Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Author: admin

Into the Shadowed Heart

The Red Highway begins with a spare, haunting account of the Czech artist Karel Kupka clambering out of a plane and (as the book’s first sentence has it) stepping “for the first time into the elusive world of Arnhem Land.” Born in the last year of World War I, and growing up in a cultured family at the centre of Prague’s intelligentsia, Kupka had made his way to Paris in the last year of the next war, got to know tribal art in the studio of Andre Breton and then, somewhat mysteriously, come out to Aboriginal Australia, as if to find his way back to a deeper, purer history that could restore him after civilisation as he knew it in Europe was destroyed in two terrible wars.

Yet the first effect of any open space is to concentrate the eye; when few things are around, you start to pay close attention to every one, and begin to find in each seemingly casual detail a universe of resonance. So it is with Rothwell’s characteristically deep, private and often terrifying work. Kupka was moving under a kind of “compulsion,” we read, and “had pictured himself as an outsider, carrying out profound investigations” in the bush. He was at once fascinated and disquieted by the spirits, the witch doctors, the writhing creatures from the world of sorcery he discovered as he deepened his “advance into the shadows” of Australia’s hidden north. In Darwin he was asked to paint an Aboriginal Madonna for a new cathedral, its predecessor damaged beyond repair by Japanese attacks in war. He did so, but his work was stolen and then returned, a little bruised, and hung so that it could hardly be inspected.

Anyone who has seen the tall, thin, somewhat displaced Nicolas Rothwell may grow a little startled to read that Kupka was “tall, and thin, and somewhat out of place.” Anyone who has read Rothwell’s earlier books – Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Heaven and Earth and Another Country – may feel a penetrating chill when she reads that Kupka, in Sydney, seemed “a pale, transfigured creature, striking through with his words to some uncharted higher realm.” Those who may happen to know that Rothwell is half-Czech and half-Australian will see that there is something more going on here than just the excavation of rich and fascinating history, and the telling of a mysterious fable about an European artist, pushed almost against his will into the secret and oblique silences of Australia’s heart. While recounting a formal, factual, meticulously precise story about a figure trying to salvage something from the magnetic north before it dies – or he does – Rothwell is clearly laying out something much closer to the bone as, again and again, he takes himself off into the vast, silent, unpeopled spaces of the red highway, looking for something he can’t even acknowledge to himself. While flying towards Arnhem Land for the first time, he tells us, Kupka’s plane (the Star of Australia) crashed, which meant that the traveller was stripped of almost everything, and felt that he was now released for a journey into a “new and deeper life,” on the far side of death.

The Red Highway is a masterful and unforgettable book in its own right, spooked and riveting and full of echoes; but it is also just one more part of a huge scroll that Rothwell seems to be assembling, piece by piece, as he fills in the secret history of his continent (and, by potent implication, himself). Much like the late German writer WG Sebald, whom he strikingly resembles in his sombre, attic eloquence, Rothwell seems drawn by his hauntedness deeper and deeper into precisely those places most guaranteed to unsettle him. Over and over he is attracted to figures of melancholy, to intimations of death. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944, son of a Nazi soldier, so everywhere he went in Europe – tramping around England or visiting the cities of Italy – he always seemed to end up either in a churchyard, shaken, or excavating some odd solitary as exiled as himself. Rothwell grew up mostly in Europe, with Australia in his blood, and surrounded by the ghosts and suicides of that used-up world. As he pushes farther into the emptiness at the centre of the oldest continent, everyone he meets seems to have a European past, and nearly everywhere he goes betrays deep scars from World War II. So even as he is pressing into the future, away from the vengeful cycles of history, he is met at every turn by relics from the past, as if everything is conspiring to create a huge tapestry of pain and restoration.

This teaches you to read the book in a very special way, attending with one eye to the vivid, funny, atmospheric accounts of the writer’s often ill-begotten trips into the desert or conversations with old acquaintances who refuse to take him too seriously; and with the other to the secret pattern invisibly developing behind the scenes. Everything has at once an immediate life and a kind of shadow in Rothwell’s work, which means that we devour, say, the details of the story of Henk Guth, a Dutch painter who moved to Alice Springs and began to bring the palette of “the old Dutch masters – deep, rich sepia earths, dark greens and wheat-sheaf yellows” to a scene more often associated with blinding sunlight, dazzled red and cloudless blue. Yet even as we succumb to the spell of the narrative, we realise that this description of importing a shadowed Rembrandt eye to the light-filled surfaces of Australia is, in fact, a perfect distillation of the book we’re reading.

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in AustraliaPosted on

Living Among Incompatibles

I walked into the center of old Kyoto not long ago and found myself in a scene from a Hiroshige painting. Huge floats containing ancestral treasures stood on the narrow lanes at the heart of the ancient capital, while rows of lanterns bobbed above the wooden houses. Old men played piercing melodies on bamboo flutes, and little boys, wearing blue headbands to match their yukata, or cotton kimono, thumped away on drums. Along the Kamo River, which runs through the “Moon Capital” like a lifeline, couples were seated on wooden platforms under the stars, red lanterns (with white plovers on them) lighting up their faces as in a novel by Yasunari Kawabata. Even at the busiest intersections, women in indigo kimono were standing, picture-perfect, under parasols.

Yet when the floats began to move through the busy streets, in the great summer festival of Gion Matsuri, I started to notice other things below the classic surfaces. Many of the men in white-and-blue yukata, chanting a traditional song in unison, had the dragon tattoos of gangsters across their bare chests. Many of the young women running after them were teetering on 8-inch platform heels, their hair bright yellow and their skins artificially tanned in the fashion of the moment. Even some of the tiniest little boys were calling their mothers on tiny cell phones. The ancient rites were observed solemnly, with dignity and elegance; but they were woven into and around and through the most garish of modern Western artifacts. As if (as often happens) a geisha were carrying a boom box into a traditional inn.

