admin, Author at Pico Iyer Journeys

A Call Through the Mist

The foreigner in Japan, more than anywhere, stands at the edge of an intimacy that is closing slowly in his face. He walks along a beach, perhaps, as darkness falls, with a young, a beautiful girl, and they talk of loneliness, and all the places he has seen, the nights. The girl offers to introduce him to a local inn, where he will be taken care of, and they walk together up to a private room and sit by the window, looking out at the sea. Then he touches her arm, and the spell is broken. Giggling, she makes her diplomatic retreat. The next morning, when he rises to leave the small town by boat, sailing away into the mist, he sees her there, on the pier, with two friends, waiting for him with presents and goodbyes.

It is a haunting moment, and one that stands for a lifetime of such moments for those of us who find ourselves on this island of half-opened doors. It is made more touching by the fact that the girl knows she will never see the places that she dreams of; all her days will be spent in this forgotten town. And it is made more plangent by the fact that the foreigner confesses to himself (and to us) that the encounter is perplexing to him because he is “innocent despite experience”–and innocent not only because he sees no point in guilt. The plumbing of innocence and loneliness, the incarnation of a deeply Japanese freedom from cynicism and openness to wonder, the attentiveness to all the fine print, emotional and otherwise, in every fleeting moment are part of what make Donald Richie the most lasting and graceful foreign writer on Japan since Lafcadio Hearn (and before). He apprehends Japan (in all senses) on its own terms, yet puts it in a larger picture. He catches the sound of the sea through the mist, the fisherman’s no-nonsense explanation of how it will bring him a living, and then the sense of loss that is what the sound, and the explanation, mean. Japan keeps its visitors permanently enchanted–and vexed–Richie has told us, through its teasing mix of intimacy and distance; it is that same mix, brought to us through a companionable yet solitary traveler, utterly unguarded but always discreet, that gives his own prose its particular strength and beauty. The writing is open, unpretentious, immediate; yet entirely poised, unhurried, at peace with mystery.

For such a large presence, which attracts so many votaries and critics from abroad, Japan has been strangely ill-served by its foreign writers. There is never any shortage of books purporting to lay its secrets bare through a microscopic scrutiny of its business practices, its political structures or its neon lanes; yet all of them, in the end, say the same thing (about how well Japan manages to keep its public face intact). And faced with the girl on the beach, many foreigners are apt to dilate on sexual mores in Japan; others to start anthropologizing about the persistence of rural custom; still others to talk about the rigid status quo that keeps the girl on the island. Donald Richie is the only one I know who will follow the experience through to where explanations fall away, confide his own clumsiness to us and not even begin to attempt larger formulations or grand summations. It is, he knows, just an encounter, all but inexplicable, between one stranger and another.

This freedom from an ax to grind and an agenda to pursue is what has helped him to write beautifully and variously on every facet of a culture he has absorbed and loved, from an unsafe distance, for more than 50 years now. It is what has allowed him to write, with a man of culture’s impenitence, about its Zen customs and its sex clubs, its emperor and its film industry. Sidestepping special interests and provincialisms, he simply roams around and tells us what the place looks and sounds and feels like: the archetypal Richie scene, as represented here, finds him walking up a hill to a shrine, telling us some of the folk lore and history that surround the place, noting how the people move and talk (or don’t talk) in this ostensibly holy place and then coming out again with some gentle rumination on Japan’s relation to silence and worship and time. In The Inland Sea, it’s striking that he travels with no design grander than to wander; and to record an older, less affected way of life before it dies. The place comes alive to us because he simply talks to people–kids, old women, gangsters and bargirls–and lets them tell their stories. Often, their stories have no ending, or leave him with a question he knows he cannot answer.

An ease with incompleteness, then, is part of what lights up his wandering meditations; and a refusal of all pomp and cant. At one point here he begins to talk about what the Japanese love of Turkish baths says about their relations between male and female; then he stops because, he realizes, the Japanese would make nothing of it at all. At another moment, he briefly congratulates himself on being able to identify a pavanne from Faure–only for the woman at his side to hum along with the melody and tell him where he’s wrong. He has left Tokyo, one senses, because the big city is less and less itself (and, what is much the same thing, is taking itself more and more seriously, as a modern Western capital); and he seeks out the forgotten places of the Inland Sea partly because they still have an unselfconscious candor. And yet where other foreigners in Japan regularly write books on “looking for the lost,” or mourning the beauties that are dying, only Richie manages, first, to find the lost, and then to ackowledge that loss, as much as anything, lies partly in the eye of the beholder. He can afford to be a self-styled “romantic” only because–like the country around him–he is so pragmatic.

The reader fortunate enough to join him on his quiet, wistful journey will quickly see that unselfconsciousness and candor are what distinguish the narrator, too. And she will likely find herself carried away by the watercolor beauty of the prose, touched by what Tanizaki, praising shadows, called a “pensive luster” (it’s no surprise to learn that Richie is an accomplished painter, as well as musician, actor and film-maker). “All in sea or sky is tint rather than color,” as Lafcadio Hearn wrote, describing the “sober and delicate beauty” of Japan, an “all-temperate world where nothing is garish.” Indeed, I would venture to say that there is not a graceless sentence in the book. Richie has no time for artifice, but, we quickly see, he is a serious admirer of craft. His book, then, flows with an easy, natural charm, and yet, at its end, as if by chance we get a long-awaited letter, a searching reflection on the author and his relation to the place where he’s chosen to live, and a silvered epiphany on the sea.

