Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

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Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s novels are all about putting the pieces together. Quite literally, because they proceed through a series of exquisited shaped vignettes that the reader has to fit into a pattern in her head; but more deeply, too, because their structure invariably reflects their theme. Nearly always they are about attempting to suture things together, to heal a fracture–between one side of Toronto and another in his first major novel, In the Skin of a Lion; between (and within) four wounded travelers in an abandoned convent in The English Patient; between a visiting forensic anthropologist and two divided brothers amidst the debris of Sri Lanka’s ongoing civil war in Anil’s Ghost. How to turn the fragments into a living whole, if only for a moment, is the burden of these elaborate, questing anthologies of scenes.

The main characters in these books are themselves in pieces, too, scarred fugitives found in spaces not their own, deeply alone and at a jagged angle to society. Ondaatje’s first book-length narrative, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, was so much a set of disparate frames as it followed its splintered subject across the West that it is now listed among the author’s nine works of poetry and not his six books of fiction. His next big work, Coming Through Slaughter, in 1976, served up another riffing picaresque about a messed-up jazzman in New Orleans at the turn of the last century (the real cornet-player Buddy Bolden) who, after cutting up his wife’s lover in a jealous rage, ends up cut up himself, on the run, and slowly loses his mind as well as his art. One source of such concerns is revealed a little, perhaps, in Ondaatje’s much-acclaimed memoir, Running in the Family, in which, not really a local and not quite a foreigner, he returns to Sri Lanka, where he was born, to piece through the shards of his own family’s extravagant and wildly self-destructive history.

These are poets’ novels, in other words, the work of a highly meticulous craftsman who creates scenes of uncanny beauty and precision and pieces them together like jewels in a necklace. Born to mixed ancestry in colonial Ceylon, educated in England and resident in Canada since 1962, while traveling widely, Ondaatje is harder to place than even such exile colleagues as Salman Rushdie or Kazuo Ishiguro, and there is a sense that he is always pushing across forms as well as continents, to create a new kind of mongrel fiction that leaves old categories behind. Few reading experiences, to my mind, are so enveloping and delectable as making one’s way through the slow, spacious pages of an Ondaatje novel, as pleasing to the senses as sipping white wine in the sunlight; and there is a different and deeper delight in going through a second time–”Only the rereading counts,” he cites here from Nabokov–to see the secret stitching that links a reference to Dumas in Northern California to one in southern France, or rhymes the image of one woman’s hair darkening in a shower to another. The question, though, that always haunts these elliptical and delicate works is how much their very beauty takes us away from the war and scenes of great pain they describe, and to what extent, in courting art, they leave real life behind.

Divisadero, Ondaatje’s latest epic of intimate moments, ravishing and intricate, begins on a ranch north of San Francisco in the 1970s, and within pages we are in the half-magical, aromatic world that Ondaatje has made his own. A teenage girl is guiding her horse through the madrone above the morning mist while the local bar down below goes up in flames. Another girl is playing “Begin the Beguine” on an old wind-up gramophone, reading The Leopard before making love and hanging Buddhist prayer-flags above her cabin as if to sanctify that love. A skilful cowherd is showing us how to hammer “sharpened sticks of redwood or cedar” from the inside out to heal a leak in a water tower, and how to splint up a broken wrist with willow.

Four people live on the ranch and all are deeply bruised, and correspondingly skittish: the patriarch has lost his wife while she was giving birth to his only daughter, Anna, now sixteen, and in his grief he has adopted another girl, Claire, born the same week, who likewise saw her mother die in giving birth to her. The cowhand, Coop, was taken in when, at the age of four, he hid out in a crawl space while his entire family was killed by a hired hand. The story comes to us through Anna at this point, but we are quickly made to see that there are pieces of every character in every other, and identity will always be a shifting and uncertain thing for them.

It is the particular distinction of an Ondaatje novel to mix richly atmospheric scenes of Keatsian tenderness with moments of explosive violence–this is, after all, a writer who devoted his first long book to an outlaw who blew away twenty men by the time he was twenty-one. And the interplay between the hurts that arise from those eruptions and the impulse to take care of those hurts, to tend to them with a surgeon’s professionalism, gives his books their drama and their theme. In this case, one of the girls gets too close to Coop, her father discovers them during a freakish ice storm, violence breaks out on every side– and all four characters, already fragile, are scattered to different corners of the world, more traumatized than ever.

The novel that follows picks them up two decades later, running from their pasts and trying to hide out in other worlds, and new pursuits, and it shuffles fluidly back and forth between Coop, gambling his way across the American West, and Anna, remaking her life in the Gers region of southwestern France, and settling down in a forgotten manoir to piece together the story of a French writer, Lucien Segura, who himself had disappeared from the house and who “had a wound in his voice” that speaks to her. The startling and unexpected risk in the novel comes when, in its third part, it travels back, at length, into the life of Segura himself, at the beginning of the last century, as if to say that the losses and divisions of the present can begin to be healed by looking at a completely different story in the past, and gradually coming to some resolution in our heads.

In every one of his books, Ondaatje alights upon some new territory and begins, with patient attentiveness, to excavate its forgotten history and secret treasures; it’s no coincidence that so many of his characters are archaeologists, researchers, archivists. And his settings are nearly always marginal places, far from the city, that few writers have chosen to light up before (part of Divisadero is set in the little Central Californian town of Santa Maria, forty-five minutes by car from where I write this, in my longtime home in Santa Barbara, and yet unvisited by almost everyone I know). In that context, it’s no coincidence that California’s Gold Rush is evoked in the second paragraph of the book, as Ondaatje tries to find the bounty in neglected people and scenes (as recently as the 1970s, he tells us, five thousand people were still panning full-time for gold in California’s rivers).

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Howard Norman

Howard Norman’s novels are nearly all about hemmed-in, stifled people in the vast, silent spaces of the far north, whose quiet lives are thrown about by acts–or moments–of sudden violence. His characters are mostly shy eccentrics, engaged in occupations not so different from the private, controlling business of the novelist: in previous novels, they have included a bird artist and a lighthouse keeper, a teenage restorer of an old movie-house, two museum guards. And because they are all hobbyists, their boxed lives have a feeling of being out of time as well as space, even when, as in his latest book, the action is located in the mid-1980s. One pressed-down drama follows another in a snowbound, spellbound rhythm. If the books were set to music, they would be taken on by Glenn Gould.

Devotion, Norman’s sixth novel, is a story of passion, in many interlocking forms, but true to Norman’s deliberately mild, pocket-watch style, its title places its emphasis on the undramatic, domestic, quiet acts that for him seem to make up our real lives. It tells a love story in which husband and wife never share a house; most of the time they watch one another through rainy windows, communicate through an intermediary or pass on intimate messages by tape-recorder. Their few moments of hand-to-hand and mouth-to-mouth contact are exciting precisely because they exist in such a prairie of non-communication.

When the action begins, the main character in the book, David Kozol, is found sitting on an estate in remote Nova Scotia, tending to his father-in-law William Field. Field, we learn very soon, has confronted David in London, after seeing Kozol with a woman other than his wife (and Fields’s daughter) Maggie and, in the ensuing scuffle, has stepped off a sidewalk and been hit by a taxi. It is now David’s paradoxical task to nurse back to health the man who has challenged him to a fight–and who regularly writes him notes promising to clock him again. David is not allowed to meet Maggie, to whom he is still officially married, and almost every time she comes to visit her ailing father, David makes himself absent (a task for which he is well-suited). For a while after his accident, we are told, Field’s voice seemed likely to disappear forever.

