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Wojtyla is tireless, sometimes putting in 20-hour days, and known as a voracious reader. He is fluent in Latin, Italian, English, French and German, as well as Polish. Not Russian? Said a priest in his entourage when asked that question last week: "No Pole speaks Russian—but everyone understands it." A flip-up desk allows him to write while being driven in his car. He has a disconcerting habit of reading or writing while carrying on a conversation—and then displaying total recall of what was said.
The new Pope does not smoke, drinks wine only occasionally, and cares nothing for food, dress, or social distinctions. Says a Catholic editor in Cracow: "He will eat anything that's put in front of him." Another friend adds in jest: "If the Italians knew about his taste in wines, they would never have agreed to have him as Pope." Father Mieczyslaw Malinski, a former classmate of the new Pope's and a longtime friend, notes that "he is a man without pretensions. His driver told me: 'I feel ashamed of the Cardinal. He is always so shabbily dressed. Look at his shoes, shirts—they are worn out.' "
An avid skier, he takes a week off each year to schuss in the Tatras, dressed in baggy wool pants and old-style lace-up boots. His only concession to luxury is a pair of Head skis. Another friend, who calls him "one of the daredevil skiers in the Tatras,"adds, "He loves the thrill of it, the danger." Once, during a midwinter interview with TIME'S Bonn bureau chief, William Mader, Wojtyla gazed out the window of his residence and said, "I wish I could be out there now somewhere in the mountains, racing down into a valley. It's an extraordinary sensation."
Wojtyla is equally rhapsodic about canoeing and kayaking, and was in fact on a kayak trip when he was named a bishop in 1958. Wyszynski's staff could not find him for hours, but finally managed to get him back to Warsaw. "The Pope has nominated you to become a bishop," Wyszynski told him. "Will you accept? You know the Holy Father does not like to be turned down." Wojtyla thought for a moment, then said: "Yes. But it doesn't mean that I can't return to my kayak trip, does it?" It did not, and he was back on the lakes in a matter of hours. While camping, he takes along a portable altar for Mass and fashions a cross by lashing two paddles together.
Wojtyla's closest friends include artists and intellectuals as well as clerics. He is a lover of music—Bach, Poland's Henry Wieniawski and folk songs being favorites. A New Hampshire woman remembers that she once broke her leg while skiing in Poland and was serenaded in the nearby hospital by a group of fellow skiers; only later did she learn that the guitarist was Bishop Wojtyla. On retreats, he often takes the guitar along and sings late at night with fellow priests.
Wojtyla has written four books and more than 500 essays and articles. A Polish publisher is planning to put out soon a thin volume of his poetry on the theme of the fatherland. When Wojtyla visited Harvard University in 1976 to deliver an abstruse philosophical lecture, Summer School Director Thomas Crooks came away considering him "one of the most impressive men I've met in my life. He had an absolutely radiant personality."