When first I came to Japan, more than 20 years ago, these contradictions—and the serenity with which the culture lived among them—startled me every day. If the test of a first-rate mind, as Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time, and still keep going, then Japan, I thought, had the best mind I’d encountered in a lifetime of traveling. And in the years that have followed, the extremes have in some ways intensified, as much of Japan streaks into a mongrel, high-tech, science fictive future, while the rest remains more firmly rooted in the old than any culture that I know, including China’s. There are TVs on the dashboards of taxis in Kyoto, but most Japanese people were slower to get onto the Internet than the people of Cambodia were.

As I’ve stayed longer in Japan, though, living here on and off for almost a decade, I’ve come to think that contradiction is in many ways in the eye of the beholder, and that part of the magic of this place is that it invites, and sometimes forces the foreigner to leave, his assumptions at home. We tend to think that cultures, and people, must be one thing or the other (modern or traditional, themselves or imitations, elegant or crude); the Japanese are happy to see them as both things simultaneously. They adhere, that is, to a belief in both/and more than in either/or. And this allows them to collect an almost indefinite number of selves and surfaces without remaining any less themselves within: at a typical wedding over here, the bride still changes costume three or four times in a day, shifting from classic Shinto maiden to white-dress Eastern Cinderella to typical Japanese young woman (with many traditions alive in her).

This is, of course, a skill prized in all ritualized old societies—it’s little different from the England where I was born—but nowhere is it managed so efficiently as in Japan. In countries like America, for example, the emphasis is on “being yourself”; in Japan, it’s often on the opposite. Being “not yourself,” but just a kind of impersonal actor playing the part the moment requires (to this day my Japanese wife doesn’t know the name of her immediate boss at work, because the boss is always and only known as “Tencho,” or “Department Head”). And this is all made easier, perhaps, by the fact that the Japanese tend, I believe, to think in images rather than in ideas, and where ideas need to be consistent, images can sit side by side, belonging to different worlds, like parallel lines in a haiku. It’s not uncommon, near where I live, to see a Zen abbot stepping out of a late-model Mercedes, on his way to his favorite bar in the red-light district. In Europe, such behavior might be seen as hypocritical; in pragmatic Japan, a Buddhist priest will perform every last rite demanded of him at funerals and ceremonies immaculately—like the Platonic image of a Buddhist priest; but when he is finished, he will go home to his wife and children, and pop open a beer in front of the baseball game on TV. He’s played his role, he’s allowed to slough off his robes.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in JapanPosted on

The Doctor Is Within

“Dream–nothing!” is one of the many things the Fourteenth Dalai Lama regularly says to large audiences that startles the unprepared. Just before I did an onstage conversation at New York Town’s Hall with him this month, he told me, “If I had magical powers, I’d never need an operation!” and broke into guffaws as he thought of the three-hour gallbladder operation he’d been through last October, weeks before being in hospital for another ailment. For a Buddhist, after all, our power lies nowhere but ourselves. We can’t change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world–and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. The point of life is happiness, the Dalai Lama always points out, and that lies within our grasp, our untapped potential, with every breath.

Easy for him to say, you might scoff. He’s a monk, a practiced meditator and, many believe, an unusually wise and even enlightened soul. Yet when you think back on his circumstances, you recall that he was made ruler of his people, responsible for more than 6 million Tibetans, when he was only four years old. He was facing a civil war of sorts in Lhasa when he was eleven, and when he was fifteen, he was made full political leader and had to start protecting his country against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, leaders of the world’s largest (and sometimes least tractable) nation. This spring marks the completion of half a century for him in exile, trying to guide and protect 6 million Tibetans he hasn’t seen in fifty years, and to rally 150,000 or so exiled Tibetans who have in most cases not seen Tibet. This isn’t an obvious recipe for producing a vividly contagious optimism.

Yet in 35 years of talking to the Dalai Lama, and traveling with him everywhere from Zurich to Hiroshima, as a non-Buddhist, skeptical journalist, I’ve found him to be as deeply confident, and therefore sunny, as anyone I’ve met. And I’ve begun to think that his almost visible glow does not come from any mysterious or unique source. Indeed, mystery and rumors of his own uniqueness are two of the things that move him most instantly to erupt into warm laughter. The Dalai Lama I’ve seen is a realist (which is what makes his optimism the more impressive and persuasive). And he’s as practical as the man he calls his “boss.” The Buddha always presented himself as more physician than metaphysician: if an arrow is sticking out of your side, he famously said, don’t argue about where it came from or who made it; just pull it out. You make your way to happiness not by thinking about it or wondering how to capture it, but simply by finding the cause of your suffering, and then attending to it, as any doctor of the mind might do.

The first words the Dalai Lama said when he came into exile, I learned not long ago, were “Now we are free.” He had just lost his homeland, his seeming destiny, contact with the people he had been chosen to rule; he had been forced to undergo a harrowing flight for 14 days across the highest mountains in the world. But his first instinct–the result of training and teaching, surely, as much as of temperament–was to look at what he could do better now. He could bring democratic and modern reforms to the Tibetan people that he could not so easily have done in old Tibet. He and Tibet could learn from Western science and society at last, and give someting back to them. He could create a new, improved Tibet–a Tibet 2.1., in effect–outside Tibet. The very condition that most of us would see as loss, severance and frustration, he saw as possibility.