The other thing that hits one, reading Richie, is that he is a great writer on Japan partly because he is interested in everything outside Japan; the least dogmatic of foreign observers, he is also the least narrow in his focus. Often, he is able to explain the place because he can set it next to Munich, or Calcutta, or Lima, Ohio; and its very particular way of being and aesthetic he makes familiar to us, and close, by referring to Flemish war paintings, say, or Seneca. It is this background of learning and refinement, I think–this interest in painting and music and books–that helps Richie be merely amused by what rouses anger in many others; and to see what others call “hypocrisy” as a deeply sincere upholding of a public role.

And yet for all the worldliness, he is still able, after 20 years in Japan, to be moved–largely because he draws no artificial borders. Horace Walpole and Beckford are invoked in the same passage that begins with a discussion of Barbarella; Mickey and Minnie, that talismanic pair so easy to mock, he sees as invested with what future generations will regard as “that implacable air of mystery we now find in pre-Columbian sculpture or the artifacts of Etruria.” In his reveries of a solitary walker (he would not mind, I think, the title from Rousseau), he can make Confucius apprehensible through Calvin, and so begin to tell us how Japan has “found means to call a truce, if not halt, to the great war between aspirations and actuality” and how, not unrelatedly, in Japan “you can change your mood as you can change your mind.”

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Posted in JapanPosted on July 14, 2002

The War of Perceptions

For far too many people, the world changed irreparably five weeks ago; holes were left in hearts and lives–in whole cities–that can never be repaired. And for those on both sides of the fighting in Afghanistan, these days are like no others. When lives are suddenly overturned by a rising of the waters or a convulsion of the earth, we tell ourselves we’ve been thrown about by an “act of God”; the recent violence, though, has been man-made, and its tremors are felt in every corner of the globe.

Yet in a larger sense, the horrors of the past month have been more a shock than a surprise. For many of America’s enemies, the war began long before September 11, years ago, in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and underground–even in the World Trade Towers in 1993; and for those on the other side, wishing the Taliban were not in power and hunting down Osama bin Laden are nothing new. Sadly, the residents of Afghanistan have been running from their war-blasted country for decades now. Some people may have believed that America was invulnerable, the global economy was doing what no economy in history had done before and peace was now a given; but most of us recalled that Benjamin Barber, for one, had defined the coming age six years ago as pitting Jihad vs. McWorld, while Salman Rushdie had described–and inadvertently lived through–the same conflict before the Cold War ended.

Much older than the current physical war, in fact, is the war of perceptions, fought with words and images on both sides, and often centering on the virtue of the image itself (the Islamic world, famously, refusing any human images at all, in its mosques and its holy books, even as modern America can seem a cathedral of the image, and icons of a more secular kind). The war sets the haves against the have nots, and the cultures of speed against the cultures of slowness, but most of all it puts those who believe in the future against those committed to the past. The debate in America may center around Islam, but the debate in many other places around the global campfire centers around America, the dominant force that shapes the consciousness and conditions of the global order and the symbolic power that stands for modernity, acceleration and the democratic blast of images. The victims on both sides, as ever, have been symbols, not so much of nations (as in the past) as of whole visions of the world.

One of the deepest ideas in classic Islamic thought centers around the inner jihad, the inward struggle (since jihad, of course, means “effort” or “struggle,” and has nothing to do with war) that takes place in every soul, regardless of its religious denomination. This is a daily struggle, as most of us know, and it is played out every time a stranger accosts us in the street, or another beckons us towards an open door: which of the voices inside us will we listen to, and how do we make sure the best in us is not hostage to the worst? More profoundly, how much do we blame others for the setbacks in our life, and how much do we blame ourselves? A doctor comes forward with a grave diagnosis, and something in us cries out against a world that makes no sense, while something else tries to find a hidden, higher sense.

For the vast majority of the world’s people, following recent events as in a kind of planetary town hall, transfixed by images, yet mostly powerless, the horror has been compounded by the sense of helplessness, as we watch moments whose consequences affect us all, but whose causes lie far beyond us. But in the war of perceptions, none of us is powerless. We can never control our circumstances, but we can always control to some extent how we respond to them, and in what light we choose to see them. We can choose at every moment whether to take our cues from CNN or from some holy book, and whether to see the fighting in terms of the two sides, or of what lies beyond them.

The air strikes will end at some point, and the enmity between incompatible visions of the world will certainly go on. For most of us, the important question is not what we think and feel now, but what we will think and feel when it’s all over. America’s challenge, in the war of perceptions, is to restore its image as a haven of peace and a stronghold of freedom and tolerance. The Islamic world’s task is to make sure that its true doctrine of forbearance and charity not be blotted by a few. But perhaps the greatest challenge is the one facing everyone, however far from the line of fire: how much do we allow ourselves to be ruled by the current conflict, and how much by whatever will outlast it? In the war of perceptions there’s no excuse for doing nothing.

Posted in The Promise Of AmericaPosted on October 22, 2001

A High Priest of Literature

If writing were a religion, V.S. Naipaul would be its most steadfast monk. Arriving in Oxford in 1950, as an 18 year-old scholarship boy from Trinidad, he already looked old beyond his years, haunted by an outsider’s uncertainties and yet determined to make his way in the world. After his father died three years later, the eldest son was obliged to help support his family back home,. but he stayed on in England and, as he always writes, pursued “no other profession” than writing. Living to this day almost alone in the countryside, and writing his way out of disorder with a ruthless chastity and horror of indulgence, Naipaul carries himself still like a literary sannyasin.

When Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, as he is officially known, won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, therefore, it seemed that the prize was being awarded to writing itself, as practiced, and sanctified, by a man who composes his judgments as if he’s never heard of the Internet or MTV, and holds onto “incorruptible” standards, in the Nobel citation’s apt words, while remaining “singularly unaffected by literary fashion and models.” Writing against the current of the times–even as he embodies them (an Indian born in Trinidad claiming the prize for Great Britain)–Naipaul has staked his whole career on the bet that you can best understand the modern world by stepping away from the hype and the swirl and roaming around it with a ferocious detachment. In the process he has fashioned the most transparent English sentences of our times.

It is typical of Naipaul–a reflection, perhaps, of how much he travels on the page as well as off, always urging himself on to new directions–that none of his great books reads alike; he’s reinvented his style with every major change in his thinking. A House for Mr. Biswas, the culmination of his early work, bubbles with the zest and color of the Port of Spain of his boyhood, telling the poignant story of a frustrated journalist (baed on his father) with a Dickensian confidence almost shocking in one not yet thirty. His patient studies of Islam outside the Arabic world, Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, read like oral histories of the modern faith, so scrupulously does the author absent himself, often, and get his subjects to speak as into a tape-recorder. And his immortal book, The Enigma of Arrival, describes the end of Empire, and the loneliness of a colonial exile simply by evoking, in clean, hypnotic sentences, the writer in his little Wiltshire cottage, at the edge of a once-great estate run by a dying eccentric.

The shadow side of Naipaul’s fearlessness is that he has done nothing to ingratiate himself to the world. His contemporary and fellow Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, has written with sorrowful eloquence of Naipaul’s determination to put down Trinidad, and especially its African heritage, as if he were trying to push down the chaos and luxuriance of his boyhood. Those who share his Indian background have followed with fascinated alarm his vexed dialogue with the country of his ancestors over three books and 26 years (Naipaul being the rare writer who returns again and again to the places that get at him, as if to do them better). And hiding behind the disguise of a snuff-taking 18th century English country squire in tweeds, he has turned a pitiless eye on the failures of the developing world, in books with acid titles like The Mimic Men and The Overcrowded Barracoon. Tightly buttoned with semi-colons and taking pains to speak clearly and never to sing, his straight-backed prose reads as if it has never seen a tropical sunrise.

Yet what begins to redeem this unsparingness is the fact that Naipaul has turned the same honesty on himself. The Enigma of Arrival is an unusually moving allegory of immigration and reinvention partly because it bodies forth the newcomer’s anxieties so nakedly, as he watches the “idea of decay” being replaced by “the idea of flux.” In life, the writer has thought nothing of talking about his adventures with prostitutes as a young man, deriding even the fiction of his younger brother and marrying a divorced journalist 25 years his junior in the same year his devoted wife of 41 years passed away. He has sired no children and seems to allow himself few diversions. Even the knighthood in 1990 that might have seemed a culimination of all his efforts has not stopped Naipaul from writing as astringently, as restlessly, as ever.

The new Nobel laureate stands, in some ways, for a rigor and a discrimination that many find uncomfortable. Yet without embracing any of the half-measures of the age, he has quietly, almost unobtrusively, thrown light on the fury of faith in the Islamic world, the dissolution of East and West and the estrangement of those caught between worlds, simply by tracking his own anxieties. In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, the writer’s former friend and near-disciple Paul Theroux describes bitterly how even a longtime running-mate got sacrificed to Naipaul’s sense of his mission (sometimes he has seemed too busy–or fastidious–even for love). But the main thrust of the book’s early pages–a kind of post-colonial version of Boswell’s life of Johnson–is simply that Naipaul made the life of writing seem a plausible, even a noble occupation. Writing is how one finds order–a center–in a world ever more without a sense of orientation, he tells us; and everything must be sacrificed for clarity.

Posted in IndiaPosted on October 1, 2001

Imagining Canada

Several years ago, a book arrived on my doorstep, and it was like no other novel I could remember reading. Its characters were all spirits of a kind, rootless, and drifting far from home, and all of them had gathered, like partial ghosts, in a shelled nunnery at the end of World War II. At their center was a young woman from “Upper America,” as she called it, with a name that could have been Czech or Japanese or even—who knows?—Canadian. At her side was an Indian named for kippers who hungered for stories about Toronto, “as if it were a place of peculiar wonders.” Stealing in and out of their presence was a wanderer with the highly baroque Italian name of Caravaggio, though he, too, was a foreigner in the Italy where they found themselves, and came, as it happened, from Toronto. And lying in bandages in their midst was a “desert Englishman,” without a name and almost without a face, whose origins and identity were always mostly in shadow.

The book possessed me in ways both mysterious and easy to explain. Its scenes, precise, ornamental, full of exotic information, made me feel as if I were walking through a series of bejeweled chambers, sensual and deliberate and arched, a kind of literary Alhambra. The action was presided over by Renaissance murals and suffused with the spirits of Tacitus and Herodotus and Kipling, yet it felt as fresh as tomorrow, with the characters exchanging stories of desert winds and streets of parrots, golden temples and tropical spices. The love-scenes, charged with the lapis elegance of high Arabic poetry, threw open the windows of the stuffy house of English letters to let in a new, an intoxicating, light. Yet the truest attraction of the novel for me lay in something deeper: for even as it scrutinized the past and positioned its characters in scenes now fifty and sixty years behind us, it seemed to me not so much a historical novel rooted in what is now the last century as a revolutionary one, charting the outlines of a new world, in which strangers could interact and love and talk in a new kind of way, “unconscious of ancestry”. And if it didn’t read like the traditional English novels I’d grown up with at school, it also didn’t read like a typical novel from North Africa or Sri Lanka; it was something else, outside familiar categories. The Cold War had ended three years before the book came out, and geopoliticians were telling us that all the old divisions were now extinct; but in The English Patient this new world order was a fact of life, and any assumptions you might make about the nationalities of its characters—that the English patient was English, say, or that the one enlisted in the British Army was British—would be wrong. At the very moment when the world was being convulsed by nationalistic divisions, and people were being killed on the basis of the passports they carried, or their religions, these four semi-posthumous beings told us we could define ourselves in new ways and step into a different kind of community.

