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Pico iyer's 'the half known life' upends the conventional travel genre.

A mesmerizing collection of essays that vividly recalls sojourns to mostly contentious yet fabled realms, Pico Iyer's The Half Known Life upends the conventional travel genre by offering a paradoxical investigation of paradise.

Iyer's deeply reflective explorations at once affirm and challenge the French philosopher Blaise Pascal's statement that "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

After years of traversing the globe as the Dalai Lama's biographer and observing first-hand how people struggle with the search for a meaningful existence, Iyer, a noted British-American essayist of Tamil ancestry, has often wondered what kind of paradise can be found in our increasingly fractious world.

Since travel is often tied to escape/refuge as well as conquest/acquisition, the notion of paradise in today's context inevitably brings up attendant issues of loss, instability, violence and oppression. Voyaging from shadowy mosques and gardens of Iran (where the same Farsi word is used for both "garden" and "paradise") to the sterile skyline of North Korea; the deceptively peaceful lakes of Kashmir to the unyielding terrains of Ladakh and the tense sunlit lawns of Sri Lanka; the wrathful Old Testament landscape of Broome, Australia to the fog-shrouded, Bardo-like embankments of Varanasi; the clamorous streets of Jerusalem to the hushed temples of Koyasan, Japan, Iyer poetically depicts the otherworldly beauty of these places while trenchantly examining the paradox of utopia. Why do so many seeming paradises rupture in suffering and chaos? Is the serpent an inherent feature of paradise? In the process he also questions our idea of knowledge by positing that "the half known life is where so many of our possibilities lie."

While acknowledging that a flawed understanding of other cultures can create tragic consequences, Iyer believes "it's everything half known, from love to faith to wonder and terror," that actually guides the trajectory of one's life. Accordingly, there is usually a gap between our preconceived notion of happiness and a deeper, realer truth that we may intuit but tend to overlook in our pursuit of happiness. "The places we avoid [are] often closer to us than the ones we eagerly seek out," Iyer insightfully observes.

The notion of home/truth versus exile/illusion is fluid one — Iyer is less interested in binary thinking than in embracing contradictions. In his view, it's precisely our imperfect grasp of reality that both invites us to commune with other worlds and teaches us to be humble when we find ourselves untethered from the familiar. Therefore Iyer's idea of paradise, in embracing both engagement and conscious solitude, affirms yet also modifies Pascal's isolationist sentiment. In some way Iyer's worldview is closer to Olga Tokarczuk's Boschian universe of provisionary heretics in The Books of Jacob , and shares more kinship with limbo or hell than what we normally envision as the kingdom of perfect happiness.

In acknowledging suffering as an indispensable feature of paradise, Iyer emphatically renounces a pristine image of Eden, as embodied by North Korea's "massive stage set, all Legoland skyscrapers and false fronts." Seeing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as a necessary fall, and the Buddha's departure from his princely estate as a conscious acceptance of human frailties, Iyer concludes that a true paradise is only attainable through displacement.

While The Half Known Land is not without its romantic seductions — Iyer's indelible prose often conjures the hypnotic, teeming vista of a David Lean epic or the evocative interior of a Mira Nair picture — his descriptions are suffused with an awareness of loss. Although we are deeply enchanted by Iyer's recounting of his mother's fairytale childhood in Kashmir's alpine hills, we also understand his wish to relinquish this illusory past:

"Could [my mother's] memories of Kashmir still be found? Should they? The very British who had raised her and educated her so beautifully had also cut the honeymooners' valley into pieces and left it in the hands of implacable [Pakistan, Indian and Chinese] rivals ...."

In another bittersweet story about Kashmir, a Westerner's dream of escape turns into a long lasting, sustainable engagement with the region after the man suffered a devastating loss. In Iyer's riveting anecdotes, a sudden intimacy with death brings one closer to glimpses of paradise. This unflinching yet organic acceptance of death seems to nullify any hubristic attempt toward absolutes. Iyer's discussion of the Dalai Lama's pragmatism in treating various religious traditions as complementary medical systems — rather than mystical truths — seems especially apt. By concentrating on relieving human suffering, His Holiness's teachings are situated in the here and now, rather than in any theoretical exaltation of eternal life.

Finally, The Half Known Life offers us a revelatory refresher on American literature. Iyer's intimations of mortality help us embrace Herman Melville's visceral terror of the unknown in Moby Dick , and his engagement of diverse worlds brings to mind both Emily Dickinson's dwelling in possibility ("The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise") and Elizabeth Bishop's ambiguous epiphany in "Questions of Travel":

"Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free."

Thúy Đinh is a freelance critic and literary translator. Her work can be found at thuydinhwriter.com. She tweets @ThuyTBDinh

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THE HALF KNOWN LIFE: In Search of Paradise , by Pico Iyer

Ten times over 12 years, Pico Iyer accompanied the Dalai Lama across Japan. Inevitably, at every large public gathering, someone would ask what to do after having been disappointed by a dream not realized. The dreams themselves differed — peace in the Middle East, a reversal of climate change or hope for a relationship — but the disillusionment was always the same.

“Wrong dream!” the Dalai Lama would respond.

“The Half Known Life ,” with this vignette at its center, takes the Dalai Lama’s sentiment to heart. How to reconcile our wishes and hopes with reality? Where does paradise really lie? What can a secular seeker learn from the world’s holiest places? In Iyer’s hands , the search for paradise, the way out of the ego, doubles as an internal journey. Skittering from the gardens of Iran’s holiest mosques to the car-free streets of North Korea’s capital, from the avenues of East Belfast to war-torn Kashmir’s Dal Lake houseboats, from the outback of aboriginal Australia to the Ethiopian chapels of Jerusalem, from the empty moonscape of Ladakh to the massive stone Buddhas of Sri Lanka, from the graveyards of Japan’s mountain temples to the burning ghats of Varanasi, this elliptical odyssey, graced with occasional notes of light, finds itself by dwelling in the shadows. The places we avoid, Iyer says, are “so often closer to us than the ones we eagerly seek out.”

No stranger to the travel genre, the prolific Iyer is after something more here. His chronicle, which begins with an appreciation of the sophistication, beauty and culture of Iran, becomes a requiem for a world — and an existence — estranged from itself. There are only two things he is afraid of, he tells us: serpents and heights; and there are plenty of both here, along with crypts, tombstones, graveyards, burning corpses and flickering lights, “an infinity of reflections” in “a treasure house of riddles.” A lonely, nostalgic and haunted quality emerges as Iyer casually intersperses bits of his personal history. There is a formula to many of the chapters: He touches down in a new place, checks into a lodging and finds a taxi or guide to take him to the next site. We meet his drivers, listen to their surprising conversation and extract unexpected wisdom. “The writer’s job,” Iyer opines, “is to dismantle the very notion of Other by showing how your hurts belong to me, as my hopes do to you.” But empathy is not the only thing going on; Iyer is also looking within. And as he looks, things get dizzier and dizzier.

Iyer is not a Buddhist, but he has a Buddhist sensibility. Born in Oxford and educated in elite English boarding schools, he is a secular writer with an eye for the spiritual. His book has the soft ring of a classic Buddhist meditation strategy: In order to understand the emptiness of the ego, one must first find the self as it appears. This might sound easy, but in practice it is incredibly frustrating. The more one tries to zero in on the self, the more elusive it becomes. The process is often likened to a dog chasing its own tail — round and round you go until the very giddiness of the process whirls you into an unexpected understanding. “The Half Known Life” brings this uncertainty to the fore. By the end of the book, Iyer wakes to a fog-drenched Varanasi, the holy Indian city of the dead. He can barely see 30 feet in front of him. Fires from burning bodies add smoke to the mist. We are in a “half known realm” filled with “ghostly towers and palaces” where the only paradise is a “candlelit back alleyway” that shows the way home. Iyer references Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville as he gathers his conclusions; both writers inferred that “a keen sense of all that could never be fathomed” is the way to paradise.

For Iyer, this thing that could never be fathomed — the self, the past, one’s ancestors, the world — is also, first and foremost, death. It is everywhere in this book. Our lives are only half known, he concludes, because we can never tell what the final act will be. And we will be unable to reflect upon it after it occurs. “The fact that nothing lasts is the reason why everything matters,” he realizes while in the Japanese monastery of Koyasan. But it is in Varanasi that he brings it all together. As an Englishman with relatives in India, he had always avoided Varanasi. “Too dirty,” they had warned him. But it is there that he makes a critical connection. “Death is not the opposite of life,” he writes, quoting the Varanasi scholar Diana Eck. It is, rather, “the opposite of birth.”

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The nowhere man

By the time I was nine, I was already used to going to school by transatlantic plane, to sleeping in airports, to shuttling back and forth, three times a year, between my parents' Indian home in California and my boarding school in England. While I was growing up, I was never within 6,000 miles of the nearest relative-and came, therefore, to learn how to define relations in non-familial ways. From the time I was a teenager, I took it for granted that I could take my budget vacations (as I did) in Bolivia and Tibet, China and Morocco. It never seemed strange to me that a girlfriend might be half a world (or ten hours flying time) away, that my closest friends might be on the other side of a continent or sea.

It was only recently that I realised that all these habits of mind and life would scarcely have been imaginable in my parents' youth; that the very facts and facilities that shape my world are all distinctly new developments, and mark me as a modern type.

It was only recently, in fact, that I realised that I am an example, perhaps, of an entirely new breed of people, a transcontinental tribe of wanderers that is multiplying as fast as international telephone lines and frequent flyer programmes. We are the transit loungers, forever heading to the departure gate. We buy our interests duty-free, we eat our food on plastic plates, we watch the world through borrowed headphones. We pass through countries as through revolving doors, resident aliens of the world, impermanent residents of nowhere. Nothing is strange to us, and nowhere is foreign. We are visitors even in our own homes.

This is not, I think, a function of affluence so much as of simple circumstance. I am not, that is, a jet-setter pursuing vacations from Marbella to Phuket; I am a product of a movable sensibility, living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly mongrel. I am a multinational soul on a multicultural globe where more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone, or going to school; I fold up my self and carry it round with me as if it were an overnight case.

The modern world seems increasingly made for people like me. I can plop myself down anywhere and find myself in the same relation of familiarity and strangeness: Lusaka is scarcely more strange to me than the foreigners' England in which I was born, the America where I am registered as an "alien," and the almost unvisited India that people tell me is my home. I can fly from London to San Francisco to Osaka and feel myself no more a foreigner in one place than another; all of them are just locations-pavilions in some intercontinental Expo-and I can work or live or love in any of them. All have Holiday Inns, direct-dial phones, CNN and DHL. All have sushi, Thai restaurants and Kentucky Fried Chicken. My office is as close as the nearest fax machine or modem. Roppongi is West Hollywood is Leblon.

This kind of life offers an unprecedented sense of freedom and mobility: tied down nowhere, we can pick and choose among locations. Ours is the first generation that can go off to visit Tibet for a week, or meet Tibetans down the street; ours is the first generation to be able to go to Nigeria for a holiday to find our roots-or to find that they are not there. At a superficial level, this new internationalism means that I can meet, in the Hilton coffee shop, an Indonesian businessman who is as conversant as I am with Magic Johnson and Madonna. At a deeper level, it means that I need never feel estranged. If all the world is alien to us, all the world is home.

I have learned to love foreignness. In any place I visit, I have the privileges of an outsider: I am an object of interest, and even fascination; I am a person set apart, able to enjoy the benefits of the place without paying the taxes. And the places themselves seem glamorous to me-romantic-as seen through foreign eyes: distance on both sides lends enchantment. Policemen let me off speeding tickets, girls want to hear the story of my life, pedestrians will gladly point me to the nearest golden arches. Perpetual foreigners in the transit lounge, we enjoy a kind of diplomatic immunity; and, living off room service in our hotel rooms, we are never obliged to grow up, or even, really, to be ourselves.

Thus many of us learn to exult in the blessing of belonging to what feels like a whole new race. It is a race, as Salman Rushdie says, of "people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves-because they are so defined by others-by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves." And when people argue that our very notion of wonder is eroded, that alienness itself is as seriously endangered as the wilderness, that more and more of the world is turning into a single synthetic monoculture, I am not worried: a Japanese version of a French fashion is something new, I say, not quite Japanese and not truly French. Comme des Gar?ons hybrids are the art form of the time.

And yet, sometimes, I stop myself and think. What kind of heart is being produced by these new changes? Must I always be a None of the Above? When the stewardess presents me with disembarkation forms, what do I fill in? My passport says one thing, my face another; my accent contradicts my eyes. Place of residence, final destination, even marital status are not much easier to fill in; usually I just tick "other."

Beneath all the boxes, where do we place ourselves? How does one fix a moving object on a map? I am not an exile, really, nor an immigrant; not deracinated, I think, any more than I am rooted. I have not felt the oppression of war, nor found ostracism in the places where I do alight; I scarcely feel severed from a home I have scarcely known. Yet is "citizen of the world" enough to comfort me?

Alienation, we are taught from kindergarten onwards, is the condition of our time. This is the century of exiles and refugees, of boat people and statelessness; the time when traditions have been abolished, and men become closer to machines. This is the century of estrangement: more than a third of all Afghans live outside Afghanistan; the second city of the Khmers is a refugee camp; the second tongue of Beverly Hills is Farsi.

To understand the modern state, we are often told, we must read VS Naipaul, and see how people estranged from their cultures mimic people estranged from their roots. Naipaul is the definitive modern traveller in part because he is the definitive symbol of modern rootlessness; his singular qualification for his wandering is not his stamina, nor his bravado, nor his love of exploration-it is his congenital displacement. Here is a man who was a foreigner at birth, a citizen of an exiled community set down on a colo-nised island. Here is a man for whom every arrival is enigmatic, a man without a home-except for an India to which he stubbornly returns, only to be reminded of his distance from it. The strength of Naipaul is the poignancy of Naipaul: the poignancy of a wanderer who tries to go home, but is not taken in, and is accepted by another home only so long as he admits that he is a lodger there.

There is, however, another way of apprehending foreignness, and that is the way of Nabokov. In him we see an avid cultivation of novelty: he collects foreign worlds with a connoisseur's delight, he sees foreign words as toys to play with, and exile as the state of kings. This touring aristocrat can even relish the pleasures of low culture precisely because they are the things that his own high culture lacks: the motel and the summer camp, the roadside attraction and the hot fudge sundae. I recognise in Nabokov a European's love for the US rooted in the US's very youthfulness and heedlessness; I recognise in him the sense that the newcomer's viewpoint may be the one most conducive to bright ardour. Unfamiliarity, in any form, breeds content.

Nabokov shows us that if nowhere is home, everywhere is. That instead of taking alienation as our natural state, we can feel partially adjusted everywhere. That the outsider at the feast does not have to sit in the corner alone, taking notes; he can plunge into the pleasures of his new home with abandon.

We airport hoppers can, in fact, go through the world as through a house of wonders, picking up something at every stop, and taking the whole globe as our playpen. And we can mix and match as the situation demands. "Nobody's history is my history," Kazuo Ishiguro, a great spokesman for the privileged homeless, once said to me, and then went on, "Whenever it was convenient for me to become very Japanese, I could become very Japanese, and then, when I wanted to drop it, I would just become this ordinary Englishman." Instantly, I felt a shock of recognition: I have a wardrobe of selves from which to choose. And I savour the luxury of being able to be an Indian in Cuba (where people are starving for yoga and Rabindranath Tagore), an American in Thailand; or an Englishman in New York.

And so we go on circling the world, six miles above the ground, displaced from time, above the clouds, with all our needs attended to. We listen to announcements in three languages. We disembark at airports that are self-sufficient communities, with hotels, gymnasia and places of worship. At customs we have nothing to declare but ourselves.

But what price do we pay for all this? I sometimes think that this mobile way of life is as disquietingly novel as high-rises, or the video monitors that are re-wiring our consciousness. Even as we fret about the changes our progress wreaks in the air and on the airwaves, in forests and on streets, we hardly worry about the changes it is working in ourselves, the new kind of soul that is being born out of a new kind of life. Yet this could be the most dangerous development of all, and the least examined.

For us in the transit lounge, disorientation is as alien as affiliation. We become professional observers, able to see the merits and deficiencies of anywhere, to balance our parents' viewpoints with their enemies' position. Yes, we say, of course it's terrible, but look at the situation from Saddam's point of view. I understand how you feel, but the Chinese had their own cultural reasons for Tiananmen Square. Fervour comes to seem to us the most foreign place of all.

Seasoned experts at dispassion, we are less good at involvement, or suspensions of disbelief; at, in fact, the abolition of distance. We are masters of the aerial perspective, but touching down becomes more difficult. Unable to get stirred by the raising of a flag, we are sometimes unable to see how anyone could be stirred. I sometimes think that this is how Rushdie, the great analyst of this condition, somehow became its victim. He had juggled homes for so long, so adroitly, that he forgot how the world looks to someone who is rooted-in country or belief. He had chosen to live so far from affiliation that he could no longer see why people choose affiliation in the first place. Besides, being part of no society means one is accountable to no one, and need respect no laws outside one's own. If single nation people can be fanatical as terrorists, we can end up ineffectual as peace keepers.

We become, in fact, strangers to belief itself, unable to comprehend many of the rages and dogmas that animate (and unite) people. Conflict itself seems inexplicable to us, simply because partisanship is; we have the agnostic's inability to retrace the steps of faith. I could not begin to fathom why some Muslims would think of murder after hearing about The Satanic Verses: yet sometimes I force myself to recall that it is we, in our floating scepticism, who are the exceptions, that in China or Iran, in Korea or Peru, it is not so strange to give up one's life for a cause.

We end up, then, a little like non-aligned nations, confirming our reservations at every step. We tell ourselves, self-servingly, that nationalism breeds monsters, and choose to ignore the fact that internationalism breeds them too. Ours is the culpability not of the assassin, but of the bystander who takes a snapshot of the murder. Or, when the revolution catches fire, hops on the next plane out.

In any case, the issues, in the transit lounge, are passing; a few hours from now, they will be a thousand miles away. Besides, this is a foreign country, we have no interests here. The only thing we have to fear are hijackers-passionate people with beliefs.

Sometimes, though, just sometimes, I am brought up short by symptoms of my condition. I have never bought a house of any kind, and my ideal domestic environment, I sometimes tell my friends, is a hotel room. I have never voted, or ever wanted to vote, and I eat in restaurants three times a day. I have never supported a nation (in the Olympic games, say) or represented "my country" in anything. Even my name is weirdly international, because my "real name" is one that makes sense only in the home where I have never lived.

I choose to live in the US in part because it feels more alien the longer I stay there. I love being in Japan because it reminds me, at every turn, of my foreignness. When I want to see if any place is home, I must subject the candidates to a battery of tests. Home is the place of which one has memories but no expectations.

If I have any deeper home, it is, I suppose, in English. My language is the house I carry around with me as a snail his shell; and in my lesser moments I try to forget that mine is not the language spoken in America, or even, really, by any member of my family.

Yet even here, I find, I cannot place my accent, or reproduce it as I can the tones of others. And I am so used to modifying my English inflections according to whom I am talking to-an American, an Englishman, a villager in Nepal, a receptionist in Paris-that I scarcely know what kind of voice I have.

I wonder, sometimes, if this new kind of non-affiliation may not be alien to something fundamental in the human state. The refugee at least harbours passionate feelings about the world he has left-and generally seeks to return there; the exile at least is propelled by some kind of strong emotion away from the old country and towards the new-indifference is not an exile emotion. But what does the transit lounger feel? What are the issues that we would die for? What are the passions that we would live for?

Airports are among the only sites in public life where emotions are hugely sanctioned, in block capitals. We see people weep, shout, kiss in airports; we see them at the furthest edges of excitement and exhaustion. Airports are privileged spaces where we can see the primal states writ large-fear, recognition, hope. But there are some of us, perhaps, sitting at the departure gate, boarding passes in hand, who feel neither the pain of separation nor the exultation of wonder; who alight with the same emotions with which we embarked; who go down to the baggage carousel and watch our lives circling, circling, circling, waiting to be claimed.

THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER

Alas, with essays I could probably choose a hundred old favorites, or a different every hour of the day. But on this particular blazing autumn morning in Japan, the sun burning down out of a cloudless blue sky onto the rusting reds and oranges and lemon-yellows of my local park, the ones that come to me instantly include:

“Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (from Essays: First Series , 1841)

“Walking” by Henry David Thoreau (from a lecture, 1861)

“Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard (from Teaching a Stone to Talk , 1982)

“Late Victorians” by Richard Rodriguez (from Harper’s , October 1990)

“Speaking in Tongues” by Zadie Smith (from The New York Review of Books , February 2009)

“On Going a Journey” by William Hazlitt (from The New Monthly Magazine , 1822)

“The Critic as Artist” by Oscar Wilde (from Intentions , 1891)

“Mrs Gupta Never Rang” by Jan Morris (from City Improbable , 2005)

The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory by Derek Walcott (published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993)

“Reflections on Writing” by Henry Miller (from Wisdom of the Heart , 1942)

(With sincerest apologies to Donald Richie, Joan Didion, Somerset Maugham, James Wood, Thomas Merton, S.J. Perelman, Norman Mailer, Joseph Brodsky, Virginia Woolf, Woody Allen, Kenneth Tynan, Hunter Thompson, Thomas de Quincey and many others, any one of whom I would probably include in this list if you asked me again an hour from now.)

About Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is one of the world’s foremost travel writers. The author of over ten books, including the seminal Video Night in Katmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So Far East , Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions , and Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World . He was named by The Utne Reader one of the world’s “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life” and The New Yorker has said that “As a guide to far flung places, Iyer can hardly be surpassed. His essays regularly appear in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, National Geographic, Time, The Times Literary Supplement, and many others. He lives in suburban Japan.

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The New York Times

Opinionator | the joy of less.

The Joy of Less

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

Related reading in this series: “ The Limits of Control ” by Leonard Mlodinow

“ Simplicity at a Price ,” Reader Comments

“ Happy Like God ” by Simon Critchley

“ Beyond the Sea ” by Simon Critchley

Pico Iyer’s most recent book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” is just out in paperback.

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hey Pico, beautiful piece:) i really agree on the point u made towards the end. once you have decided on treading an unknown path with full determination, chances are you end up finding that ur decision was correct. even though financially the situation may not be up to the mark, but that mental peace and happiness is second to none:) take care ciao

I loved this article. It sums me up completely. Simplicity is divine. When I was younger I moved from Canada to the United States, in search of action. What I got was stress. I’m older now and living back in Canada, and let me tell you, having health insurance locked in for life rules. Enough said.

My best friend is an english teacher in Korea and lives a life most people ought to envy: no car and no stuff. Just a quiet and spacious apartment, peace and simplicity.

For all you who crave action, wealth and status: have at it.

There are many similarities between Mr Iyer’s way of life and mine. Although not known in the world of journalism and letters as well as Mr Iyer is, I too began a similar odyssey about 14 years ago. I have come to think of this as my quest to “right-size” my lifestyle. I jumped off the editorial executive ladder at a major computer magazine company, a path I had taken after 15 years climbing the management ranks as an editor in the news business. I now make an adequate living with the writing craft. My accomplishments are not as broadly known as Mr Iyer’s, but they satisfy me, and they pay the rent. I happen to split my time in rural Monterey County, California, and as a writer/photographer in residence at a Shinto community outside Kyoto, where I spend several months each year contributing to their English editorial products. I don’t make a great deal of money, but I do make enough to be able to pay through the nose for health insurance and to take care of other basic needs. People seem envious of the flexibility I have. Some remark that it seems like I have already retired. Far from it; I work hard but not excessively. I take each assignment as it comes and am grateful. My life differs in that I have embraced technology, and find that for me it enhances the sense of freedom and flexibility to pursue this simpler life. I’ve learned that technology need not complicate life, but used properly can help with the simplification. The Internet and cell telephony allow me to tackle an occasional writing project for U.S.-clients when I’m living in Japan, for example. Mr Iyer is dead on right in his last paragraph where he sums up freedom versus security. I would only add — as I tell my curious friends — that every decision we make in life has both a price and payoff.

It’s beautiful what simplicity–either forced or voluntary–can teach us about ourselves…about Life.

Somehow, when removed from the things we think we want, with time, we find the things we need. This has always been my favorite part about traveling, the clarity that arrives just after the longing dissipates.

I’m in a boat similar to yours: living in central Nigeria just seven months after I declared that I’d never leave the bourgeois lifestyle of Western Los Angeles. But here I am, trading beautiful (hot) people, cashmere blankets, and “organic food” for beautiful people, a blanket of stars, and organic food.

Life has a funny way of giving us exactly what we need.

Obi Okorougo //theuberman.com

I don’t think it’s about living in Japan especially, I think it’s about leaving behind all those things that tend over time to clutter up our lives – employment, culture, family, friends, mortages, houses, cars, furniture, expectations – in a word, stuff … I ran away to sea with my wife at 30 in a sail boat, had kids in the Pacific Islands, and worked, in the Middle East mostly. Twenty-five years later we returned home and social pressures had receded – parents had died, siblings were distant and old friends had gone their way. We built a house, set up our kids, and enjoyed our own culture again for a few years – the food, wine, concerts, movies, books, new friends – but now stuff is staring to accumulate. It’s time to have a garage sale, rent out the house and go to sea – we kept the sail boat. I would probably sit here, a grumpy old man counting our dwindling savings, but my brave wife will drag me away again and I’ll learn to love it.

It is amazing, money has no correlation with happiness after a certain period. But I would not want to live without money.

There is never an end to needs and our needs are more a reflection of what our friends have and what is expected that we have.

It has become clearer that my needs are very transitionary. I have moved 6 times in the last 10 years and twice across the continent.

When moving across the continent, I have to choose what I can carry, it is far more expensive to ship then to re-purchase. And what is surprising is the number of boxes that go un opened when I move to the next house. I probably do not need them or probably because it is not accepted that I have them.

But still I purchase, hoping, that this time my purchase will bring me value and happiness.

21 years in kyoto and you dont speak the language? I would call that ignorant, and wouldn’t admit to it on line lol

Thank you for this absolutely beautiful essay and I plan to print it out as a reminder/meditation of my own two rooms within a large home and my life quieting down- in fits and starts- to a goal of tranquility.Making peace with the world and self is not an easy task- to be aware of collisions of history and the daily jars of crime and accidents or the frantic insistence of social tasks emptied of meaning- these must be set aside. But one needn’t cross an ocean to find this serenity- I tred a path of Persian carpets between a mistress suite and kitchen like a pilgrim or empress. “The soul selects her own society” – Emily Dickinson

You state your life choices with sobriety and modesty, almost as if they didn’t amount to much more than a quirky personal path. In my view, however, they’re highly charged with relevance and urgency for people in “rich” countries like the US. Conspicuous consumption, material envy, gigantic houses and cars, the willingness to eat, drink, and swallow anything, and so on are symptoms of a grave spiritual disease with terrible consequences for everyone concerned, and your life choices point toward a remedy.

The question is, how can we persuade more people to embark upon such a rewarding and healthy life? Individuals and families would benefit, of course, but if we achieve critical mass, so would communities, societies, and the whole of humanity!

Of course, we all can’t live the Good Life in an Indiana Chateau.

3 months ago I moved from a Park Avenue apartment to Hong Kong, and I share many of the sentiments you experienced in your move to Japan. Last week I caved and had cable installed; this week I am asking myself why. I think the wants and needs of life are in constant battle with eath other, and our role is to balance them so as to create the most comfortable environment for us. But as we tread this path, we must also have our loved ones in mind, which makes our goal of personal balance that much more complicated.

Over the years Pico Iyer’s travel insights aided by his skill in the craft of writing and his ease of language made for fun reading and evoked one’s own memories of exotic adventures. His “the joy of less”, while a welcome and refreshingly more peaceful view of life is devoid of profundity. Several years ago Pico spoke with professional delight at a book signing talk in Bellingham, Washington. There, hoping to meet a wise man, I sensed that this bright writer had an inner weakness and yearning. Now he is apparently stronger and wiser but still his eloquence imprisons him in golden chains. Freedom comes from discipline and one is spiritual and creative only when one is free. Understanding is silent. I wish him well on his journey.

I wonder if Pico Iyer would feel the same if he did not return to the United States “every three months or so”.

To be able to appreciate just being is one of life’s greatest joys.

A lovely article. I lived in Japan for a while too – I also LOVED having very little media I understood: little TV, few films, and virtually no advertising!!!

I do feel it necessary to point out two things:

One does not need to live in a foreign country to find simplicity. (It can, however, make it easier – it’s easier to buck the status quo if you can’t figure out what it is, will never be a “true” member of it, can’t understand it, etc…)

Many, many, people in Japan live like you once did in Manhattan – under A LOT of pressure, underpaid, etc… (I know several Japanese who found their solace in the US! Works both ways, I suppose).

One of my most peaceful experiences was during a three week permaculture course I took in the San Juan Islands. Lived in a tent, primarily vegan diet, wood-fired shower, composting toilets – spent all day surrounded by interesting intelligent people learning, and my free time swimming, reading, and drawing.

It is a truism that what is good for the individual is not good for the group and vice versa. We cannot all opt-out. Ironically, mass consumerism and economies of scale make opting-out less expensive and easier for those that so choose. To each their own, but we also need leaders to run our companies, to run our economies and to lead our nations. We need people who want to work hard. That enjoy a challenge. People who enjoy their work and work towards goals be they better understanding the world in which we live or how to build a better iPod that helps the global community come together and communicate with one another. We need people who are content to sit in a small apartment and reflect on the world in which we live, and we need those that go to the four corners of the globe to make that world possible. As Japan is a net importer of energy and a net exporter of manufactured goods that means many people are essentially needed to support those that are satisfied with less, so long as their basic needs are met. Think about that. Nameste.

Inspiring words, Pico, that you will probably never read – will you really want to upset your tranquility by reading online blather at the bottom of your column?

Anyway, there is a lot to appreciate in your sentiment, and it resonates with this middle-aged child of the (late) ’60s who grew up with BOTH (Jewish-American) middle class striving and laid-back hippie crunchy-granola-ness running at cross purposes.

We came to Israel a decade ago for a life of meaning, but have been more surprised by how we can enjoy a (slightly) less material life than in America. OK, we have a car, but it’s one car and not two. We can leave work to pick up a sick child. We have many friends (unfortunately not us) with one or both parents in the neighborhood and actively involved in their and their kids’ lives in a way that just doesn’t happen in most Jewish-American middle class existence.

Israel is also at a different stage of development (I use that word advisedly) than America. We are still mostly driven by survival needs, and that has positive ideas as well as (very obvious) negative ones. The real values still apply here, more so than we believe are possible in America.

Pico, what you said was not new – as you quoted many others saying similar things, but it is nice to be reminded of it. Continued good wishes for enjoying the simple(r) life…

Lovely essay. Thank you.

Yes, Pico, yes. As long as our dreams are not bad (it is the guilty conscience that denies happiness), we can be bounded in a nutshell and call ourselves the kings of infinite space.

I have always enjoyed Pico Iyer’s writing immensely, and remember in particular a cover story he did for the New York Times magazine several years ago about the psychological and physical effects of constant inter-continental jet travel. This article supplies a powerful counterpoint to that one.

Anthony De Mello’s Awareness was the milestone book in my life. Had to read it about 6 times before I really began to understand and accept I was asleep. Once I woke up my life began to make sense. Now trying to wake up those around me too.

Thank you for this lovely reflection. My wife and I spend the bulk of each year teaching at a university near Kyoto, and I often marvel, as we sit in the tatami room of our three room apartment (luxury!), how content we are with the absolute simplicity of our lives. We have no car and no cell phone, but the teaching fills our lives with creativity and service and inter-generational juice and Kyoto is a magnificent playground. This simple day to day richness fills our lives with a vitality that surpasses understanding.

The tenth of an inch of difference between heaven and hell is accepting things as they are or wishing them to be otherwise.

— Zen

I believe it all…

…except for not thinking about…or missing…Park Ave, Rockefeller Center (Maison du Chocolat!…although there is one in Tokyo), and, of course, the splendors of Central Park (Shakespeare In The Park begins this Wednesday.), PBS, The Met, The Frick, and all the diversity and intricate wonders of my home sweet home, NYC…

…maybe I should Invite Pico and his companion to have dinner over here and gaze out at my midtown view of this fabulous place. Late, we can all stroll over to Maison du Chocolat for the best pistachio ice cream in the world as dessert.

Even as he says, I agree: The Pursuit of What Matters is not about a place but about a state of mind. And that requires the kind of practical life he describes which can be pursued anywhere, and must be attended to everywhere….

What's Next

Peeking into Pico Iyer’s Perspectives

Like an ivory frontispiece to a magniloquent tome, wherein lay the annals of a nation splayed across its vellum pages, stood the Raffles Hotel, monumentalising old-world resplendence and modern mystique in its grand visage. Stark against the Singapore sun and sky stood its frosty white marble pillars and alabaster walls, chilled by both its grandeur and the modern air-conditioning.

Sweating from the heat and the imposing event ahead, we students approached, with caution, unsure of where amidst these colonnades, balustrades and quadrangles we would find our session with internationally acclaimed travel writer Pico Iyer, author of The Man Within My Head (2012), Sun After Dark (2004) and The Lady and the Monk (1991). This exclusive engagement on 14 August 2019 for National University of Singapore (NUS) literature students arose on occasion of Mr Iyer becoming the first Writer-in-Residence in the new Raffles Writer’s Residency fellowship, set up by the Raffles Hotel. For the joint organisation and coordination of this opportunity, Associate Professor Anne Thell and the Raffles Hotel receive our sincerest thanks!

We eventually found the venue for the session: Jubilee Lounge. This in turn found us jubilant at our arrival in time – and, mutually, the hotel staff equally jubilant at their successful wrangling of a dishevelled group of students through the labyrinthine hotel and into this immaculate room. Thence began the magic of the moment, manifest by the man of the moment: Mr Iyer opened—with characteristic courtesy, asking leave of the audience to read a passage from his notable work, The Global Soul (2000)—with a reading of a quasi-autobiographical scene of his burning house set ablaze by California forest fires and his harrowing escape.

With a meditative coda, Mr Iyer’s tone dispossessed itself from that different time and turned with warmth to us, instead. With his eyes gleaming with learning and reflection, and his smile—genial, assured and knowing—he invited us into conversation on the notion of home, initiating this topic with intellectual and spiritual verve as he expounded on Buddha’s Fire Sermon, in which the image of a burning house features most prominently as a symbol for the stripping away of the pleasure and perspective of visual indulgence for one to bear witness to the truth. Indeed, for Mr Iyer, a cosmopolitan supra-cityscape like Singapore—with its global connections, globalist orientations and sparse land space—was conducive for the making a global, mobile people who would be especially prepared to take their sense of home with them wherever they went, rather than tether ‘home’ to an expression of a thing or a place.

What constitutes home—for us, for anyone? Our responses were too varied to capture in this brief essay, but I will offer a skeletal report: One English Literature major alumnus, Ong Lin Kang, proffered the observation that the mobility of a people whose homes could be ensouled and so carried with them despite their travels had to be supported by a certain status and privilege. Given this, the increasingly vociferous reactions and sentiments of xenophobia, especially with respect to immigration, could be seen as a conflict between those who sense of home is physical and those for whom it is not physical. Mr. Iyer averred and supplemented this idea—and this in turn prompted Augustine Chay, a current postgraduate student, to ask about Mr Iyer’s views on the ethics of representation in the craft of a literary practitioner of travel writing, as to whether one should take pains to reorient unconscious biases to one’s conscious values. Showing utmost respect to the audience, Mr Iyer asked leave to answer the question posed, in another way. He related his own complex cultural programming: American by residence; British by birth; Indian by ethnicity, citizenry and ancestry; and Japanese by residence and through marriage. Only with an exceptional exercise of self-awareness and self-abnegation could he identify how one or another cultural lens contributed to his perspective – the perspective through which he views the subjects of which he writes, and with which he narrates his views to readers through his work. More often than not, however, it would be a nigh-impossible task. The question then was for readers to identify, and then de-orient themselves from, the writer’s unconscious biases, in relation to the reader’s conscious values. This was why he stood by the words he said in an interview in 2006 that “imaginative imperialism when writing about the West’s meeting with the East […] never concerned [him] too much” – not because it did not concern him at all, but because there was little, if anything at all, that he could do to operationalise that concern. How he could do anything about it, however, would occur in his teaching: guiding others towards developing a critical literary intelligence and independence to do the work of reading with relish, responsibility and resistance.

On the matter of how a writer operationalised his craft, Owen David Harry, another postgraduate student in English Literature, was interested in what Mr Iyer’s actual writing practices were. Mr Iyer was glad to divulge his experience – and revealed that of the questions students had prepared for this session, he was looking forward the most to attempting an answer to this one. He informed us that he sets aside a few hours, at least, each morning for writing, by hand, and insists that he continues this practice even if his writing that day does not come to him easily or well, or if he is travelling and in a new time zone. He perseveres in this way because he has realised that when he does so, even if he does not get much writing done on a current project, he produces something , and is better able the next day to discriminate between what was good in style or subject and what was not, and what should be in this work and what might belong in a subsequent work, like the next book or an essay.

Related to this concern of what goes into constructing place and in writing a book about places, a current English Literature undergraduate, Ariane Noelle Vanco, asked if elision in travel writing is a concern, as surely not everything experienced and observed may be accounted for in writing—and, furthermore, not much that is pejorative or unpleasant finds its way into travel writing. Mr Iyer prefaced his answer as both a response to Ariane and a continuation of his response to Owen about his writing practices: in writing Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), he shuttled from one city to the next, from Rangoon to New York to Manila to Hong Kong to Bombay to Beijing to Bali; and from one country to the next, from Thailand to the Philippines to Nepal to India to Burma to China to America. He was young, and traveling eagerly through fast-paced cities, and furiously scribbled down everything, attempting to record, as much as he could, every perceptual observation—sight, sound, smell, touch and taste—as it happened. He found, though, that while this method captured fresh perceptions, it also encouraged only nascent thoughts about them. Later, he changed his methods and began to exercise more discipline and focus. Now, he jots down phrases and fragments, and what creative and descriptive expressions dawned on him about his observations – how sights could be smelt; and how sounds could be touched and felt, for instance. He then writes from memory and carefully selects just a few details to include—the sound of a saxophone on a busy street, for instance. He acknowledges that reconstructing from memory is difficult, especially if you want to make writing come alive. Oftentimes too perceptions once missed cannot be recovered. Thus he returns to his notes to start writing about his impressions, as these allow him to reconstruct, or approximate, that feeling of first perception that is so central to capturing place. If he can still feel those first sensations via his writing, it is more likely a reader can, too—and that is his wish for any reader of any of his works: to feel place. He concluded jocularly that despite this conscious effort to connect with readers, each time he writes a book he strives to write a very different book than the one before, which may not be viewed as a wise marketing strategy since a reader who loves one book might hate the next! Optimistically, though, he hopes that a reader who hated a first book might find himself or herself loving another.

Picking up from Mr Iyer’s initiation of the topic of Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), I asked if he still held the suspicion that every Asian culture and city he encountered was “too deep, too canny or too self-possessed to be turned by passing trade winds from the west”, as he wrote in that book; and if, in the thirty years since its publication, that suspicion had been ossified or overturned. Mr Iyer smiled and said, “Of course.”

“These are grand, old civilisations that you have in Asia,” he continued. “They will not so spurn themselves to become someone else. Look at China and its resurgent ascendance. Look at India and its innovations for an electronic democracy. Look at Japan, and its cultural and aesthetic power. They have reassurance in and respect for who they regard themselves to be – and who they were and who they want to be.” He also mentioned that the underlying identities of cities and countries are not so easily changed; for instance, a city which might appear to have transformed entirely—a new skyline, new streets, new trends—still retains its unique character. Cities you know well are like old friends: recognizable even after years of distance. He concluded that this was much the case with Singapore, too: Singapore, as he writes in his recently published book This Could Be Home: Raffles Hotel and the City of Tomorrow (2019), “belonged to many cultures all at once, but wasn’t entirely hostage to any one of them.”

(Contributed by Loon Kin Yip, Brendan.)

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Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions Paperback – June 30, 1998

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publication date June 30, 1998
• Dimensions 8.5 x 5.43 x 0.62 inches
• ISBN-10 9780679776109
• ISBN-13 978-0679776109
• See all details

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0679776109
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; First Vintage. edition (June 30, 1998)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780679776109
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679776109
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.7 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 5.43 x 0.62 inches
• #4,756 in Travel Writing Reference
• #7,681 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
• #23,373 in Short Stories Anthologies

About the authors

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Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England--to parents from India--raised in California and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. Since 1987 he has been based in Western Japan, while traveling everywhere from Bhutan to Easter Island, North Korea to Los Angeles Airport. Apart from the two novels and ten works of non-fiction he has published, he has written the introductions to more than fifty other books, as well as screenplays, librettos and many liner-notes for Leonard Cohen. He speaks regularly everywhere from West Point to Davos and Shanghai to Bogota and between 2013 and 2016, he delivered three talks for TED.com

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Leonard Cohen and the Art of Stillness: Pico Iyer on What the Monastic Musician Taught Him About Presence

By maria popova.

“Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments,” Alan Lightman wrote in his sublime meditation on science and spirituality , “and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.” In his conversation with E.O. Wilson , the poet Robert Hass described beauty as a “paradox of stillness and motion.” But in our Productivity Age of perpetual motion, it’s increasingly hard — yet increasingly imperative — to honor stillness, to build pockets of it into our lives , so that our faith in beauty doesn’t become half-hearted, lopsided, crippled. The delicate bridling of that paradox is what novelist and essayist Pico Iyer explores in The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere ( public library ) — a beautifully argued case for the unexpected pleasures of “sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it,” revealed through one man’s sincere record of learning to “take care of his loved ones, do his job, and hold on to some direction in a madly accelerating world.”

Iyer begins by recounting a snaking drive up the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles to visit his boyhood hero — legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. In 1994, shortly after the most revealing interview he ever gave , Cohen had moved to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center to embark on five years of seclusion, serving as personal assistant to the great Japanese Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, then in his late eighties. Midway through his time at the Zen Center, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and given the Dharma name Jikan — Pali for “silence.”

Iyer writes:

I’d come up here in order to write about my host’s near-silent, anonymous life on the mountain, but for the moment I lost all sense of where I was. I could hardly believe that this rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth the singer and poet who’d been renowned for thirty years as an international heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world.

Cohen, who once described the hubbub of his ordinary state of mind as “very much like the waiting room at the DMV,” had sought in the sequestered Zen community a more extreme, more committed version of a respite most of us long for in the midst of modern life — at least at times, at least on some level, and often wholeheartedly, achingly. Iyer reflects on Cohen’s particular impulse and what it reveals about our shared yearning:

Leonard Cohen had come to this Old World redoubt to make a life — an art — out of stillness. And he was working on simplifying himself as fiercely as he might on the verses of one of his songs, which he spends more than ten years polishing to perfection. The week I was visiting, he was essentially spending seven days and nights in a bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. His name in the monastery, Jikan, referred to the silence between two thoughts. […] One evening — four in the morning, the end of December — Cohen took time out from his meditations to walk down to my cabin and try to explain what he was doing here. Sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was “the real deep entertainment” he had found in his sixty-one years on the planet. “Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available within this activity.” Was he kidding? Cohen is famous for his mischief and ironies. He wasn’t, I realized as he went on. “What else would I be doing?” he asked. “Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.” Typically lofty and pitiless words; living on such close terms with silence clearly hadn’t diminished his gift for golden sentences. But the words carried weight when coming from one who seemed to have tasted all the pleasures that the world has to offer.

Iyer beholds his encounter with Cohen with the same incredulous amazement that most of us modern cynics experience, at first reluctantly, when confronted with something or someone incomprehensibly earnest, for nothing dissolves snark like unflinching sincerity. For Cohen, Iyer observes, the Zen practice was not a matter of “piety or purity” but of practical salvation and refuge from “the confusion and terror that had long been his bedfellows.” Iyer writes:

Sitting still with his aged Japanese friend, sipping Courvoisier, and listening to the crickets deep into the night, was the closest he’d come to finding lasting happiness, the kind that doesn’t change even when life throws up one of its regular challenges and disruptions. “Nothing touches it,” Cohen said, as the light came into the cabin, of sitting still… Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.

But the paradox thickens the closer we get to its source. The kind of stillness Cohen bows to is a capacity most reliably acquired through meditation. And yet even though meditation is our greatest gateway to everyday transcendence , most adults in the West don’t practice it. The second most common reason nonpractitioners have against meditating is that they don’t have the time to do it — not enough time to learn to live with presence. (The most common reason to resist, of course, is people’s protestation that they simply can’t do it or aren’t cut out for it, which is merely the time argument by a guise of greater denial — it simply means that they haven’t put in the time to get good at it; there is a reason it’s termed a meditation practice — mastering it obeys the same basic principles of attaining excellence as any skill.)

A century after Bertrand Russell admonished that the conquest of leisure and health would be of no use if no one remembers how to use them , Iyer paints an empirical caricature of the paradoxical time argument against stillness. Citing a sociological study of time diaries that found Americans were working fewer hours than they were 30 years earlier but felt as if they were working more, he writes:

We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off — our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

As most of us would begrudgingly admit, not without some necessary tussle with denial and rationalization, the challenge of staying present in the era of productivity is in no small part a product of our age itself. Iyer captures this elegantly:

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources — it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one’s senses.

Much like we find ourselves by getting lost , Iyer suggests, we inhabit the world more fully by mindfully vacating its mayhem:

Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Annie Dillard’s memorable notion of “unmerited grace [that] is handed to you, but only if you look for it,” Iyer considers the rewards that beckon us from that space of stillness:

It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere — by sitting still or letting my mind relax — that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

With a wink of wisdom that would’ve made William James proud , Iyer adds:

It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that’s necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.

The Art of Stillness , which comes from TED Books , is a wonderful read in its entirety. Complement it with Alan Watts on happiness and how to live with presence , Rebecca Solnit’s magnificent field guide to getting lost , Annie Dillard on presence vs. productivity , and some thoughts on wisdom in the age of information .

— Published November 10, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/10/pico-iyer-the-art-of-stillness/ —

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Pico Iyer is the author of fifteen books, most recently Autumn Light and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, twinned works on living with uncer­tainty and impermanence.

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Only 20 hours after lockdown was declared in California, in March 2020, my mother was rushed into the hospital in an ambulance. She was losing blood, fast. The phone had rung in our little apartment in Western Japan, and the ambulance driver had asked me if I really wanted to send my 88-year-old loved one to the ICU. A hospital, in those early days of the pandemic, felt more dangerous than anywhere. As my mother’s only close living relative, I had to say yes, and then I secured a seat on the next flight back. Minutes later, a friend sent an email: No visitors were allowed in hospitals. I was as close to my mother in Japan as I would be up the road in Santa Barbara.

What could I do? I hastened across the park in my quiet neighborhood and down a flight of barely noticeable steps to the local Shinto shrine. I threw coins in a wooden box and clapped my hands to summon the gods. I prayed for them to protect my mother, and the whole uncertain world. Then, walking back through the bright spring sunshine, I began to think of Koyasan, the mystical mountain three hours away at whose top stand 117 Buddhist temples and 200,000 graves, guarded by centuries-old cedars.

I’d traveled to the holy mountain twice with the Dalai Lama, my friend for 48 years now. Amid the rusting maples and deep silences, I’d heard him remind us that “death is part of our life.” We prepare for job interviews, a driving test, even a first date. Might it not be useful to ready ourselves for the one non-negotiable fact of life?

All of us could feel death breathing down our necks during the pandemic. In Japan, however, the Dalai Lama’s invocation of the Buddha’s First Noble Truth—the reality of suffering—carries particular force. For 1,400 years or more, my adopted home of 35 years has been living with warfare and earthquakes and fires and tsunamis. Reality, my neighbors seem to know, is the only home we have. If we’re going to find paradise anywhere, it has to be right here.

I remembered my first trip to the templed mountain, 14 years before. I’d met a Swiss monk in a funky café along the hushed main street. “In Europe,” he’d told me, “people talk of mountains as ‘ladders to heaven.’ Here in Japan, people come to the mountains in order to die.” Or, perhaps, to find what never dies. Twice every day, I watched monks in robes carry fresh meals on an elegant stretcher of sorts to Kobo Daishi, the founder of the mountain’s Buddhist order, who stopped breathing in the year 835 but is believed to be sitting still in meditation here.

Most of us are in no hurry to think of the end of things. Yet as the English novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.” Not knowing how much time I—or anyone around me—had, during the pandemic, reminded me to reflect on what was really important. On what I loved most and how I could stay close to it. Living next to death moved me to think about how to live.

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Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England in 1957. Since 1982 he has been a full-time writer, publishing 15 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long- running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu , The Open Road and The Art of Stillness . At the same time he has been writing for Time , the New York Times , Granta , the Financial Times and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far. Since 1992 Iyer has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in Nara, Japan.

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