Not all Tibetans can be quite so sanguine and far-sighted, of course, and in terms of a resolution of Tibet’s political predicament vis a vis China, the Dalai Lama has made no visible progress in fifty years. Beijing is only coming down harder and harder on Tibet, as he frankly admits. But when I travel with him around the world, I see that he’s coming to the U.S., as he did this spring, to offer concrete, practical tips for happiness, or inner health, the way any physician might offer you advice for external health. Think in terms of enemies, he suggests, and the only loser is yourself. Concentrate on external wealth, he said at Town Hall, and at some point you realize it has limits–and you’re still feeling discontented. Offer assistance to that friend in need, and you’re likely to feel better–even if your friend does not.

None of these are Buddhist laws as such–though in his case they arise from Buddhist teaching–any more than the law of gravity is Christian, just because it happened to be pinned down by the Christian Isaac Newton. I spend much of my time in a Benedictine monastery in California, and the monks I know there have likewise found how to be delighted by the smallest birthday cake. Happiness is not pleasure, they know, and unhappiness, as the Buddhists say, is not the same as suffering. Suffering–in the sense of old age, sickness and death–is the law of life; but unhappiness is just the position we choose–or can not {itals} choose–to bring to it.

Not long ago, I was traveling with the Dalai Lama across Japan and a journalist came into our bullet-train compartment for an interview. “Your Holiness,” he said, “you have seen so much suffering and loss in your life. Your people have been killed and your country has been occupied. You have had to worry about the welfare of Tibet every day since you were four years old. How can you always remain so happy and smiling?”

“My profession,” said the Dalai Lama instantly, as if he hardly had to think about it. His answer could mean many things, but one of the best things it meant to me was that that kind of happiness is within the reach of almost anyone. We can work on it as we work on our putting, our cooking or on training our bodies at the gym. True happiness, in that sense, doesn’t mean trying to acquire things, so much as letting go of things (our illusions and attachments). Our real nature, the Dalai Lama is essentially suggesting, is blue sky; it’s only the clouds of ignorance or short-sightedness that sometimes prevent us from seeing things as they are.

Posted in The Joy Of LessPosted on

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. “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, 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 five. In Japan, the late 18th century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw five children die in infancy and his own body paralyzed.

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 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 (where many were on their fourth marriages, and seeing a therapist every day). Though poverty certainly doesn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So–as post-60s cliche 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 NBA 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 give myself undistractedly to what my family needs.

When the phone does ring–once a week–I’m thrilled, as I never was in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the U.S. every three months or so, and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been reading P.G. Wodehouse or Walden, the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 newscycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man happy,” as Henry James’s character famously said, “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

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 multi-millionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they anyway aren’t 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.

For a self-employed free-lancer, a constantly precarious life is, these days, more uncertain than ever–especially since my tools of choice, books, are coming to seem an outdated technology. 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. The constitution of Japan, refreshingly, says almost nothing about the pursuit of happiness, as if to suggest that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most 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.

Posted in The Joy Of LessPosted on

A Hell on Earth

“The situation inside Tibet is almost like a military occupation,” I saw the Dalai Lama tell an interviewer last November, when I spent a week traveling with him across Japan. “Everywhere. Everywhere, fear, terror. I cannot remain indifferent.” Just moments before, with equal directness and urgency, he had said, “I have to accept failure. In terms of the Chinese government becoming more lenient [in Chinese-occupied Tibet], my policy has failed. We have to accept reality.”

Accepting reality–first investigating it clearly, and then seeing what can be done with it–is almost his first principle, and now he was about to convene a meeting of Tibetans in his exile home, in Dharamsala, India, and then another, in Delhi, of foreign supporters of Tibet, to discuss alternative approaches to relieving the ever more brutal 50-year long suppression of Tibet by Beijing. “This ancient nation with its own unique cultural heritage is dying,” he said later the same day. “The situation inside Tibet is almost something like a death sentence.”

It was shocking to hear such words from a man who has become one of the modern globe’s foremost embodiments of patience and the power of never giving up. I had spent a week with him traveling across Japan the previous November–and the one before that–and even then he had been working hard to find common ground with China, though he was never slow to speak out against corruption, censorship and oppression in the People’s Republic. In the 34 years I’ve been regularly talking and listening to him, I’ve grown used to seeing him begin each day by praying for his “Chinese brothers and sisters,” and constantly asking his fellow Tibetans “to reach out to the Chinese people and make better relations.” He was still doing all that this winter and yet there was a sense, for the first time that I had seen, that he could no longer contain his impatience and disappointment with Beijing, and was determined to speak out now, telling the world what he knew, while also urging his people to prepare for the time when their 73 year-old leader, ruler now for 68 years, would no longer be among them.

The year just past was something of an annus horribilis for the Tibetan leader and his people: last March, on the 49th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight into India, demonstrations spread across Tibet and led to a Chinese crackdown that is bringing about more deaths and imprisonments than we will ever likely know about. In August, the Dalai Lama was forced to cut short a trip to France for reasons of ill health. One week later, his eldest brother, Taktser Rinpoche, himself an incarnate lama, died in Indiana, where he had been based for several decades. Five weeks after that, the Dalai Lama was in hospital for gallbladder surgery, a procedure that usually takes fifteen or twenty minutes, he said, but in his case took three hours. And just after he returned from Japan on his first major trip since his illness, clearly ready to talk to Beijing in a new way, China terminated its regular meetings with the Dalai Lama’s envoys, essentially accusing him of arguing for ethnic cleansing. It could almost seem as if they had begun the talks in 2002, months after being named host of the 2008 Summer Olympics, in order to appease a watching world and, now that the Games had been successfully completed, could bring to an end even the pretense of talking to Tibet.