“We were German, English, Hungarian, African—all of us insignificant to them,” reminisced the title character as he thought back to a “desert society” before the war in which all kinds of people flowed together in a common cause, no borders or distinctions visible in the sand. “Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations.” His closest associate among the explorers had died, he recalled, because of nations; categories could quite literally be fatal. And as the four figures circled around one another in the candlelight, all “international bastards” in The English Patient’s pungent phrase, they moved, as the narrative kept putting it, like separate planets, “planetary strangers.” This vision of people turning like stars, independent universes almost, too large and mysterious to be pushed into the boxes of application forms, so excited me that I went back to Michael Ondaatje’s previous novel, In the Skin of a Lion, and found that it concerned the people, mostly immigrants, who helped build Toronto in the 19th century. They were not map-makers and explorers, in this case, but bridge -builders, though really it came to the same thing: their lives had been devoted to making a connection between two different worlds, old and new, or East and West. The English Patient was a sequel, I came to understand, which was describing the next stage in Toronto’s foundation, imagining a neutral zone in the middle of war—a space between, in some respects—in which strangers from different worlds could come and heal their wounds, in part by sharing stories, kisses, blood. I don’t know how much of this is what Michael Ondaatje consciously intended, but I do know that he could not help but be influenced by his own multicultured background, growing up in Sri Lanka, going to school in England and then coming to a Toronto where it might have seemed that many of his different homes from Asia, Europe and North America were coming together. The writer’s mixed-race siblings—or “mongrels,’ as he might provocatively have called them—lived, I learned, on four different continents even now.

And his quietly visionary book, making the Old World new by filling it with other worlds and pasts, spoke with particular beauty to a typically mongrel modern reader like myself who was born in England, into an Indian household, and was officially living in California (while spending most of my time in Japan).

The sudden appearance of the book on my doorstep had another, and a more practical aptness because, just three months before I entered its universe, I had taken my first trip to Toronto, the ideal waystation for a traveler from California who wanted to go to Cuba (and a reminder, too, that Canada was exempt from many of the enmities of its neighbor to the south, and still enjoyed cordial relations with places deemed un-American). As I walked around the city, stepping across centuries and continents each time I crossed a side-street, I found myself, as many people had told me I would, in the East Coast city of my dreams, the kind you see only in movies (in part, of course, because idealized visions of Boston or Washington or New York are generally set in Toronto, just as the San Francisco or Seattle of the world’s imagination is usually shot in Vancouver). I went to a ballgame at the SkyDome, I looked at “Indian-Pakistani-style Chinese” restaurants, I walked and walked among the shifting colors and sovereignties of Bloor Street, and everywhere I saw a confluence of tribes not so very different from what I would encounter in The English Patient. I even peered through the gates of the university where now we sit, and remembered how it had been the longed-for destination among those of us studying English Literature in England, in part because it was here that Northrop Frye had mapped out a whole design of the universal consciousness. In some ways, not so surprisingly, what I was seeing was a place with both the sense of history (and so the sense of irony) of the England where I’d grown up, and the sense of future (and so the sense of expansiveness) of the America where I’d come to make a new life.

The first time I’d ever set foot in Canada, I suddenly remembered, was in 1967, when, as a child, I was brought by my parents to see the World Expo in Montreal and, mini-passport in hand, learned to become a citizen of the new world order by stepping from national pavilion to national pavilion in a compressed distillation of the globe. Not long before, like many of our background, my parents and I had sat in Oxford and wondered whether to emigrate to Canada or California (we ultimately decided on the place that presented itself to us as “the Athens of the West,” and later came to wonder whether we might not have been better off in Sparta).

Now, as I walked around what seemed to be a concrete, physical version of what Wired magazine, in honour of Marshall McLuhan had called “mosaic thinking,” I felt I was seeing, in some respects, a liberated England and an elevated America that seemed ideal for an Indian who came at once from everywhere and nowhere. I recognized the skepticism I heard in many voices, but it seemed free of the bitterness it might have carried in England. I responded to the earnest optimism and hopefulness of the place, but it didn’t feel as heedless of the past, and of grounding realities, as California often did. History was a given here, I suspected, as it was in The English Patient, but it didn’t have to be a confinement. I found myself exhilarated, too, by the quick-wittedness and intelligence of a culture that seemed free of the competitive bustle and noise I might expect to find in New York. Here, I thought, was all Manhattan’s software without, so to speak, its hard drive.

This was a lot, perhaps, to see in just two days, en route to the vibrant mayhem of Havana. And the Torontonians I met expressed surprise

and even alarm at my enthusiasm, inured as they doubtless are to the ravings of short-time visitors. As anywhere, they told me, the city

was governed by a hierarchy that the innocent newcomer couldn’t see, and that was no more eager to surrender power than any other status quo, as locked inside old resentments as anything in Britain or South Africa. The newspapers, besides, were full of the latest secessionist talk from Quebec; and the recent outburst of even small disturbances in the wake of the Rodney King verdict had everyone debating once again the virtues of multiculturalism.