In this odd position of inadvertent closeness and near-arctic isolation, David tends the wounded swans that were formerly Field’s subjects, reads Penguin Island and other novels by Anatole France (Maggie’s favorite author) and listens, on a 1950 Grundig-Majestic turntable, to Bach cello suites (as Norman has said he does), an illiterate, we are told, “at reading his own heart.” In his spare hours David is working on a monograph on a melancholy Czech photographer who takes pictures of eggs and glasses of water. David is an orphan, and so his only human connection on the isolated estate (owned by two Hungarian refugees from the Holocaust who now live mostly on an island in Scotland) is with the man who has sworn to be his enemy.

Howard Norman fashions miniatures–books a little bit like Joseph Cornell boxes–and they often consist, as here, of a set of miniature vignettes pieced together in an unexpected, carefully oblique way that only slowly discloses their patterning. His conversations are haunting and broken–often about brokenness–and information comes to us in bits and pieces, through a series of non-sequiturs (all of which gives the narrative a curious tautness and even intensity). And it is typical of his precision that even in the opening scene all the details have some relevance to his theme (and the whole book serves as a microcosm of his oeuvre).

David, we see almost instantly, has effectively taken his father-in-law’s place as tender of the wounded (both Maggie and the damaged birds). He sits alone in the near-dusk and is clearly, like Field pere and fille, a riddle waiting to be cracked. William, we later learn, is also a gentle man who has been subject to moments of violent and destructive passion, a shut-in flourishing a rifle in the dark. Penguin Island and the other France books, like many of the details in the novel, tell us, in essence, how to read the book in our hands (the epigraph to Devotion comes from France, and tells us that “Devotion is a thing that demands motives”). The swans will recur in almost every scene just in case we haven’t realized that this is a book about injured beings who are flapping around angrily and even biting others because they have lost the capacity to fly.

Much of the appeal of Norman’s stories lies in their musty, elliptical manner, which can occasionally suggest a wordless dream. Here is a scene in which David meets Stefania and Isador, the owners of the estate.

“He let the swans loose. They headed directly for the pond, distributing themselves in four preening armadas. Their statuesque beauty. Each of their heads forming an elegant cursive S . The invisible rudders of their feet. “Since they can’t fly,” Isador said, “this is their great moment of freedom, I always think.”

They all three watched the swans a while. “I’m remembering, just now,” Stefania said. “When I was a girl, swans–from where, who knows ? Norway or Sweden possibly. As a girl they would fly over my village.”

And with that the second chapter ends.

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What I Love About Kyoto

What I love about Kyoto is the night. Almost every visitor to the ancient Japanese capital, home of geisha and tea-ceremonies and kimono and 2000 temples–is shocked by the first view, as she steps out of Kyoto’s ultra-modern train station, with an eleven-storey department-store and a luxury hotel attached: the “City of Heavenly Peace,” the home to rock gardens and straw-sandalled potters is, on first encounter, a huge, concrete, sprawling mess of skyscrapers, larger than Detroit.

As you thread your way through its clangourous streets, in and out of arcades crammed with yellow-haired girls in micro-skirts and boys in hip-hop clothing doing their best to impersonate 50 Cent (or 50 Yen at least), as you negotiate narrow lanes thick with McDonald’s outlets and Laura Ashley shops, more Kentucky Fried Chickens than you ever see in London or New York, and those things that are not Californian often mock-Californian, you may reasonably wonder why you’ve left your home in Islington, perhaps, to come to a poor copy of Islington, but with signs you can’t read. The only foreign things to hit you are the wrong things: the fact that there are no real street addresses to speak of, that none of the signs makes any sense (in their mix of three different Japanese alphabets) and that the ones that are ostensibly in English make the least sense of all.

Gleaming “tea-rooms” called the “Cafe Selfish,” temples adorned with vending machines offering you Coke and strawberry-flavoured Fanta twenty-four hours a day, 7-Eleven oulets (it’s now a Japanese company) thick with mango-flavoured Aero balls and bottles of Creap creamer: it may be “Lost in Translation” material, and it may speak for Global Culture, J-Pop division, but it’s not what you spent L 600 to come and see, usually.

But just wait. Remember that the Japanese gift is for patience, and for accommodation of everything high and low, alone and in unfathomable combinations. Recall that the language the Japanese speak best is silence. Consult the page in your guidebook that says (as all guidebooks to Japan say) that one key to the Japanese sensibility is the short book by the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki called “In Praise of Shadows.” There’s a reason why traditional Japanese houses don’t have locks, and shoji paper screens allow you to see everyone else only in silhoutte, as outlines. The reason you’ve come all this way is to visit a place that has advanced further than any other in refining the notion that the best way of speaking is by saying nothing at all and the best way of seeing something is leaving a lot to the imagination.

Intimate, suggestive, even erotic: that is what Japan, especially the classical Japan centred in Kyoto, is all about; the shadowy side of the mind, one’s tempted to say, and certainly the night-time side. When you’re with someone you love, the last thing you want to do, sometimes, is talk.

Position yourself, therefore, along Sanjo or Shijo Bridges, at the very centre of town (you can even position yourself by a window at the Starbucks that now commands perhaps the choicest location in town, where the historic street of Sanjo-dori meets the Kamo River). Look to the east, as the sharpened light catches the cluster of trees and rounded hills of Higashiyama, the Eastern Mountains, which look shockingly close (and can, in fact, be reached in about eight or nine minutes on foot). Even ascend to the ninth-floor “Playland” on top of the Takashimaya department-store for that central Kyoto moment that we call “dusk” (and that centuries of local poets have called “tasagare” or the “Who are you ?” time).

Then, when the dark has just about fallen, notice how the chaos around you resolves itself into a kind or order. See how the lanterns outside the wooden buildings along the river convert a clamourous, jumbled space into a setting out of a Yasunari Kawabata novel. Notice how the lights are smaller than in almost any other country, dimmer, more alluring. The less you see of someone or somewhere, the more enticing they often are.

Walk out, then, into the classic geisha district of Gion. Along the narrow, red-lanterned alleyway of Pontocho, fortune-tellers at their little tables near the many-storied love-hotel, with illuminated lanterns and a readiness to tell you whether you’ll find love somewhere in the shadows. Walk up Shijo-dori and then down Hanamikoji-dori to the south, through the last few wooden tea-houses, whose charm has everything to do with the fact you can’t quite make out who’s sitting behind the near-transparent windows, or what is betokened by that pair of twinned slippers in the reception-hall.

Wander up, and up into the hills and you’ll forget that you ever wrote that postcard home saying, “You wouldn’t believe Kyoto! It’s just ten-floor tower-blocks and streams of taxis.” Through the great orange torii gates of Yasaka Jinja, the shrine that has heard the prayers of women of the night for more than a thousand years, and then past the massed white lanterns of the central shrine, up into the hills towards the Sannenzaka area, which leads all the way to the great hillside temple of Kiyomizu.

I defy you to say that you’re not now in a Japan you might have associated formerly with the romantic woodcuts of Hiroshige. You’ll still find vending machines, of course (some of them selling bottles of whisky); the taxis will still be purring outside 300 year-old private tea-houses, and the traditional handicraft shops along the pilgrims’ slope will still proudly display pictures of 17 year-old nymphets who are the local equivalent of the Spice Girls. Your fellow pedestrians will most likely be chattering away on Hello Kitty cell phones, while wearing, with their school skirts and blouses, thick white loose socks that make larger statements about their claims to looseness.

