quite-apropos-of-anything mention half a dozen famous actors who appeared in the movie.) There is the Shoot Yourself in the Foot Defense, which Barnaby practices, like so:

Pretty Danish woman: "Are you a writer, also?"
Barnaby: "Yes."
Pretty Danish woman: "What do you write?"
Barnaby: "Novels."
Pretty Danish woman: "What kind of novels?"
Barnaby: "Good ones."
(Barnaby looks at his watch and turns away.)

And then, we suppose, there is the Kapuscinski Defense, which can be learned either from the man, or from his books. In The Emperor we see, by a sort of reductio ad nauseam, what is the necessary, horrifying end of the elevation of human personality; in the author's life, as eulogized by his friends, and as highlighted by the interviews shown in the Bartos Room yesterday, we see the contrary, what can be achieved by diligence and self effacement. The Kapuscinski Defense works like this: Respect the interests of the person you are talking to enough to answer his questions, even when they are about your work—but not if they are about your person; respect your work enough to recognize that its merits are not your merits, so that you can talk about its virtues without becoming self important or self satisfied; and recognize, finally, that no man is his own judge, and that the best course is simply to pursue your work quietly and honestly, and let the question of its value, excellence, and importance be indefinitely deferred. Perhaps they will drink to you after your death, or perhaps they will forget you, but you were already immortal, because you lived not in yourself, but in the world.