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Posted in CanadaPosted on April 5, 2001

The Joy of What's Fleeting

I look around me sometimes in the Japanese suburb where I choose to live and all I can see are versions of the most passing surfaces from the America I came here to leave behind. The area in which I make my home, doing its best to approximate to the San Fernando Valley, has no temples or shrines or narrow winding streets of the kind, when young, I associated with the “real Japan.” The girls hanging out at the convenience-store are often yellow-haired, with cowboy hats perched on heads not made for such attire, and tans that don’t look ideal on a Japanese complexion. When I take the train to the ancient capital, what I see, as often as not, are ads for the joys of artifice: a “Santa Maria” ship docked in Osaka, a “Britannia Village” school for learning English, the theme parks that replicate Spain and Holland and everywhere else.

My neighbors in this area, pragmatic even in their romances, assume, I think, that Spain can be enjoyed more easily, and certainly more comfortably and authentically, in the vicinity of Wakayama than in that distant, alien place called Europe; that, in fact, a copy may be more desirable than an original, if only because it aspires more self-consciously and precisely to the Platonic ideal. Besides, the “real Spain,” if such exists, would likely be full of aliens and mongrel visitors from Osaka, who would contrive to make it look less and less like the longago country of Goya and Cervantes. This principle extends to the virtual idoru who were made for Japan long before they were made by Japan, and to the figure on the NTT telephone screen who bows to you every time you put the receiver down. Anything nature can do, man can do better.

Japan seems to have far fewer qualms than we do in the West about what we so nervously call “the authentic,” and to that extent thrives on the impermanent (the great shrine at Ise is torn down and rebuilt every twenty years so it’ll always look the same). Everything from the geisha in Gion to the smiles at the 7-Eleven are based on the assumption that acting is just a different kind of truth (as, indeed, is assumed in the England where I was born). The important thing, the culture seems to tell me, is not what is true or what is old, but what emotions it stirs in the heart. A fake windmill built yesterday–so long as you ignore its context–can inspire just as much awe and excitement as any of the ones that faced Quixote. Sometimes even more.

When first I moved to Japan, from California, something in this troubled me. Not because I begrudged the locals their innocent diversions, or because I didn’t enjoy their Disneyland fashions and convenience-spaces (indeed, these were part of what I most relished on arrival); but more because I was unsettled by the larger implications of the practice. I felt that in politics, around the world, images had so replaced ideas, and personalities so consistently effaced principles, that we had attained a post-ironic state in which we judged many public leaders by how convincingly they delivered their unconvincing lines. I thought that so many people had grown so used to taking their images from the screen that more and more of the people I saw in “real life” seemed to be acting and talking as in on camera. And I worried that virtual reality had so quickly asserted itself as an inescapable presence that we hardly cared if Tibet was razed to the ground because vesions of Tibet were readily available on Hollywood stage-sets in Morocco and Argentina.

The single greatest danger of the post-modern whirl, I’d felt, was that we were so content with replicas that we’d lost a feeling for the true; and so blinclly caught up in our latest toys that we’d lost a sense of what we were losing. Planned obsolescence was the rhythm of the day.

Yet these days, one of the great luxuries for me of living in Japan is that it doesn’t flatter most of my simplistic assumptions and complacencies, not least about the true. My Buddhist neighbors might tell me that Amsterdam itself is hardly more real or lasting than the Huis Ten Bosch version of its past in Nagasaki. The lady next door might add that the only truths that matter are the ones that play out in the soul, which have less to do with surface than with the interaction between a surface and a depth. And her mother might even remind me of the Buddhist story of the Miraculous Tooth. A young man, going on pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha found enlightenment, promises his aging mother he’ll bring her home a relic of the teacher. On the way back, he suddenly realizes that he’s forgotten to collect a thing for her, and, seeing a dying dog beside the road, he quickly picks a tooth out of its mouth, and presents it to his mother as the Buddha’s own. Radiant with gratitude, the devout old woman places the dog’s tooth on an altar, and prays to it so intensely that the old tooth begins to emanate rainbows, and the faithful old woman herself becomes enlightened.

Perhaps the best thing to be said about the modern moment is precisely that it’s forced us to ask searching questions about the true, and to see that our elegies may be as illusory as our rhapsodies. Both, often, have as much to do with us as with what we survey; loss is as much in the eye of the beholder, sometimes, as is beauty. And as the story of the Miraculous Tooth brings home, truth sometimes exists less in what’s outside us than in what we make of it. Even three hundred years ago, after all, Basho was saying, “Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto.”

Any thought about the true, is, in effect, a thought about the transient: being eternal, after all, is an important part of being true. And one of the things I most savor about living in Japan is that it moves me towards taking the long view of things (as is often hard to do in young and ahistorical America). And taking the long view of things in turn nudges me towards the very serenity and even capacity for delight that Westerners, on arrival in Japan, deride as “fatalism” or “immaturity.” The cultures of the Old World, in my experience, do not see suffering as the enemy to life, but as its basis–and therefore as the ground on which we build our joy.

When first I arrived in Japan, I was a little startled by the fascination with everything that’s fleeting, especially when it extended to James Dean, and the ritualized veneration of the cherry-blossoms. Now I see that the more you look at life in the light of loss, the more you cherish what’s around you, either because it’s lasting, or because it isn’t. I walk out sometimes on October mornings in my mock-American suburb, the air just touched with an edge of elegy–the coming dark, the first chill of winter–and the sky as radiant and cloudless as any I have seen, and I feel myself not just in the exalted sadness of the Himayalas, but in a place that finds in transience a kind of trust in something higher, and a liberation from the frustrations of the mood or moment. The self will pass, the weather will change, the person who thinks that nothing is what is used to be will soon be nothing himself; but everything that’s true will last. Life, my Buddhist neighbors whisper, is nothing less than a “joyful participation in a world of sorrows.”