But as you follow impulse into lanes that are almost deserted, as you come out into Maruyama Park, and see only the suggestions of windows and pagodas leading up into the hills, as you walk along the sleekly polished streets of shops, giving old Japan a chic new finish, you will, I think, realize you’re not in Kansas any more.

I arrived in Kyoto twenty years ago, to live in a place as different as possible from the England and the California where I’d grown up. As soon as night falls every day, I know that what I can see and understand is ringed by a much greater dark that represents, excitingly, all that I do not and will not ever know.

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What I Love About Los Angeles

I once drove one hour out of central Los Angeles, along the infamous 10 freeway, clogged with long-distance trucks and low-riding gang-mobiles as it moves into and through the dark industrial areas of East Los Angeles towards the desert, and turned off the barreling eight lanes at a small road in a college town. Following a riddle of residential streets in a non-descript neighborhood, I came at last upon an almost unmarked road, and started driving up, around turns, higher and higher, till all I could see were tall conifers, the occasional cabin, mountain slopes above. Very soon there was nothing man-made visible; nothing, in fact, but rock and road and what could have been snow on the ground.

Turning into an empty driveway at the top, I found a slope of pine trees and a dark hall in which a 91 year-old, shaven-headed man from Japan was leading twenty or so shaven-headed men in black through a rigorous Zen training as punishing as anything in the army. No sleep for seven days, as many as sixteen hours of meditation between one sunrise and the next, walks barefoot around the freezing trees at midnight, to keep themselves alert and sharp. Everything I thought I knew about Los Angeles was forgotten–or reversed.

And yet the journey into the mountains was akin to a passage through a hidden gateway into a whole other universe hiding out within the one I knew. The best trips always have this sense of a creaking door swinging back, to admit one not so much to a different place as to a different light or angle, from which the places one knows look back at one, transformed.

It was also a reminder, easily forgotten if one looks at posters and postcards and the latest incarnation of Baywatch (shot in Vancouver), that in L.A., as in Rio, or along the Cote d’Azur, all the secrets lie in the hills. Drive down towards the beaches if you want to enter what can feel like a stage-set, with golden sunsets along the pier in Malibu, and oil-chested body-builders preening themselves on Muscle Beach in Venice, or sandy-haired kids with leathery skin taking the waves at Redondo or Huntington Beach as if the Beach Boys had never left. Drive into the hills if you want to see real life, or California before it had a sense of itself.

The lowlands in Los Angeles are just that: they are the place of clotted freeways and long stretches of murky boulevard, running between broken motels and look-alike mini-malls, those areas so infernal that, as they say, “you can’t even see the mountains” through the smoggy air. L.A. is home to an “industry,” and even if it is an industry of make-believe, it is one fuelled by exorbitant amounts of warehouse space, cars and trucks and dolleys, all the stuff that keeps Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards in a constant state of congestion and agitation.

Around this always ruthless business is an ever more complex cluster of half-intersecting neighborhoods speaking Korean and Vietnamese and Spanish as it sounds in El Salvador, people drawn by a dream of Los Angeles that shows only the curving coastline and its long horizons. Los Angeles is in the unhappy state of presenting you with a snarl of overlapping freeways all curling around billboards that broadcast the pristine, cloudless, orange-tree Los Angeles that you never see off-screen. The few relatively idyllic areas (Bel-Air, the Malibu Colony, Marina Del Ray) are all gated.

But head into the hills and you leave all that behind. You’re freed from the burden of the Los Angeles that’s selling itself in the image of what it longs (or used) to be. Screenwriters and movie-stars famously hide out besides the winding roads that snake up into the Hollywood Hills, or along the few streets that cut across the passes, such as Mulholland Drive (home to Nicholson and to Brando once) or Topanga Canyon (home to Joni Mitchell’s “Ladies of the Canyon”). But the hills I am speaking of are even farther back, near Mount Baldy, where the Zen master holds his silent training camp, or even in the high places behind Caltech, where scientists keep their observatories, relics of a time when Los Angeles was famous for the clearness of its skies.

Every famous city, like a movie star who’s been told to act herself once too often, has to be stripped–freed–of its sense of what it’s meant to be if you are to enjoy it. In the hills of Southern California you find retreat-houses, hiking trails, the coyotes and mountain lions who, displaced by human habitations, wander more and more down into shopping-malls to seek their prey. But what you most find is California before it was discovered. You can smell the anise everywhere; the potholed, two-lane roads become avenues of wild-mustard, and even golden poppies, in the spring; the dry, bare slopes and the brush remind you of a time before the cowboys arrived.

To drive up into the hills behind Los Angeles is to drive into the past. And to drive into the past of a place that claims to have no history is to drive into the time when it was all promise, a prospect stretching out before the innocent eye. Once upon a time Los Angeles was all future. Drive up to where you can’t even see the freeways–only the ocean far below, and lakes tucked into the hills–and you see why it was that everyone came to Los Angeles in the first place.

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Thanks for the Dance

Through the long hot nights of summer and early autumn I have been listening to the ten newest songs from Leonard Cohen, almost unbearably sad in their themes and beautiful in their bareness, yet turned sultry and smoky and rich with a full-bodied looseness thanks to his collaborator in life and in art, Anjani. The songs on Anjani’s album (as it is officially), Blue Alert, are all about goodbye and “closing time” and passing away from the scene. “Tired” is the word that recurs, and “old,” and the picture that Cohen uses for himself on the back cover (as the album’s “producer”) makes him look out of focus and almost posthumous, fading from our view. Yet when such songs of parting and old age are delivered by a young, fresh, commanding woman singer, they take on a much more complicated resonance. Sweet as much as bitter, with the echo of spring in the dark of early winter.

The album has stayed with me, almost every evening, because the paradoxes with which Leonard Cohen has always played so mischievously, so meticulously, take on new flesh and blood here, and show us a man—with a woman beside, and inside, him—who has passed through his stress and is not going anywhere except toward a final nowhere. The ceremonies of farewell have been mounting in recent years on his recordings. On Ten New Songs, in 2001, Cohen featured his co-singer, Sharon Robinson, on the album cover with him, and her husky, aromatic back-up often drowned out his aging growl. On his last album, Dear Heather, in 2004, he offered a drawing he’d made of a sylph or Muse (who looks very much like Anjani) on the cover—no picture of himself—and on at least two songs let Anjani more or less take over. Now he releases a whole collection of new songs in camouflage, as it were, delivered by his companion, and as if to say that it doesn’t really matter who or where they come from. It’s almost as if the songs, looking at death with a voice that never cracks, taking leave of everything with a due sense that much has been enjoyed, issue from someone already absent, or were sent in by his ghost.

Cohen has always held us by writing songs of naked desire and songs of monastic longing, and playing the one off the other: the ladies’ man who is impossible because, deep down, he’s reaching out for surrender. On his first album, his goodbyes were addressed to the women he was leaving to continue his quest. On recent albums his songs had very much the feel of Mount Baldy Zen Center in L.A., where, living as a monk, he really had taken leave of everything. Now, fully back in the sensual world (sharing a small house in L.A. with his daughter Lorca, Anjani just around the corner), he is writing of physical love with the wholeheartedness of someone who doesn’t have other things on his mind. He’s got his monastic stirrings out of his system, one feels, enough to take another being into his life. “Co-production” has rarely had a warmer implication.