As I watched and listened to him speak, day after day, behind closed doors, to groups of Chinese individuals, to members of the international press and to Japanese power-brokers, I could not help feeling that the Dalai Lama was opening a new chapter in Tibetan history and, with his customary realism and pragmatism, looking for new ways to keep up with changing circumstances. As he, and everyone who cares about China and Tibet, knows, this March marks the 50th anniversary of what Tibetans call “the Tibetan Uprising,” when 30,000 Tibetans in Lhasa took up arms to protect the 23 year-old Dalai Lama, allowing him to flee in safety from Tibet (in China it is going to be celebrated as “Serf Liberation Day”). Already, tensions have mounted across China and Tibet in anticipation of the anniversary, and Beijing has launched a “Strike Hard” campaign, involving dozens of arrests of Tibetans refusing to celebrate the Tibetan New Year (in memory of those who died last year). The Chinese government has worked long and hard to make sure that no one in the outside world sees what is happening inside Tibet. But in this case when a body falls in a forest, all of us know that it is falling, even if we do not witness it first-hand.

The first thing the Dalai Lama said to me when I met him on the opening day of his recent tour, in his Tokyo hotel, was, “My surgery was very successful!” He had visibly lost a lot of weight in the three months since I’d seen him last, but his recovery from the gallbladder operation had been unusually fast, he said, and his doctors had said that his body was that of a man in his sixties. Certainly, anyone who saw him opening his arms to the Chinese intellectuals eager to get a photo with him, receiving Mongolians gathered to present ceremonial blue scarves to him in the lobby of his hotel, talking to Japanese politicians in his suite and just making sure that he shook hands and conversed with every last waiter, bodyguard and interested passerby would have felt she was seeing the affectionate, mischievous and attentive man the world knows. Every time he began speaking about the situation in Tibet, though–and on this tour, as not before, the questions even from Buddhist monks were political–he spoke with the unwavering clarity and passion of a man whose charges are trapped in a burning house.

You can see something of how the Tibetan leader works in the world by simply noticing how he allocates his time on such a trip: he delivered two major talks to the general public, on his favored theme of “secular ethics”–the logical basis for thinking of others, whether or not you have any religion; he flew down to the southern island of Kyushu to offer Buddhist teachings to a group of 400 or so (often feuding) Japanese Buddhists who had invited him to their country for the purpose; he even spent an entire morning visiting a girls’ school in the provincial capital of Fukuoka, since his first priority is always education, and helping those young enough to be in a position to make the future.

Yet the whole first day of his trip, added at the last minute, was dedicated to talking to Chinese individuals resident in Japan: two and a half hours in the morning with a group of fourteen professors, and three hours in the afternoon with a boisterous, animated group of 200 or so students and others living overseas. And much of the next two days was spent speaking to the Japanese and international media about how things stand in Tibet today, and urging them to try to go themselves and offer an “independent, objective, unbiased investigation” into what is really happening behind the black curtain China has yanked down.

The Dalai Lama’s habit is to look for the realistic facts and useful possibility in any situation and, if thwarted, as he told the girls, to “look at the problem from a wider perspective.” But whenever he was asked, he did not hesitate to tell his listeners about a new Chinese policy of beating Tibetans as soon as they are arrested; about the 80 year-old Tibetan man who had asked why monks should be arrested for calling for basic human rights, and who was himself imprisoned and subjected to beating; about reports of Chinese trucks in Tibet last March packed with dead bodies, being taken away to be buried. He had not had the chance to “independently cross-check” every report, he said, so they should not all be taken as proven fact; but other reports have suggested that at least 140 Tibetans have been killed in the last year, and more than 900 have been taken into custody, often after having been beaten.

Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in The Xivth Dalai LamaPosted on

At Sea, On Land

Thirty minutes to the south of the bustling little town of Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, where the single-lane road runs along a palmy coastline, I saw a small island rising out of the Pacific with what seemed to be the turrets of a white castle poking through its trees. I pulled up along the side of the road, and stepped onto the soft, warm sand to get a better look at this tropical Havisham enigma. A little boy, shirtless, poked around in his shorts about thirty feet out into the blue-green waters. Two thin, spidery figures stood at a landing two hundred yards out to sea, in front of a small locked white door.

I had been so entranced by the hidden palace, Taprobane, that I had actually asked my taxi-driver to stop during my previous trip to Sri Lanka and had waded out, uninvited, to inspect the famous former home of Paul Bowles and the Count de Mauny-Talvande. Now, however, I was semi-legitimate, so I motioned out to the two distant figures. The waves rose between me and them and, in any case, the distance was too far for a voice to carry. The water came in and in, pooling around my feet. Finally, after about twenty minutes of non-communication, the figures waved at me to stay where I was, and two others opened the white door and splashed through the surf towards the shore, their shorts turning black and water-logged as they did so.

“Your wallet,” warned one, as he arrived by my side, motioning for me to take it out from my trouser pocket.

“My passport, too?”

“Yes, sir. Sometimes water quite strong.”

I took off my shoes and socks, rolled my black jeans up to my thighs and followed the boys into the rising water, my money and my official token of identity threatening to get swept away by the waves. By the time we arrived at the landing, and clambered up onto solid ground and went in past the white door to a jungly garden, I felt like a trespasser on Robinson Crusoe’s island. My trousers were so soaked I could hardly move, my feet were salty and wet, my pockets were empty and I was stepping into a five-bedroom neo-Palladian pleasure-dome where black-and-white photos along the walls showed elephants playing polo and black-tie parties from more than half a century ago, when kings, queens and prime ministers danced the night away here.