Posted in The Joy Of What's FleetingPosted on January 1, 2001

The Perils of Faith

Stay too far away from a spiritual teacher, the Tibetans famously warn us, and you cannot feel the heat; draw too close, and you get burned. The fire warnings grow especially urgent when that teacher attracts students through her warmth, and all the more so when the students, in turn, try to put words to the burning they feel around them. That is one reason why lucid and balanced accounts of spiritual communities are so hard to come by: the fires of emotional surrender tend to be so intense on every side-among those who have staked their lives on a community, and on making it work, and among those who’ve turned their backs on it, and defined themselves by that rejection-that the ensuing stories have the unsettling fervor of depositions in a divorce court. “I’ll love him forever.” “He ruined my life.”

Recently, I had reason to think about this again when I came upon the new book by Martha Sherrill, The Buddha from Brooklyn (Random House; 304 pages; $25), one of the most measured and disciplined accountings of a circle of idealists I can remember reading. Sherrill first came to Catherine Burroughs and the Tibetan Buddhist center she founded in Poolesville, Maryland as a reporter for the Washington Post Style section, intrigued by the sound of a big-haired, Simpsons-watching former psychic from Brooklyn who had suddenly been recognized as the incarnation of a seventeenth-century Tibetan saint. She warmed instantly to Jetsunma Akhon Norbu Lhamo-as Burroughs was now known-grew close to many of the one hundred or so students who had gathered around her, and even began to dream of her vivid and consuming presence, and to consider buying property near Kunzang Palyul Choling (or “KPC,” as the students call it); yet even as she was clearly rooting for the center to succeed, her journalist’s instincts prompted her to watch, and to record in minute detail, all the scandals (of money and sex, of course) that threatened to undo the community, as they have done so many others, and to devote much of her narrative to following a young nun who ended up fleeing the place and having Jetsunma arrested for battery.

The Buddha from Brooklyn struck me as an unusually clear and close look at all the hazards-and potential-of trying to set up a spiritual community in America, as seen by an outsider pledged to objectivity and eager to learn; but more than that, and more valuably, it charts a heartrending and all but universal story about the costs of idealism and the mixed blessings of devotion, and about what happens when our sweetest ideals get entangled in reality and Realpolitik and the very complications we had hoped to leave behind. Much more than Jetsunma, it tells us about the price of faith.

Every teacher of spiritual values is a koan of sorts, part mirror, part Ozymandian riddle, but in this case the koan came with all the oversized intensity of a Technicolor marquee in Las Vegas. Jetsunma, a Dutch-Italian-Jewish daughter of a sometime grocery-store clerk and a convicted thief, made a practice-perhaps a point-of not conforming to anyone’s ideas of enlightenment (and does so to this day with her followers in Sedona, Arizona). Quoting unabashedly from Comedy Central, going to the manicurist once a week, and sporting a vanity plate that said, “OM AH HUM,” she especially unsettled her students’ easy assumptions (and ours) by parading a new young lover, of either sex, with every passing season. Most of what made and makes her sympathetic, in fact, is that she comes across as such a typically confused woman of her generation-worrying about her weight, eager to reverse a losing streak of four lost husbands, and more than ready to talk about her makeup, her problems with men, and her “abusive childhood.” What Sherrill sees in her, among other things, is vulnerability. And when she listens to her speak, dispensing sensible, practical tips about compassion, seasoned with talk of “the first big aha” and “Hell-ooo,” the visitor can’t help but be impressed by her emphasis on social action and the heart. On the big screen she would be played by Bette Midler.

Yet this full-throated and seemingly down-to-earth, even ambitious woman-dreaming of making her fortune through hair-care devices with “built-in gel paks that could be heated in a microwave” and once the subject of psychiatric study-was seen by Penor Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage (the oldest school in Tibetan Buddhism), questioned for a while, and then pronounced to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan saint. The rinpoche (so revered in India, Sherrill tells us, that followers collect the pieces of soil he’s walked on) was clearly impressed by her ability to attract students, and apparently undeterred by the fact that his new acolyte, until recently, had been a channeler of the prophet Jeremiah and of “Andor, who claimed to be the head of the Intergalactic Council.”

Stranger things have happened, of course, and the incarnation system is all about finding a divine light in unexpected, undiscovered places. Yet this constantly unexpected saga challenges our assumptions in all kinds of fresh and unusual ways. We’re used, after all, to taking wisdom from eccentric Zen masters and from charismatic Tibetans who breach every conventional notion of propriety and sobriety, telling us that everything they do-eating pizza, watching TV, having sex-is, if seen in the right light, a form of service and instruction. Why should we not extend the same trust to an American woman who’s been recognized by one of them? Why are we more comfortable with a teacher who looks exotic or otherworldly than with someone who looks, in Sherrill’s words, like a “Beverly Hills real estate agent” and doesn’t hide her failings? Isn’t the very definition of American opportunity that, to amend the old adage, every girl can grow up to be a Buddha?

Jetsunma’s story, to me, dramatized many of the questions that shadow every spiritual center, precisely because it played itself out in such extravagant and colorful terms; and the stakes involved intensified because the “Fully Awakened Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light” (as Sherrill translates KPC’s official title) quickly-very quickly-became the largest collection of Tibetan monks and (mostly) nuns in America. Jetsunma’s students, in short, were not just practicing meditation, or listening to Tibetan teachers; they were actually donning robes, adopting new names, and reciting vows in a language they couldn’t understand. Yet these solemn oaths-that, for example, they were not hermaphrodites, and were not animals or spirits, and that they would not drink, have sex, or dance for pleasure-were all being taken by a group of typical Americans: Redskin fans, former Jesuits, a six-foot female personal trainer from Bally, and a man who had sold weapons parts to Third World countries. Their story is essentially the classic (and unanswerable) one of what happens when good and imperfect souls aspire to perfection.