The songs are tinglingly sensual, of course, full of an erotic charge and suggestiveness made keener, more piquant, I’m sure, by years in a monastery (where every swaying of a skirt, every echo of some perfume, becomes potent). In the very first song, “Blue Alert,” we have a woman touching herself in the long night, and soon there are lovers lying down under a mosquito net, “to give and get,” a woman with “my braids and my blouse all undone.” The very slowness of the songs allows one to dwell on every drawn-out syllable. But the shock and excitement of the new work comes, in part, from the fact that some parts are written—and delivered—in a female voice. The shiver is hers, not her aging admirer’s. And when she describes her “yellow jacket with padded shoulders” or how her “shoulders are bare,” one gets an immediacy of detail that in Cohen’s traditional work would have given way to wider philosophizing (or at least to his favorite word, “naked”). Other songs, while sung by Anjani with an ache and a sweetness and a robust sense of elegy that are all her own, sound as if they come from a man—Cohen himself—and sometimes the voice seems to go back and forth within the same song between the woman and the man. Goodbye to dualism!

The process of making a final departure from this world has been on Cohen’s mind for quite a while now. But when I listen to the songs on Blue Alert, I feel that I am seeing, sometimes for the first time, what all the monastic training is about. Even such immortal poets as Derek Walcott (in “The Bounty”) offer nostalgia, wistfulness, as they start to close up shop; even the masterful Philip Roth rages against the dying of the light, bewildered, on the run, taken aback, in his later work (The Dying Animal and Everyman). Cohen, by comparison, wastes no time at all on regret or feeling sorry for himself. This phase has ended, his tunes might be saying. But a new one is being born, Anjani’s ringing voice announces.

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The Idea of Disorder in Key West

The air, sultry, pulsing, hot even along the pitch-black streets, is redolent of Cuba. The two-storey gingerbread white houses, their leafy verandahs looking out on swampy gardens, hammocks swaying under Gothic extravagances, make you think you are in Haiti. On one car on sleepy Fleming Street, defiant outlaw legends painted all over it, one of the most prominent declares, “We Seceded where Others Failed.” Your plane ticket tells you that you haven’t left the United States, but your instincts suggest otherwise: you’re in the Conch Republic now, the afterthought of an island off the tip of Florida’s nose that seems closer to Fidel Castro’s maverick island (only 90 miles away) than to George W. Bush’s.

Nothing is quite straight in this off-shore home of renegades. You call for a taxi and a young nurse sidles up in a flamingo-pink sedan with an ad for a strip-club around its sides. Down near said “Fetish and Fantasy Role-Playing” shack, an old woman is offering a sanctuary for clawed creatures (“Chicken Are Safe Here”), and a psychic delivers futures next to a gay bar. In the local paper, the Key West Citizen, the headlines announce, “Syrup-Covered Woman arrested after head found,” “300-pound man kept smashing his head” and–impossible to match–”Man named Noel arrested for urinating on church.” The strangest fish of all may well be the large, doughy-faced Middle Americans from Orlando or Nebraska padding up and down the main drag and inspecting the human zoo from behind the safety of their smirks.

The idea of disorder in Key West, to invert the line from Wallace Stevens, is its very livelihood; the little settlement at the southeastern edge of the not-so-United States–the only Caribbean island in the nation–plays curious games with the very idea of law and order, or the norm. Originally a base for chasing pirates, it has set itself up as “The End of the Republic/The End of the Road: Tropical Vacationland,” in the words of one large sign, the ideal place for fugitives, or those who just wish to steal away from America without acquiring a visa. There are more writers per capita along its leafy side streets than anywhere this side of Greenwich Village: Tennessee Williams wrote here, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison; these days you can see Annie Dillard sashaying off to a one-house writers’ colony, Robert Stone, Ann Beattie. Along Margaret and Amelia and Carolina and Elizabeth, as the pretty lanes are called, rainbow flags announce “gay-friendly” inns, while tanned couples dine by candlelight on second-floor terraces, and residents place “Chat Lunatique” plaques outside their ferny bungalows. The idea is to do as little as possible–no industry, little heavy lifting–and make a life-style and even an art-form out of it, in the manner of sometime local (and cruising songwriter) Jimmy Buffett.

Yet even quirkiness is a commodity for the tourist industry, and so this raffish place for castaways, home to the first American international air flight (when Pan Am flew from here to Havana on October 28, 1927), is a magnet, increasingly, for regular people eager to inspect the outlandish, even to partake of it, before returning to the rat race. Modern Key West is therefore a thoughtful, poetic, largely silent American Broome with a crazy all-night disco at its heart.

Chesty college boys walk the length of Duval Street, drinking a ritual beer at every bar. Shops selling “Deep Sea Drinking” t-shirts alternate with embarrassedly chic boutiques that also sell signs saying, “Sorry, We’re Open.” Key West has become one of those places where real oddity meets its theme-parked shadow–All-You-Can-Eat Oddity–with the curious result that it is sunlit and shady all at once. Fast Buck Freddie’s sits very close to the Banana Republic outlet and head shops peddling “National Pimp Association” stickers stand next to Starbucks.

You can almost see the war between the blue states and the red in the ever more polarised nation play out on both sides of central Duval Street. Step away from it and in two minutes you’re in gracious streets where a laundromat doubles as a gas-station and trebles as an Indian restaurant, and hidden lanes lead to little cottages where the fans turn slowly, slowly. Elegant restaurants sit among the bungalows and muscular men in shorts, holding hands, disappear off into the dark. The pace is Bahamian, and the volume is a private whisper. Then you return to the main street and the obligatory carnival is at full-blast, as if Johnny Depp had moved, in less than a minute, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Pirates of the Caribbean. The house where Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms is home now to the Pelican Poop Shoppe.

For a small, small world–everyone seems to know everyone else’s business–Key West has a disproportionately lavish history. A center of operations during the Spanish-American War, it was, for fifty years in the 19th century, the richest town per capita in the U.S. (in part because it had only 2000 heads), as well as the world’s largest source of cigars, its 166 factories churning out 100 million smokes a year. By 1933, however, it was bankrupt, unable even to pay the salaries of city employees, and its status as a place outside the law, and all but outside the country, began to grow. Its aromatic cemetery has one section for Jewish people, another for Catholics, a whole area consecrated to those who died on the U.S.S. Maine in 1900, another for those who perished during the War of Cuban Independence. One Tom L. Sawyer is there, too, but he’s listed as a “community leader.”

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On the Edge of the Wild

At night, every night, electrical storms broke across the bay, the mangrove trees in front of my little motel shaking in the wind, the clouds above the ocean lit up every few seconds by long, silent blasts of Turner-esque light, as if the heavens were receiving an X-ray. When I stepped out of my little room the next morning, the red-dirt earth all around seemed to thrum with an almost palpable intensity. There was silence everywhere in the empty landscape, and here and there, on the settlement’s stray patches of grass, a few Aboriginals were sitting in circles under trees, or walking along the straight, tropical roads, as displaced as blacks during the days of apartheid in South Africa, the bright white Outlanders of tourists whooshing past them.

My first five minutes in Broome, a remote and eerily powerful little pearling town on the northern coast of Western Australia, I was taking notes outside the Sun Picture Gardens, said to be the oldest outdoors movie house in the world, when I was startled by a shout; “Who are you ?”

