Here the celebrated Polish foreign correspondent invokes the writer's duty to exile himself, at least temporarily, by going out into the world and meeting "the Other" face-to-face. He begins with a definition of "the Other" as "non-Europeans, or non-whites, while fully aware that, for the latter, the former are just as much 'Others'". From the wars described by Herodotus to the European Renaissance, Kapuscinski argues, contact with the "Other" was defined by violence and colonisation; it was literature (Defoe, Swift, Voltaire, Goethe, the French encyclopédistes) that first drew the Other on his own terms, with "clarity and humanity"; further progress was made by the anthropology of Malinowski, who pitched his tent among the Trobriand islanders and discovered that "the white man in the tropics is the worst, least reliable source of information about local peoples and cultures". Is the modern world now a "global village"? Hardly - "more like the anonymous crowd at a major airport, a crowd of people rushing along in haste, mutually indifferent and ignorant". The only glimmer of hope in the author's eyes is in the generalisation of the Other, after Emmanuel Levinas, to any other person, and the recognition that you are an Other, too. The last words are in Joseph Conrad's hard-won English: "the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts".