Pico Iyer Journeys

The Writing Life

Yet as the years began to pass, something strange began to happen. I wrote about Yemen and Bolivia and Ethiopia and Haiti, while sitting at my tiny desk in Japan. I tossed off books and daily articles and letters to myself and to my friends, about every subject I could think of (except Japan). And yet all I was really writing about, underneath the surface and in the spaces, was the new country that had become my home, and the reasons (its gift for silence and for thinking about others, its habit of self-erasure) that had brought me there.

My sentences grew shorter and shorter, and more and more empty, till they looked a bit like that room where I’d slept in the temple. My pages became so quiet you had to lean in to hear them, and, as with any good Japanese, completely unstriking, and neutral on the surface. I grew less and less interested in explanations, because the mere moment seemed enough in itself; where I’d written forty pages after my first two weeks here, and then 338 pages after a year, now I found I could barely write a postcard about Japan, if you’d asked me. Image had taken the place of idea.

Perhaps the greatest beauty of the writing life is that it offers you concrete, inarguable evidence for all the changes in your life; the pages you write are like the charts nurses may place at the end of your bed, I often think, to map your progress. Whatever you need to know about yourself is there, before your eyes, if only you know where to look. And as the years passed, I started to read myself and slowly to realize something most unexpected was going on: I was turning Japanese.

I barely spoke the language and I had no official contact with its society; I lived at my desk, in my head, as I had done in New York. But the silences seemed to seep across my sentences. The words that remained were orderly, soft-toned, well-mannered. Less and less was visible on the surface, as if everything was being pushed down, to that more intriguing realm where things are felt but not said, where judgments are fleeting and explanations are beside the point, where nothing is talked about, because it’s known.

I have just finished a small book on the XIVth Dalai Lama, which is really about the ideas he takes around the world: self-confidence, responsibility, selflessness, and all the ways we can make our own lives and those of our friends and enemies better in a world where there will always be suffering, old age and death. As I wrote it, I began to realize that, without intending to, I was describing something essential about the new home I’d found myself in, something I could never have guessed at in my “definitive” essays and book of many years ago. Its love of autumn, the dazzling blue skies that play off the turning leaves, the coming of the dark. Its people’s habit of defining themselves in terms of a larger whole, or just a central absence. Its gift for attention and for not making very much at all of all the dramas and losses that course through all our lives.

Then I noticed something else: I was describing, at least a little, the person I had become, the person the country had made out of me. No names of soft drinks or quotes about Springsteen or labored explanations at all: just an attentive silence where I’d thought my self ought to be, and a reflection of Japan. Writing tells you everything you need to know about yourself and the world you live in, even if by making yourself seem redundant and that life quite mute. You think you’re describing something outside yourself, but–as every photographer knows–every portrait you make is, in some unintended way, a self-portrait. I didn’t have to write about Japan now; it was streaming into every sentence, the polite ghost in the corner who says very little but asks you what you want and then disappears again into the dark.

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