I looked over to see an Aboriginal man, less than three feet away from me, staring at me with undisguised rage. I fumbled out an answer, and he looked at me again, with even more hatred in his eyes, and reeled beside me like my shadow as I started to walk down the street, faster and faster, as if to remind me who was the real intruder in the scene.

It was an unsettling moment, but it set the tone for days of the most curious interlude I can remember spending, in a place that unsettled me in every direction, many of them transporting. Soon I was walking past the indigenous population as it huddled beside two overturned shopping carts next to the Tourist Information Center, calling out, “Where’s your umbrella, then?” to every innocent stumbling into the office in search of a map. It felt as if I had fallen into some largely unvisited corner of myself, where everything is more intense in the emptiness all around, and you find yourself walking along an 80-mile beach, completely unpopulated, not sure if you are awake or in a silent dream. “Broome time” is really a form of stepping out of time altogether.

The first thing you will hear when you set foot in Western Australia is that it is one of the most isolated (and therefore wildest and strangest and most elemental) places on the planet. Perth is the loneliest regional capital in the world, more than 1600 miles from the nearest urban settlement, and, as the cliche has it, closer to Singapore than to Sydney. But Broome is far-off–otherworldly–even by Western Australian standards, 2 1/2 hours north of Perth by Boeing 737, somewhere beyond Lake Disappointment and the Great Sandy Desert. The little town itself, with its tropical, corrugated-iron huts, its eccentric drop-outs lounging beneath slowly-turning fans, its sense of having seceded from normality into a province of its own, has something of the flavor of Key West. But this is Key West on the edge of Wyoming–or (since Australia is empty and remote even by the standards of the American West) of Wyoming’s Wyoming.

On a recent trip to Perth, I had a few days free and, pulling out a map, looked for the most visible remote place I could find: Broome. It was Wet season when I arrived, which meant off-season, the 110-degree days ensuring that most shops closed at 3 p.m., when they deigned to open at all (in the peak months of June, July and August–the Australian winter–Broome sees 00 inches of rain a month, and caravans full of tourists; in January and February it sees 00, and emptiness). I knew that the improbable scattering of 14,000 people was home to the world’s richest pearl beds–as well as the launching-pad for the Kimberley wilderness all around–and that it had been settled for a century or more by Japanese, Chinese and Malays, brought here by the treasures hidden inside oysters and the prospect of making their fortunes. But nothing had prepared me for the ramshackle waywardness of this wild, unmonitored place charged with the ancient, slightly spooked presences of Australia’s Empty Quarter. Walking along deserted, straight, straight roads, the wind roaring in my ears, a few beat-up cars and home-made shacks beside me, the ocean a turquoise mirror all around (the local “pindan” red-dirt roads run right into the white sand beaches and blue-green waters), I realized that I had fallen out of Key West and landed up in Easter Island.

These days, Broome is an anthology of the kind of pleasures a visitor might crave if only she knew what to ask for. Cable Beach, on one side of town, is less a beach than a desert, or a sandy expanse, so wide and unpeopled along its 13-mile stretch that the only signs of movement I could see on it, often, were far-off four-wheel-drive vehicles zigzagging merrily across its empty spaces. The whole area is full of quirky flourishes–no mail delivery and gusting winds of 150 miles per hour, a weird effect in the winter months in which the moon on the water creates what seems to be a golden staircase leading up to the heavens, a clock in the most elegant pearl shop in town that is 3 1/2 hours behind (or is it 8 1/2 hours ahead ?). The restaurants and ferny guest-houses are models of an Asian Caucasian style that exults in the fact that the area feels, in its setting and its ways, more like parts of Bali or an island in Thailand than somewhere governed by Perth. Even an unprepossessing four-star motel offers scallop and leak ravioli, twice-baked goat’s cheese souffle and lemon and rosemary roasted quail–and that is just in the appetizer section of the room-service menu!

The sheer oddity of every detail in the town can be explained in part by history. The first Englishman to set foot on Australian soil was a sometime pirate and writer called Sir William Dampier, who arrived on the Kimberely coast in 1688, and published a book A New Voyage Around the World that inspired interest in the area and moved the British Admiralty to send him back to the region in 1699, aboard the HMS Roebuck. By the turn of the 19th century, French explorers were chronicling the almost unimaginable natural wonders of the Western Australia coastline (220 types of reef-building coral, horizontal waterfalls and “pindan poison plants”; 500 mm. of rain in a recent 24-hour span).  Then, in 1883, the largest pearl shell in the world was found off Roebuck Bay, in Broome, the town found itself in gazettes for the first time and people started arriving to find pearls.

By 1901 the population of the settlement consisted of 132 Europeans and 1358 Asians, the Westerners running the pearl trade, the Japanese and Malays and Aboriginals and Koepangers (so named for the Dutch East Indies port of Koepang, from which they came) diving for treasure, often at risk of their lives. The Chinese, assessing the situation, ran the shops (with the result that Broome’s tiny central area is still called Chinatown, and is dominated by the Yuen Ming General Store and Feng Sam’s restaurant). It was a raucous, roguish kind of place in those days, its few inhabited streets crisscrossed with opium dens, brothels and gambling houses, and the “old lock-up”–now a gallery, of course–sporting these days a plaque remembering the police chief who died of sunstroke after trying to mediate a battle between the Japanese and the Koepangers in 1920.

At the turn of the last century, Broome was responsible for 80% of the world’s mother of pearl, and not long thereafter 400 pearling luggers regularly cast off from the waters nearby.  And even though the trade to some extent fell away as two World Wars and the Depression intervened, history never stopped decorating it, as if with its private graffiti. In 1942 Broome was the site of “Western Australia’s Pearl Harbor” when nine Japanese Zero fighters suddenly launched an attack on it, picking off Allied planes. More recently, one of the many wayfarers to stop in Broome and not clamber back up to reality was Lord Alistair McAlpine, from Britain, who so fell under its spell that he bought the Sun Picture Gardens, established the town’s only semi-plush resort and even set up a zoo filled with white rhinos and big cats, their food flown in from around the world every day. (Though now he is in Italy, you can stay in McAlpine’s house, lush with mango trees and crimson-winged parrots, and turned these days into an elegant, if quirky, B and B).

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Paradise at War

Suddenly, rising above the clumps of tea bushes that smother the rolling hills of central Sri Lanka–slight female Tamil workers moving up and down the slopes with baskets on their backs–a great forested outcropping appears. You pass a long flight of steps along the main road, leading up to a Hindu temple. A sign for a Moslem burial ground. A Buddhist monk, in lustrous orange robes, standing outside an international phone-call shack with his umbrella. Then, not long after a sign alerts you to “Guinness World Record Dancer Hezam (Enjoy the Show),” you go through one final army checkpoint and arrive at the place where all these traditions converge.

A series of more than 3000 steps leads up and up, past stalls selling sweets and resting-houses for monks, past a statue of the Buddha reclining, next to the Hindu elephant god Ganesh. Far below, the surge and rush of the Mahaweli River, the island’s main artery, keeps you company as you climb. During the pilgrimage season, in winter and spring, fairy lights lead thousands of the faithful up to the blustery summit of Adam’s Peak (or Sri Pada, “the Resplendent Foot,” as Sri Lankans call it), with its great depression, a little like an oversized footprint, next to which you can see a huge triangular shadow as the sun comes up.