None of this is particular to Buddhism, of course-Christian groups are often much the same. But the difficulties of pursuing their ideal were surely compounded by the fact that these students were committing themselves to a discipline so far, in time and space, from everything they knew. Every single aspect of Tibetan Buddhism-the relation between the sexes, the nature of hierarchy, the very meaning of obedience-had little relation to what they had grown up with and nothing to do with the notions of punishment and sacrifice that they imported from their all-American homes. Even the self they were so eagerly trying to dissolve might be said to have a different quality, a different meaning, in many parts of Asia where people tend to define themselves in terms of a family, a company, or even a country. To take another example, the essence of Zen, as I understand it, is “nothing special”; yet how can it possibly be nothing special to someone who has leaped across a great cultural divide, taken on a whole universe of alien customs and words, and abandoned everything he knows to embrace it?

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Posted in The Perils Of FaithPosted on April 1, 2000

Why We Travel

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that’s “moral” since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship — both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion — of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.

Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of “Wild Orchids” (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week’s wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.

If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald’s would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bataar — or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo — or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much the same.

But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you’ve landed on a different planet — and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they’re being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of our global neighborhood and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon — a human Federal Express, if you like — in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.

But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Barack Obama or Taylor Swift. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import — and export — dreams with tenderness.

By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more — not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes — they help you bring newly appreciative distant) eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second — and perhaps more important — thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.

We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity — and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious — to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves — and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year — or at least 45 hours — and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m SPEAKING {OMIT “NOT”} pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.

So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can “place” me — no one can fix me in my RESUME –I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.

This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear” — disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families — to become better Buddhists — I have to question my own too-ready judgments. “The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, “should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.

I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in MALINESE anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I’ll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.

That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you’ve abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.

That whole complex interaction — not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?) — is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.

All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he’d ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. “To write well about a thing,” he said, “I’ve got to like it!”

At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O’Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It’s not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.

In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And — most crucial of all — the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas — and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.

The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents’ inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic — the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million — it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)

Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room — through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing — not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.

All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he’d never visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.

In Mary Morris’s “House Arrest,” a thinly disguised account of Castro’s Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, “All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author’s imagination.” On Page 172, however, we read, “La isla, of course, does exist. Don’t let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn’t. But it does.” No wonder the travel-writer narrator — a fictional construct (or not)? — confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. “Erewhon,” after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler’s great travel novel, is just “nowhere” rearranged.

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is — and has to be — an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin’s books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul’s recent book, “A Way in the World,” was published as a non-fictional “series” in England and a “novel” in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux’s half-invented memoir, “My Other Life,” were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as “Fact and Fiction.”

And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “traveling is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”

So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also — Emerson and Thoreau remind us — have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.

And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack’s “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.

So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Posted in Why We TravelPosted on March 18, 2000October 4, 2021

King of Infinite Space

When you step into a classic ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, you step into decades, perhaps centuries, of silence. I was reminded of this as soon as I returned, not long ago, to Tawaraya, a nineteen-room inn that sits on a tiny lane of lanterns near the heart of old Kyoto. Though the place is often referred to as “the world’s best hotel,” there was nothing to denote its presence save a tiny sign hanging above an entranceway that has been welcoming guests for nearly three hundred years. I stepped through the doorway, barely large enough for one person, and found myself in a polished-stone genkan, or reception area, roughly the size of a small kitchen (the term different world). There was no lobby to be seen, no front desk or elevator: just a man in a Japanese silk jacket taking away my shoes (to polish them), a kimonoed woman laying slippers before me, and another man, in shirt and tie, whisking away my bags.

I stepped up onto the tatami mat and entered a world of shadows and screens. A single candle reflected off the polished wood of a narrow, narrow corridor. A wooden ladle sat in front of a pebbled indoor garden. A maid in kimono, shuffling along the corridor in white socks, her very movement a whisper, led me around a corner and down a passageway to my room, named after an ancient word for “green”, midori. She opened a door and slid back a panel, and there were two bare rooms, filled with emptiness and silence.

Though I had been in the inn for scarcely thirty seconds, my bags already sat neatly in one corner, as if I had been there forever, the maid ushered me to a cushion overlooking a private garden— moss and a stone lantern—and then, on her knees, bowed to the floor and placed herself at my service; another maid, who would also be waiting on me full-time, asked what I would like for breakfast the next morning, and when I opened the “Guide to Services” booklet before me and found a hand-drawn map of a “Path to the Serene World.” The maids came in again with a mug of green tea, some traditional sweets, and a hot towel, scented with incense for me to refresh myself with.

A trip to a ryokan is really a trip into a different way of seeing the world, a different sense of space and time and self. Not just because you wash (as everywhere in Japan) before you get into the tub (seated on a wooden stool, and slopping water over different parts of your body from a pail); not only because you’re eating with chopsticks and sleeping on the floor on a rice-husk pillow. But mostly because a ryokan is an initiation into the classic principles of Japanese design, which tell us that a suggestion is always more persuasive than a statement, and opulence consists mostly of finding out how much you can do without. In the most elegant ryokan, like Tawaraya, there are no dining rooms, or parking lots, or public areas; the emphasis is on privacy. The view from your room is not grand and expansive; it is deliberately particular and small, a study in miniatures. And the kind of recreation a ryokan offers has little to do with swimming pools, or health clubs, or discos, and everything to do with a sense of simplicity and silence so luxurious that all you want to do is sit and sit for hours in your room, watching the light reflect off paper screens and listening to the rain beating on the roof. You become a part of the scene; the scene becomes a part of you.