Taprobane, fittingly, was once the name for Sri Lanka, or Ceylon, itself. Some say that the little island, just big enough for a single rambling house, mirrors the shape of the larger island of which it is a microcosm. For several decades, though, the name has been synonymous with the dream some of us have of running away from the world we know and living among the elements, surrounded on every side by ocean. The octagonal fantasy was built by the self-styled count in the 1920s, with verandas in every direction radiating out from a 30 foot-high central space. For four years in the 1950s, Paul Bowles cocooned himself on the island, completing The Spider House here before returning to Morocco. At various times it has played temporary home to Somerset Maugham’s nephew Robin, the son of Balthus and Gore Vidal. When Mark Ellingham, the founder of the Rough Guide series, was asked once where on the planet he would most like to go, he mentioned the legendary one-house island across the water from the Sri Lankan town of Weligama.

Since 1995 the house has been the preserve of Geoffrey Dobbs, a spirited sort-of-Englishman who was until recently an entrepreneur in Hong Kong, and who has joined many other expats from Hong Kong and London in buying up and developing the long-forgotten old colonial properties around Galle. (All Galle, a modern Caesar might say, is divided into three parts: a busy modern town of roughly 100,000 souls; the mysterious walled city inside the 17th century Dutch fort, which echoes still with Islamic chanting from a madrasa, men sitting on broken colonial terraces watching the world not go by, schoolchildren walking past the peeling Dutch Reformed Church; and the 80 or so houses bought in recent years and done up by mostly British people into chic shops, high-end cafes and gorgeous hotels, such as the Galle Fort and Amangalla). Dobbs, who started the glamorous Galle Literary Festival two years ago and runs two renovated colonial hotels above the Fort, saw a picture of Taprobane in the ‘70s, in an airline magazine, and, after years of patience and negotiation, rented it for five years and then acquired it outright fourteen years ago as a place to invite writers, hold parties and preserve a sense of dolce far niente.

Two minutes after I step into the airy lobby of the main house, he is calling me on his mobile to offer a welcome, one of his five-person staff is handing me a towel and a Coke and I am looking into the former count’s bedroom, said to be haunted by something more than just an eerie large portrait of its former occupant. I follow steps around the island down to an infinity pool, to shaded little corners where benches or chairs have been placed, so that everywhere seems a labyrinth of privacies. Then I am guided down to the “Glass Room,” below the central building, which is furnished with a four-poster bed, a copy of Graham Greene’s Nineteen Stories and the constant sound of the sea.

It comes in from every side in the room, the splash and curl of the water breaking against the rocks not many feet below. Birds call from the trees and when I walk up to one of the many terraces around the main house, I can look out across the water towards where it ends at the South Pole. Part of the special magic of Taprobane is that the life of the world, only 200 yards across the water, is visible and audible–I can watch the coloured fishing-boats resting on the beach, hear the buses and auto-rickshaws buzzing past, catch echoes of the excitement of a soccer-game on the sand. And yet, at the same time, it feels a world away, as if one were an emperor living behind a moat.

The hours that follow feel equally human and yet displaced. For a while, eating a freshly made wrap at a table, the only guest on the island, I can imagine my one companion to be the ocean. Then my host appears with two distinguished writers. We sit among books and bottles as night falls–absolute darkness on one side, the lights of the road on the other. Later, led down to a lower terrace beside the sea, we have dinner for fourteen at a table lit by small torches, more remote than in any hotel. It is like staying at a country house staffed by flame trees, frangipani and waves.

For those who want a once-in-a-lifetime adventure–or Bacchanal or honeymoon–it’s possible these days to rent out Taprobane, for roughly L600 or more a night (depending on the season). But it’s worth recalling that Sri Lanka has always been an ambiguous Eden for foreigners. Paul Bowles, Taprobane’s most literary owner, devoted his life to writing of how the visitor gets swallowed up by the foreign, and what began as an innocent-seeming excursion turns into an auto da fe. Leonard Woolf, not many miles away, felt himself surrounded, almost devoured, by the enfolding jungle, his Sri Lankan novel A Village in the Jungle beginning, ““It was in, and of, the jungle; the air and smell of the jungle lay heavy upon it – the smell of hot air, of dust, and of dry and powdered leaves and sticks. Its beginning and its end was in the jungle…”

D.H. Lawrence, perpetually searching for an Eden that perpetually dissolved inside his head, raged against Buddhism and the frenzies he witnessed on the island, suggesting to him “the days before the Flood.” Even the unflappable Jan Morris noted, when she visited, long before Sri Lanka’s 26 year-old civil war had broken out, that the island suffered one of the highest murder rates on earth.

I sat in my room and watched a trail of red ants walk across the marble-white of my balcony. Crows jumped around the pool, scooping up nuts or pieces of stray bread. The clunk of the water-pipes in my bathroom sounded like a bugle summoning me to dinner. I remembered how Bowles had been fascinated here by the presence of large bats, their wingspans three feet wide, and delighted in the fact that the two-acre island had once been a dumping-place for cobras. Being here was like living inside a writer’s head, as the sound of the sea, incessant and constantly changing, came at me from every side.