On this midsummer day, however, barely a soul is to be seen on the sacred peak. One lonely cook tends the Japanese peace pagoda, its monk having left for the season. A forestry commission official is here to talk about “community development,” but he seems much keener to talk about the year he once spent in Rhode Island. Wild elephants and leopards take over the mountain as soon as the pilgrims depart. And even on a balmy morning in June the peak itself, apex of devotion, is blanketed in clouds.

When Marco Polo wrote about “Zeilan,” as he called it, he devoted half of his seven paragraphs to Adam’s Peak, which even today local tourist books acclaim as a “symbol of unity.” For Buddhists, after all, the 2243 meter mountain is sacred because the “footprint” at the top is said to have been left by the Buddha, on his third trip to the island that he wished (Singhalese Buddhists believe) to turn into a Buddhist stronghold. Christians sometimes ascribe the print to St. Thomas, Jesus’s disciple. Hindus suggest that it belongs to their god Shiva, while Moslems often say that it is the mark of Adam, who wept as he took his leave of Paradise here. Not Eden itself, you note, but the place where you say goodbye to it.

Four major traditions intersect on the small space, therefore, yet each one sees in it something different. The first English writer on Ceylon, Robert Knox, described the footprint as two feet long; another English traveler measured it as 5 1/2 feet; Ibn Batuta, the great Islamic traveler two generations younger than Marco Polo, had it as “eleven finger spans” in length. And though the mountain is mentioned in the 2300 year-old Indian epic, The Ramayana, it is situated there in Lanka, island of demons.

The towering symbol of unity is, in other words, a symbol of divergence. And almost everything we think we know about it is wrong, or at least blanketed in clouds. The name “Adam’s Peak” is sometimes ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, the British traveler who, scholars have found, never actually existed.  Marco Polo’s account is so hazy that it’s possible he never came here either. And the one who said that “The mountain is conspicuous from a distance of three days and it contains many rubies and other minerals, and spice trees of all sorts” was, as it happens, Sinbad the Sailor, in the Arabian Nights, who made two trips to the “island of gems.”

In summer at least, you come to Adam’s Peak not to see the sun rise, but to watch the clouds floating past, and then see the darkness descend.

My very first morning in Sri Lanka this summer, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Sri Lankan army, Parami Kulatunga, was assassinated by a suicide bomber just a few miles from where I was having breakfast. Eleven days before, 64 passengers on a bus, many of them civilians, died when someone exploded a mine underneath their vehicle. Six local sightseers had recently been killed (apparently by separatist guerrillas) in a national park, and security forces were accused of shooting five boys in Trincomalee for no persuasive reason at all. My first weekend in Sri Lanka, a journalist was gunned down three miles from where I was watching the World Cup.

The whole central area of Colombo, known as Fort, might better be known as Fortified, or even Fortress. Soldiers check cars every few yards, and “High Security Zone” signs ring the major hotels. Along Galle Face Green, the idyllic seaside promenade where children ride ponies and lovers canoodle under parasols, men sell fake beards and families take picnics, there are nine kites in the air one quiet evening–and 21 armed soldiers in the space of a block. Helicopters swoop and circle overhead.

Sri Lanka today is a whole nation all but holding its breath, poised for the next calamity. And each tightening of security only brings, inevitably, a heightening of insecurity. The day after the killing of Kulatunga, apparently by the secessionist Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), or “Tamil Tigers,” someone makes a phone call to say that a school will be the next target. Instantly parents across the island race to classrooms, sometimes bearing sticks and swords, to bring their children back to safety. A medical sales representative leaves a bag of supplies on the floor, and police rush in to “defuse” it. Explosives are found inside a child’s slippers.

To read Marco Polo today on Sri Lanka is, therefore, an exercise in darkest ironies. “The people of this island are no soldiers,” he wrote, “but on the contrary are abject and timid creatures. When they need soldiers they bring in Mahometans from other countries.” Ever since a hard-line government declared that Sinhala would be the national language, in 1956, eight years after independence from Britain, and then leafy Ceylon was turned into the Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, in 1972, the Hindu Tamils who constitute almost 20% of the population, mostly in the north and east, have felt excluded. In the 23 years since the Tigers began violently agitating for a homeland independent of the Singhalese lion (the Sri Lankan flag the rare banner that shows a lion brandishing a raised sword), more than 60,000 people have lost their lives in the war and 750,000 have been displaced. An official ceasefire was achieved in 2002, but as soon as the more nationalistic Mahinda Rajapakse became president last November, the Tigers stepped up their attacks again and more than 700 others have been killed this year in what is war in all but name.

For Polo, Zeilan was “for its size, better circumstanced than any island in the world.” Yet Sri Lankan today could hardly be more ill-starred, its places of worship more full of armed fighters than of monks. Anuradhapura, home to a bo tree said to have come from the tree under which the Buddha found enlightenment–and the oldest historically documented tree on the planet–is home now to army encampments, prostitutes, war profiteers and Artillery Regiment parades. When I went to see the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, home to Singhalese Buddhism’s most sacred relic (the Buddha’s tooth, it’s said), alarms began sounding and I was hustled out into the street where anxious uniformed men with walkie-talkies were using local buses to block off the main road. And as Kandy prepares for its great annual festival this month, the Esala Perehara, more than 7000 extra soldiers have been called in to keep watch.

It’s only right, perhaps, that Polo described the Buddha as having died on Adam’s Peak, and Adam as being buried there.

It’s a curious, haunting fact of Sri Lanka’s history that the island has often been seen not just as paradise, but as paradise in the process of being lost. Situated along the ancient sea lanes that link the East to the West, the island known as Serendib, as Taprobane, as Ratnapida has long drawn foreigners to its palmy shores. Arab and Chinese traders came in search of the sapphires and rubies that Polo also described, and Alexander the Great is said to have sought out the “elixir of life” in a lake he hoped to find inside Adam’s Peak. Portuguese, Dutch and British visitors have sailed away with ginger, wild indigo, seven kinds of cinnamon. Shaped like a jeweled pendant, the island has constantly been grabbed at, and the result has generally been bloody.

“From Seylan to Paradise is a distance of 40 Italian miles,” a 14th century papal legate to the emperor of China wrote, “so that ’tis said the waters falling from its fountains are heard there.” But that is a bittersweet position: to be within earshot of paradise but not inside it. Besides, if you travel only 21 miles north of Sri Lanka, across what’s known as Adam’s Bridge, you arrive on the complicating shores of its giant neighbor, India. In that sense, the latest violence to be disfiguring the island follows, sad to say, in a long tradition. The Buddha’s tooth alone has been at different times the target of aggressive thoughts from the Mongols, the Chinese, the Portuguese and now Tamil guerrillas (whose bombing of the Temple of the Tooth in 1998 is still represented in photographs along the temple’s walls). D.H. Lawrence, who spent a month in Kandy in 1922, was not the only one to feel, “There seems to be a flaw in the atmosphere, and one senses a darkness, and through the darkness the days before the Flood.”

Snakes abound in the beautiful garden, as its affectionate native son Michael Ondaatje writes, and “Jesus lizards,” nightjars, brain-fever birds make you feel as if you’re in a chattering jungle. Even in 1967, when Jan Morris visited, the island was suffering through a murder rate “among the highest on earth.” And long before the recent decades of headless corpses and death squads, there were Buddhist-Moslem riots in 1915, and thousands of insurgents killed in 1971. At times, it’s true, Tamil rulers have been protectors of Buddhism, while Buddhists often respect the deities of the Hindu pantheon; but as with Polo’s account, something sticks in the throat when one reads, in a tourist brochure, “Buddhism’s doctrine of peace and tolerance has left its gentle mark on the land and her people. Different religions and ethnic groups live side by side in total harmony in a democratic society.”

