I could not have achieved this understanding without going to Zimbabwe. There's no substitute for the sniff on the ground. The Real Background Writing and political action are at best awkward bedfellows, because the purpose of writing is to achieve understanding, and the politician or activist must presume that he or she already understands, or else action would be impossible. Something similar is true of writing and journalism. The two are yin and yang , each carrying within itself the seed of its polar opposite.
Journalism is first of all about something .
Writing, by contrast, is by someone . The purpose of writing is to articulate the connections among all creatures and things and to tease out meaning from the always enigmatic and often banal-seeming universe we inhabit. To write requires a degree and kind of personal courage, certainly an ego, sometimes an arrogance tantamount to hubris, that one doesn't need merely to report. I mention The Quiet American pointedly. Greene himself said that it included more direct reportage than any of his other novels.