“It’s terrifying,” said the eldest writer in our group (famous for her writing on Virginia Woolf, among others). “These people are living next to a killer. It’s their neighbor, and they never know its moods.” I thought back to how a local had told me about the day, four years earlier, when the sea had just come in and in–encroaching 300 yards onto the shore, and burying houses, whole villages and scores of lives. On the eastern shore of Sri Lanka, the 2004 tsunami had seen waves advance two miles onto the land. Meanwhile, on the near shore, just down the street, as it were, a father was taking his son by the hand and leading him out into the foaming ocean. Anyone who wants to savour the potent charm of Sri Lanka can hardly do so more hauntingly than by coming to Taprobane, where you taste the runaway dream you may always have harboured–and the threat, rising with the crash of the ocean, of being swept away by it and drowned.

Posted in Sri LankaPosted on

The Shock of Arrival

Slowly, the plane begins to descend, lower, still lower, till the pattern of fields and roads, visible from above, becomes a particular tree, a slow-moving car, a figure on a sidewalk. There is a sudden bump, a violent deceleration, and then you are out, in a slap of tropical air, the smell of clove cigarettes and frangipani piquant, the heat palpable and strange.

There are figures waving from inside the airport building, and when you come out the other side, you are in a car, driving through the dark, the sound of gamelan music in the trees, a chattering all around, occasionally a sudden face lit up by the headlights.

Then out into the streets, at dead of night, or just before dawn (you hardly notice), and everything seeming brighter, more vivid than it will ever seem again: the little lights, the streets without names, the stalls selling mangoes, the men calling from the shadows. In those early, virgin moments, you are wide-open, ready (in all senses) to be taken in.

No drug I can imagine, few love-affairs I might dream of, can match that simple, shocking excitement of arriving in a truly foreign place. It is akin to the first kiss, the first date, all the firsts that have an intensity and life disproportionate to their duration; the first moment is worth a thousand others. Even now, after twelve years of living on and off in Japan, what I remember most, with the fiercest ache and pang, and what changed my life irreversibly (and brought me here, in fact), is just the one-night stopover, on my way to Southeast Asia, that was my first taste of Japan. The quiet, slightly melancholy autumn morning, the scale of things–shoes laid neatly outside tatami houses–the elegance of calligraphy on white background and temple spire against blue sky, the whole unexpected shine to the air, impressed themselves on me with a force that can never (by definition) come again. You can never, as Heraclitus (or, perhaps, one of his followers) said, step in the same river twice.

Arrivals come in a rainbow of colors–the sight of the ancient city across the plains, the slow drawing into a harbor as the figures on shore grow larger, and larger, till they’re human-scaled, the night-time wander through a gleaming labyrinth of airport passageways, the flight along the Himalayas, snowcapped under blue, blue skies, as you come into Kathmandu. And all are given shape and texture by where they sit in the topography of your life: an arrival back home, or in a lover’s arms, an arrival at the place you’ve dreamed of for too long.

But nearly all of them, in my experience, come with an exaltation of novelty and wonder, outpouring and relief, that nothing else can quite efface; they are the foundations for one’s perception of a place, which subsequent events and understandings will only revise, refine and perhaps correct. My unfailing rule, whenever I want to write on a place, or truly to experience it, is simply to walk and walk and walk, wherever whim summons me, for as much of the first twenty-four hours as possible, in that state of first encounter when I will take in everything–my feet scarcely on the ground–and everything will seem new and strange to me. Few events, if any, in the next twenty-four days, will make so deep an impression.

This shock of first meeting does not have to be a pleasant one. I remember once, years ago, flying in over the thick jungle, to Suriname, as a teenager alone on the road, and seeing nothing but an unbroken canopy of trees. We touched down, I looked around, and realized I’d arrived at a dead end: jungle everywhere, a small unlit town in the middle, and almost nowhere for a solitary boy to go or stay. I quickly tried to leave Suriname, but each day I was bounced off the one departing flight, in favor of some more prosperous V.I.P. Day after day, I sat in the airport–I’d never arrived, in some sense–and when it closed, hauled my suitcase out to the jungle and spent the night there, waiting for release.

There is a quality of dream, ideally, to arrivals after long journeys, and with all that has been lost as carriages and ocean liners and long-distance trains have given way to supersonic planes, something has been gained, in the simple jolt of flying from New York, say, to Bangkok, in a few hours, and changing seasons and centuries in a moment. We lose a part of our rational faculties, the wide-awakeness that is our usual guiding light; but something else in us, closer to the dark, comes awake. Bleary, confused and not sure if we are here or there, we walk without defenses through a province of the imagination. Part of us is in mid-air, and the rest is not quite sure what to make of the whispers from across the street, the generous smiles, the coins that could be pounds or could be pennies.

Later we will return, and photograph for the neighbors the Taj Mahal by moonlight; first, though, and unforgettably, we will encounter the bodies along the road, the campfires in the unlit night, the urchins grabbing at one’s sleeve outside the Taj Mahal Hotel.

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in Why We TravelPosted on

Among the Mist-Wreathed Mountains

You know you’re in somewhere special when the bathroom in your hotel offers, along with shower cap, razor and “vanity kit,” some condoms. The people you meet are speaking English (French, Italian) as if they’ve just stepped out of a conference-room in Paris with Umberto Eco and Susan Sontag, and the light is picking out the red-brick apartment-blocks along the thickly forested hillside that guards the city as if New Mexico were paying a house-call on Rio. The first question you’re asked by your local, furiously intellectual host is, “What grieves you most about the state of the world?”

The first time I’d visited Bogota, in 1975, as a teenager, the blue-black clouds that seem to hover perpetually over the city were perhaps in part a reflection of my own black-and-blue ignorance. A schoolfriend and I had found a listing in the terse South American Handbook for improbably cheap lodgings and had not known enough Spanish to understand what the cab-driver meant when he turned around and leered at us, “Muchachas!” Being good products of English boarding-school, we had spent three days in the Hotel Picasso before we realized that everyone else in the little dive on an unlit street surrounded by unpaved alleyways was a young, scantily-clad and surprisingly amenable young woman. They, in turn, were astonished to find eighteen year-old boys who knew so little about the birds and the bees.