The Tigers, like guerrilla groups everywhere, have made up for their lack of numbers with surgical, spectacular strikes. They took out half of Sri Lankan Airways’s fleet, and much of the government’s air force with a raid on the international airport in July 2001. They were found bringing in sea mines this year, perhaps with intentions on Colombo’s port. It is almost universally believed that they are behind the murder of a foreign minister last year, the near-killing of the commander of the Sri Lankan army this April, the murder of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi when he tried to intervene in the war, in 1991. Pick up a paper today, and you see half-page ads announcing that the army, surreally, is selling 200,000 pairs of cotton socks, 100,000 camouflage t-shirts and 250 national flags. Another article announces that a local man has entered the Guinness Book of World Records by driving a car 100 km. in reverse.

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The Secret Journey

Once every three or four months, or five, for much of my adult life now, I’ve got in my car in my mother’s house in the dry hills of California, above the sea, and driven up our road, around some switchback turns, past the White Lotus yoga foundation, past the community of Sixties refugees, hiding out in the spaces between, the silent corners of our town, past the mock-Danish tourist town and the little gatherings in the hills now famous for their vineyards, past where Ronald Reagan used to keep his Western White House and where Michael Jackson sits imprisoned in his Neverland, and onto a broad, largely empty road that runs beside the sea and then, for me, trickles onto a rather narrow road that runs, in two lanes of quiet, right next to the waves, past a lighthouse, past meadows of dormant cows, up again, and around turns, to another little room 1300 feet up above the ocean, in the dry hills, where deer come out to graze at dusk and (since this is Nature, and California to boot) mountain-lions come out, too, to stalk our Bali fantasies.

There is a sign on the main highway down below–hanging from a huge cross–and there is a name (a saint’s name) on the door of the little room I enter, underneath the number. But names are all forgotten here, even my own, and when I step into the little “cell” that awaits me–narrow bed huddled up against one wall, closet and bathroom, wide blond-wood desk overlooking a garden that overlooks the sea–I really don’t know or care what “Catholic” means or hermitage or monastery or Big Sur.

My friends, a little concerned about my defection–how could I be turning my back on them, and on the smiling self who’s telling them wild stories of North Korea and Tibet and Bolivia ?–find ways to tidy up my betrayal, and say (I’m sure), “He’s gone off to find himself. He needs time to rest. He travels so much, the poor thing is in desperate need of peace and quiet. He’s just taking a break.” They step around the fact that there are crosses in this place, and hooded men singing the psalms at dawn (at noon, at dusk, at sunset), that there’s a cross on the wall above the bed. “He just needs to unplug.”

If I am with them, I say the same–no need to confront them head-on with my infidelity. Besides, I go not because of all the trappings of the chapel I had to attend twice a day every school-term day of my boarding-school adolescence, but in spite of it. “It doesn’t have to be Catholic or Buddhist–or nothing at all,” I tell them (and I believe this). “It’s the silence I enter.”

What I don’t tell them is that I don’t go there just to catch my breath, to be away from the phone, to breathe in one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the world. I go there to become another self, the self that we all are if only we choose to unpack ourselves and leave ourselves at home. That is the ultimate, the unforgivable betrayal.

In my cell–nothing is legislated there, though most people (women, real estate agents, Buddhists, nothings) go to lose themselves in silence–I read novels, and they are novels, often, of infidelity (of the everyday kind). In the best of them, the ones by Sue Miller, say, there is a palpable, quickening sense of the excitement of betraying others and your daily self in the world you know. At home you’re just a dad, an overlooked husband, a mass of duties and non-achievements and routines and concerns, a dirty sink. Then you brush your hair and put on the new shirt, the one you keep just for her, you take off your undershirt so she won’t smell the other woman on you and slip out of your room, and on the other side of town you’re received for what you are: dreamer, rescuer, white knight, sex object, subject of desire. Someone at last sees you in your mythic dimensions, as you really are, or could be. She holds you tight and adores your every inch, and for a moment your life is magnified.

The secret beats, beats, beats away in your pocket like a second heart, a time-bomb, and that gives an excitement to things, too. “My usual life doesn’t know who I really am,” you tell yourself, the devotee in your arms. “She doesn’t understand me. She’s forgotten how to look at me.” You’ve sloughed off your jeans, your cares, in fact, and you can still hear the heightened, speeding tick, tick, tick of the secret in the pocket.

She wants, the other woman, you to make things real, to make her an honest woman, to make it permanent, but you know, she knows, you won’t. It’s the unreality that excites.

I read these stories, and I read with recognition. The shadow story is as familiar as the one we’re taught in boarding-school, so much a part of us that they warn us about it in the Bible; it is as much a part of our lives as are our dreams. All the great myths, the stories of Shakespeare and Aeschylus and Homer are about it, as well as the ones in the newspaper; these kinds of betrayal are themselves domesticated, part of our romance novels, our noir dreams, our letters to Aunt Agony. They’re so much a part of us that they define us as much as all the daily stuff we’re rebelling against does.

The rebellion itself is rather daily, too, a stage, a human impulse; that’s why we talk of hormones and mid-life crises, the lure of a second skin.

For the larger betrayal that I enact on my pilgrimage, there are no accepted words. And yet it is a treachery absolute and unforgiving. I step into my cell and I step into what I feel is my real life, the only place of importance in my life, the place where I ought to be forever. There’s no will involved, or choice; this other world, and self, and life are waiting for me in this empty room, the silence, like the clothes that were made for me all along I never thought to ask for.

This isn’t a Christian thing. I’m not a Benedictine monk, and I attend none of the services held day in, day out, four times a day, while I’m in my little cell. If I make the mistake of attending one because of my longing to be good, my wish to pay, in some way, the kind monks for making the silence available to me, I soon run out again, fallen and in a state. The presence of the fifteen kindly souls in hoods, singing, takes me back, somehow, to the world, the self I’ve come here to escape. The words in the psalms are all of war. I notice which face looks kind and which one bitter.

No, the flight is to something much larger than a single text or a particular doctrine. It’s to–this is how it feels–Eternity. I step into a place that never changes, and with it that part of me, that ground in me, that belongs to changelessness. There is a self at the core of us (this is what some call “Christ,” others the “Buddha nature” and poets refer to as the immortal soul) that is simply part of the unchanging nature of the universe. Not in any exalted way. Like soil or sky or air. It is all of these things, and has nothing to do with the name or resume that accompanied me when I woke up this morning in my bedroom. I have little patience with the names we give to it, the ways we try to box or package it. It is the truth. The adulterer feels he’s stepping into his true, unacknowledged being, but he knows it’s temporary; he seizes the moment greedily, because it’s a drug that won’t last forever. There is something real in it–that is the promise of passion–but there is something willed, delusional. Here I step into another self that will never die and is realer than any of the mortal selves I know. The monks would say that I am carrying on a clandestine affair with my Real Self. I am known as one is in an affair, but known by something eternal and undeluded. The monks would call it God, but I have no need for words at all in my silence.

