THERE are two kinds of journalists: the one who lives captivated by the vortex of immediate events, always ready to provide an opinion about the last recent issue; and the one who, somehow immune to the demands of immediacy, tries to keep some distance from the events and makes more calm analysis. Journalist who are enslaved by novelty usually cannot be read after a few days or weeks. What they wrote becomes quickly outdated. But the second kind often provides insights and reflections that can be pleasantly read after many, many years. One of those rare analysts of Philippine society was Teodoro M. Kalaw, an intellectual I have written about several times before.
What attracted me to Kalaw from the beginning was the fact he wrote a very modern travel account in the modernista style that was in fashion in the Spanish-speaking world at the beginning of the 20th century. In the company of the young Manuel Quezon, who explicitly chose him thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge, he did not only make some controversial comments about neighboring Asian countries. He also traveled on the just recently inaugurated Tran-Siberian train, from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and even met a very prominent political leader in Moscow. Having read the novels of Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he came to realize that the political and social situation was extremely unstable and rightly predicted the Russian revolution a few years before it started. The title of the 1908 book is Hacia La Tierra del Zar (Toward the Land of the Czar) and deserves to be translated into English or Filipino. Kalaw was not the typical bourgeois trying to show off about a trip that very few Filipinos could afford to make: he was an engaged intellectual who observed the reality of other nations to bring lessons to the Filipino people. By observing and analyzing what other countries were experiencing, he wanted to bring some ideas to improve the material life of the Filipino people and eventually become free of United States control.
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