Now, almost three times as old, I can see all I didn’t see in a city that is less about unions than uneasy divisions: the golden kids of the Zona Rosa are about as likely to visit the sprawling shanty towns of Ciudad Bolivar in the south of the city as the girls in the Hotel Picasso were likely to start sipping chai at the Crepes and Waffles outlet in Los Rosales. Bogota is a world–in very small part–of European manners and readers of The New York Review of Books under a cloud of jungly wilderness and English drizzle. “The rich want to be European,” a young recent graduate told me, hardly noticing that she was speaking her third language. “The middle want to be American. And the poor, they want to be Mexican.”

She gestured at the mariachi music that was jaunting out of a nearby taxi.

“And the indigenous?”

“Oh, they just want to be themselves.”

The parts of the city that a visitor does not see–which is likely to be nearly all of the city (unless he’s a witless eighteen year-old boy just out of English boarding-school)–comprise shacks so far from middle-class Bogota’s idea of itself that they show up on few statistics sheets and are seldom mentioned in the newspapers. The small, protected circles of the fortunate, who have never been to streets with Hotel Picassos on them, seem entirely at ease with “Thai sushi” restaurants and references to La Dolce Vita (I asked one 23 year-old who her favorite actress was and she answered, without hesitation, “Monica Vitti. In L’Avventura”). “The cool place now is Dubai,” she went on. “Everyone wants to use the name. It’s fashionable.” I walked along a main street and, sure enough, not far from a Dunkin’ Donuts outlet with its own Internet cafe, found a small cigarette stand called “Dubai.”

Her own brother was working in Dubai, she said; the talk at a globalization panel nearby was all of China and Africa (the U.S. was not mentioned once); and wise men from India were said to be arriving in battalions to prop up the business and software sectors. Celebrating its 550th birthday in 2008, Colombia seems in some ways closer to the wider world than it’s ever been before.

Among the lucky souls, in the northern quarters, culture, even literature, seems as buzzy, as effortlessly international, as it might be around the Left Bank. Late one evening in a Mexican restaurant decorated with campy masks worn by Mexican professional wrestlers, I watch two giggling young women, with matching purses, suddenly descend on George Packer, writer on Iraq for The New Yorker, and ask him to autograph copies of the Style issue of the magazine.

“Where do you come from?” he offered, in amazement (unaccustomed to writers being venerated).

“Mars,” said one. “No, I’m sorry. We are both engineers. Professors of engineering at the University of the Andes.”

“Engineers who read The New Yorker?”

“Only the Style issue!”

Pages: 1 2
Posted in City SketchesPosted on

Obama in Hawaii

It was three days before the New Year in late 2006, and I was eating a burger with the traveler and writer Paul Theroux on Oahu’s North Shore. Beside us in the rickety little shack was a quintessentially Hawaiian group of Chinese Americans, African Americans, semi–Southeast Asians and kids who could have been any or all of the above, waiting for the dad in the group to bring over their avocado burgers from the counter. It took Paul and me a few seconds to realize that the dad in question — who looked like a skinny teenager — was, in fact, the freshman Senator from Illinois, who was expected to enter the presidential race in the next week or two.

We couldn’t help breaking in on his private moment to say hello, and Barack Obama, intruded upon in a place he’d probably come to get away from people like us, could not have been more friendly and engaged; we felt we could have talked burgers — and places and books — with him all day. But you expect that of a politician, whose livelihood depends on winning hearts. The more remarkable thing, we both felt, was that this sparkling stranger was so much like the kind of people we meet in Paris, in Hong Kong, in the Middle East: difficult to place and connected to everywhere. Like the air of his home island (not really Eastern or Western, but a vibrant mingling of the two), he spoke for the dawning global melting pot of today.

It has become part of the familiar story now, repeated so often we can barely hear it, but anyone who steps out of the U.S. today, in any direction, quickly sees that the American Century has become the Global Century and that where a generation ago much of the globe was trying to look like America, now it’s America that needs to get in tune with the rest of the globe. The very presence of someone like Obama shows this is possible. But the story of the 21st century so far has been of a fast-moving train that the U.S. (like its enemies) declines to board.

Everywhere I’ve been this year — from Jerusalem to Japan to Colombia to Italy and back again — I’ve heard people essentially say that America is an overweight, white plutocrat who is not only out of touch with the world but also shows no signs of wanting to grow closer to it. This is as unfair as any image — contradicted at every moment by the kindness and curiosity of many Americans — but it remains a potent one in a world where people communicate more with images than ideas and assumptions travel faster than truths. The best way to begin to correct it is to show the world a leader who can’t really say how much he’s African or Asian or American or just a product of their mixing in Hawaii. The point is not just that Obama will bring globalism to America; in his name, his face and his issues, he’ll bring America back to the globe.

You could, in fact, say it is the questions that he draws from his experience that are as important as any answers he may come up with. How to make a peace between the black and the white inside him (or inside our cities and our country)? How to do right by our relatives in Africa without dishonoring the grandparents from Kansas who raised us? How to bring the modest Muslim school in Java together with Harvard Law School? The questions Obama has been thinking about all his life are the very ones that dominate the world today. And the mounting economic crisis only makes the construction of a wider identity — and conversing across the waters — more urgent, not less so. I happened to be in Alaska the week Sarah Palin was introduced to the world, and around me I saw the America I had grown up on: full of open space and possibility, blessed with great oil reserves and immigrants from everywhere, scenically gorgeous — but tied to the go-it-alone spirit of a “last frontier.” It looked as much like the America of my boyhood as Hawaii and the burger joint looked like the America of tomorrow. The kids next to us in the North Shore shack seemed much less concerned with where they came from than with where they were headed.