Thomas Merton put this all best, not because he was a Christian, or even because he was a monk, but because he fell in love with silence. And he made the pursuit of that real life his lifelong mission. He knew, he saw that it was akin to the earthly love we feel, that the heightening, the rising up to a higher place, the making sense of things–above all, the disappearance of the tiny, petty self we know–when we fall in love with Eve or Adam is our closest approximation to this state, as certain drugs can give us an indication of what lies beyond. But it is only an approximation, a momentary glimpse; when you are here, you are in absolute calm.

I won’t necessarily call this a pilgrimage, because, as Merton says, again, I’m not off to find myself; only to lose it. I’m not off in search of anything; only–the words soon become fanciful–in pursuit of the state that is beyond searching, of being found (we feel this when the new lover seems to see us, to love us, for what we are. Alas, her illumination does not last for long). You could say it’s not a pilgrimage, because there’s no movement involved after I step out of my car, three hours and fifteen minutes north of my mother’s house, and I don’t pay any of the religious dues when I arrive. But all the movements and journeys I have taken around the world are underwritten, at heart, by this: this is who I am when nobody is looking. This is who I’m not, because the petty, struggling, ambitious “I” is gone. I am as still, as timeless as the plate of sea below me.

I keep quiet about this pilgrimage, often, because it sounds stupid to other people, or to myself, to put into words to them. If they have an equivalent–and they surely do, in meditation, in rock-climbing, in running, in sex–they will know what I’m talking of, and substitute their own terms; everyone knows at moments they have a deeper, purer self within, something that belongs to what stands out of time and space, and when they fall in love, they see that eternal candle in another, and have it seen in themselves. But I don’t want to try to break it down too much into the words I throw around at home. When we fall in love, and enter a room with our Beloved, we know, every one of us, that we can’t really speak about it to anyone else. To do so would be to cheapen. The point, the beauty of it, is that it admits us into the inexpressible.

So when I come down, I tell my friends that the monks watch A Fish Called Wanda in the cloister. That most of the visitors are female, and very down-to-earth. They sell fruitcake and greetings cards and cassettes in the hermitage store; they have AA meetings once a week and a sweet woman who now lives on the property, helping care for the rooms. The monastery has a website and a fax number; there’s a work-out room in the “Enclosure” for the monks. I read the autobiography of Robert Evans. Hollywood’s famous philandering and coke-snorting producer, on one of the occasions when the monks let me stay in the cloister (I found it in one of the rooms in the private library in their “Weight Room,” along with Woody Allen).

Everyone feels better when I tell them it’s a mortal place, with regular human beings, balding, divorced, confused here, and it has an address I get the editor of The New York Review of Books to send packages to. But I can say all this only because I know I’m not talking about what I love and find. It is the place where all searching ends.

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Whatever Way the Wind Blows

When you scramble up the unpaved paths that link guesthouse to teahouse in the exiled Tibetan center of Dharamsala—the spiritual home of Tibet today (and of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama)—you can feel yourself subject to an optical illusion. On many days in the spring and the autumn the sun rises so sharply behind the snowcaps overlooking the central temple and the blue is so intense in the high mountain air that you can truly feel as if you’ve landed in Shangri-la. The Tibetans are an outdoors people and they quickly spill out onto terraces and rooftops; they take picnics on lawns near their brightly colored houses, and the young monks come out to play in monasteries brilliant with marigolds and tidy gardens. The gold roofs of other temples glint along the mountainside, catching the sun, and if you travel down to the library and look up toward the Dalai Lama’s house on a hill, all you can see is blue, blue, blue—making you believe that it will be like this forever.

And then, of course, the next day a storm comes raging through town, the rain is so intense you can’t leave your tiny cell, the electricity across the settlement goes off, and all the phones are dead. You are trapped inside a thunderous prison that brings much too forcibly to mind the Buddhist hells being described in the only companions you now have, your books.

The weather! As one who was born and grew up in England, I learned very early that it was the safest thing to talk about because it was so completely anodyne. In England, besides, the weather never changed; talking about the weather was like talking about the class system, or possibility, or the future—it was a way of saying we were all stuck with things and the best thing we could do was just practice the national sport of keeping our upper lips stiff. Later, when I grew up (on paper), I realized that the weather was the one thing you should never talk about precisely because it was so banal and never changed. To talk about it was to keep out of the conversation the much more important issues of progress and eternity and change.

Now, though, slowly, I’m coming to see that the weather—not just in Dharamsala, but anywhere—is really one of the most important tools we have. It is a living parable, constantly shifting and constantly murmuring many of the same truths. For even in California, in Zurich last year, in places we think of as tropical, the weather is offering the same illustrations: I wake up one day and the world is an enchantment, waiting to be conquered by that omnicompetent force I call myself. I wake up the next and I can barely see my car through the mist and the hail and the gloom.

It hardly occurs to me to register that the change is mostly in myself, and not the world around me. Buddhists, as Matthieu Ricard says in his luminous new book, Happiness, excerpted in this issue, believe that suffering and unhappiness are quite different things: suffering is the state, the reality, we are all given, but unhappiness is just the way we choose (or do not choose) to respond to it. Those rendered suddenly paraplegic often call themselves happy, after a year or so of adjustment, as frequently as those who win the lottery end up in despair.

It sounds like such a simple thing, barely worth mentioning, until you think of the weather that is our constant companion. Almost every day I wake up and look out on the same room, the same desk, the same prospect from my window; but every day it looks different, colored not just by the light, the temperature, the time of day, but as much by the light inside me. Tired, I look with distaste on the very prospect that sent me soaring two days ago; after a good night’s sleep I see a mist itself as mystical, a veil, a story about the virtue of not seeing.

It’s all in the head, in short, and my head is constantly spinning, ready to conceal from itself what is unchanging behind it. And yet I take each day’s perceptions as gospel. I read a book and write to all my friends that the book should be avoided at all costs. I don’t know what to say when I pick it up again in another mood and find it quite enchanting.

My Zen-minded friends often speak about the dust or grime on screens that are among the many things that keep us from reality. Always the lens is getting cloudy, and then all I see is mist and bleary edges. And yet because this weather is inside us, less obviously shifting than what we see outside our windows, we give it even more credence than when we say, “Toronto is a hell-hole. I didn’t see the sun once in the six days I stayed there.” Admitting that just about all our responses and grand thoughts are temporary, the function of the moment only, no more than a trick of the moment or a product (quite literally) of which side of the bed we woke up on, is, at least to me, quite a blow to my otherwise exalted sense of my own rightness and authority.

But then I look out the window and see snatches of mist stealing up the mountain slopes, now obscuring, now revealing again a blue that was intense ten minutes ago. I pick up the notes I wrote last week and realize that I am reading not so much my words as my moods; on many occasions I’ll pick up something beautiful and, in a hazy mood, scrupulously undo all the good I’ve done. Objective reality comes to seem, almost by definition, what I’m not seeing, and whatever is not changing while the kaleidoscope is shaken—the dark in the room when no one’s here, the silence that lies behind and beneath these sentences I write.

Our external weather forecasters are growing more and more adept at telling us what to expect two days from now: sun at last (so don’t despair!) or a sudden storm (so seize the moment!). But our inner weather seems impossible to foretell—until perhaps we see that it’s all just an illusion, the product of a non-contact lens. None of it has any more value than it has stability. The only thing I tell myself is indeed to seize the moment—and to recall that all my hard-and-fast judgments and beliefs are probably about as durable as that moon just rising over the ridge.

Posted in The Joy Of What's FleetingPosted on
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