Barack Obama the man is sure to disappoint some of the expectations his fans have; any man would, especially in the age of the 24/7 news cycle. But the past and the future that he speaks for are precisely the ones that belong so uniquely to the new century and the 95% of humans who are our neighbors at the global burger table. It’s more than possible to make your fortune in Alaska — but I’d much rather find the future in Hawaii.

Posted in The Promise Of AmericaPosted on

The Snow Leopard

The Snow Leopard is an account of an expedition high into the seldom-seen Himalayan land of Inner Dolpo, to record the habits of the bharal, or rare Himalayan blue sheep. The book begins, as most scientific logs do, with a precise map, and ends with scholarly notes and an index. The leader of the climb is the eminent field biologist George Schaller (here known as “GS”) and with him travel various local porters and Sherpas and the writer who records the trip, Peter Matthiessen. The author, a “naturalist, explorer,” as his bio has it, takes pains to record every “cocoa-coloured wood frog” the travelers pass, and the “pale lavender-blue winged blossoms of the orchid tree (Bauhinia).” He records altitudes and temperatures and the history and geography of every region he passes. The human habitations he describes are, typically, full of “vacant children, listless adults, bent dogs and thin chickens in a litter of sagging shacks and rubble, mud, weeds, stagnant ditches…”

Yet even as it makes us feel every pebble and rag on the tough journey, The Snow Leopard is the record of a different kind of ascent as well, which the reader catches as a silent current pulsing just beneath the lines. “I climb on through grey daybreak worlds towards the light,” its author tells us at one moment, and a little later he is in a world of “snow and silence, wind and blue.” The journey is clearly to places inwards as well as up, and as the author climbs and climbs towards his final way-station, at 18000 feet, near the Crystal Mountain, the writer seems so to disappear inside the vastness of the scene around him–the crystal skies, the deep blue silences, the elegant clarity of a world of snow and rock–that it begins to feel as if those forces are speaking as much as he does. “The earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”

The book is written, you begin to sense, by a serious-self-taught scientist (who trained himself by driving for five years around his country and producing a near-definitive book on Wildlife in America). But it is also being written, in the same breath, by one who will later become an ordained Zen priest, whose business it is to see past all the projections and delusions of the mind to the hard rock of unvarnished reality. It is written by a seasoned journalist of the old school whose range is so great that he can light up the paths he is taking by referring to Blake and Heisenberg and Sufi and Native American lore, drawing his epigraphs from a Hindu priest, a modern lama, Hesse and Rilke and Ovid; but it is, in those same sentences, being written by a novelist who seeks to track the nature within us as well as without, and, indeed, to link the two. The ascent is an attempt, we see, to chart what cannot be seen and recorded, and the sense of elevation we feel is the one we know when we close our eyes and just sit still.

What comes to seem remarkable, and haunting, about the book has little to do with the fact that few travelers had been to Inner Dolpo in 1973, or even that no one, Peter Matthiessen suggests, had ever recorded the voice of the blue sheep before he did, as he’s observed by the animals from a distance of ten yards, before they return to pushing their noses into one another’s rumps. It comes, perhaps, from the sense that we feel, with him, the heart-shaking sense of discovery that arises when you come upon passes and places that have almost never been seen before; and yet, in that very moment, you also feel a sense of loss–that excitements fade, that everything moves on, that animals and forests will soon be no more and that even the epiphanies and discoveries that seemed so exhilarating yesterday will very soon be forgotten.

If you visit the high plateaus of the Himalaya–perhaps moved by the book to do so–you come upon great many-storied buildings on the hilltops that look out across the emptiness like fortresses and watchposts both at once. If you step into their chapels, you smell centuries of melted yak butter, make out frescoes barely visible in the faint light, feel coldness on the bare floors. The sun comes in shafts through the dust, lighting up the Buddhas. And as you walk around these cities on a hill, you begin to notice that each level is linked to the next by a short, steep ladder. You climb up, through terraces, past kitchens and altar rooms and schoolrooms, till finally you come to a flat rooftop from which nothing can be seen or heard but the snapping of prayer-flags in the wind, the blue skies extending all around, the snowcaps in the distance. You have entered, as The Snow Leopard shows us, a realm of allegory.

When I return to Peter Matthiessen’s silver account today–noticing how it grows as I do, giving back a different light every time I pick it up again–what I feel most is the sheer physicality of the climb, the return to something bare and essential (behind or beneath the realm of thoughts). The author shaves his head as he sets out, and begins to walk barefoot as he leaves the world of roads. He makes us feel and flinch from the blisters on the climbers’ feet, the leeches at their skin. I shiver, such is the transparent immediacy of the prose, when the temperature sinks to -20 degrees Centigrade, and feel with the author how “I quake with cold all night.”

Part of the beauty of such a trip is that it permits few vanities: the writer is reduced to scrambling on all fours and watches himself laboring under sixty pounds of lentils. He starts to go to sleep at nightfall and to awaken with first light, like the living things around him. The porters, at one precipitous moment, give themselves over to a silent trance. The trip is not taking them away from the real world, you see, so much as deeper into it, the better to feel its sting; epiphanies, after all, for most of us are the easy part–it’s the acceptance of the everyday that comes hard.

Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in Holy PlacesPosted on
Scroll to top