Even the most everyday aspects of your routine become transfigured, somehow, in the ryokan’s pearly light. You sit, typically, on the floor, at a low table, and the same room becomes dining room (as the maids serve your meals in your chamber) and bedroom (as they lay out your futon after you have finished eating). You slide across the tatami mat on socks and step around the spare, green garden in geta, or wooden clogs. Most guests, on entering a ryokan, will don a yukata, or light cotton kimono—a way of signifying that they have left their daily selves behind—and glide around the inn, and even the nearby streets, in the loose, relaxed gown. In a place like Tawaraya, everything is made of natural materials—reed and bamboo and paper and thatch. There are no locks or curtains, and the doors are so low that even the diminutive maids have to bow every time they come in or out.

The other feature of a ryokan, which I have never experienced in a lifetime of staying in hotels, is that, like the most alluring kind of partner, it reveals its secrets only gradually, one at a time; the longer you look, the more you are beguiled. When I first arrived in my room, I could hardly believe that I was paying hundreds of dollars a night for two largely empty tatami spaces; soon, I was thinking that I’d found a bargain as I settled into what felt like an ancient box full of hidden compartments. I opened the black cabinet in my greeting area—a small spray of flowers in a slim vase on top of it—and found a minibar inside; I opened a cupboard to hang up my clothes and saw that the wallpaper was made of sheets of traditional songs a geisha might sing. On one shelf was a lacquered box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which turned out to contain antique writing instruments; nearby, in the tokonoma—the traditional alcove that is virtually a shrine to the religion of the seasons—there was just one scroll, so delicately traced that I could hardly read it, and a small ikebana flower arrangement. In a room of rigid straight lines, the single curved flower sang.

Before long, in fact, I had discovered that my simple space actually contained seven separate chambers, and the paper screens and sliding doors which made up its divisions allowed me to create a seemingly infinite number of combinations—framed angles of the garden, rectangles of air, silhouettes of twigs on almost transparent screens. I felt as if I were afloat in a room that trembled like a mirage—now large, now small; now shadowed, now bright. A ryokan is in many ways a study in rectangles, and its air of geometric clarity is enforced by the black edges of the tatami mats, the darkened bamboo screens hanging from the roof (to filter sunlight). Not for the first time, I decided that I would forswear wandering out into the romantic city of two thousand temples, and simply spend the day exploring the many facets of my room, learning to read it (as one might, again, a partner) by a hundred different lights.

The Japanese excel, in many respects, at drawing lines and marking off firm boundaries (between work and play, or the private self and public self; between me and you); everything, from their lunches to their feelings, seems to come in boxes. But in the ryokan I could better appreciate how that sense of segmentation actually makes for a kind of flexibility—“infinite riches in a little room,” as Marlowe put it. My space changed shape and size and color as futons were put down or put away, screens were pulled up or back; and I, likewise, found myself slipping from socks to wooden clogs, to straw sandals (in the stone-paved area beside the garden), to slippers again. Identity, in Japan, is more porous and adaptable than it is in the West.

The result of all this is that the ryokan changes you as you begin to adjust to its nuances. In most hotel rooms I enter around the world, I rearrange the furniture to make myself at home; in Tawaraya, it seemed as if the room were rearranging me. I began to speak more softly and to move deliberately; I start to notice the tiny white plates and the miniature white flask of sake put out in my garden for the gods, the sewing kit, in its own box, inside a silk pouch. Before long, I found that I was almost instinctively straightening my sandals every time I took them off.

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Posted in JapanPosted on March 1, 2000

When Centuries Collide

In Shanghai, just behind the area where elderly couples gather each day at dawn to go through the ghostly motions of Tai Chi, cranes are busy erecting the world’s tallest building, to go with the tallest tower in Asia and the largest department store on the continent. In downtown Toronto, on a jam-packed sidewalk, a blue-robed Chinese monk is knocking clappers ceremoniously together. Amid all the promiscuous minglings of our mishmashed global order, the most confusing ones often arise not when cultures clash but when centuries do, with their different senses of time. The modern Everyplace is the wall of a luxury hotel, where clocks show seven different times at once.

Throughout the century now ending, the trade balance of tenses has been a simple one: America has exported tomorrow around the world–not just in the form of the latest machines, youthful trends and state-of-the-art Star Wars visions, but also in the sense of the born-again optimism native to a young Republic of Hope. The more traditional cultures of the world, in turn, have brought into America pieces of the past–Ayurvedic medicine, say, or Tai Chi, and, more deeply, a sense of community and continuity that has breathed new life into the “old-fashioned” American values of family loyalty and hard work. In cultures as in households, the old pass on their wisdom, and the young bring their reviving innocence.

The problem comes, however, when past and future converge on the present moment–which is all we have to work with–and fight it out for supremacy. The old habitually say that everything was better when they were young–let’s go back. The young are by nature sure that everything will be better when they come of age–let’s go forward. In the former Yugoslavia, in Somalia and the Middle East, America has come in saying, “Make a fresh start!” And those caught in their ancestral rivalries reply, “How can we make a pact with the future until we have made a peace with the past?” During the war in Vietnam, an American culture of the individual, which thinks in terms of years, came up against an older Asian culture that sees identity in terms of a collective and thinks in terms of centuries. The result was as bewildering as when you ask a question in French and get an answer in Cantonese.

The pundits tell us that the central division in our transnational world is between the “slow” cultures of the plow and the “fast” ones of the microchip, the gap between them accelerating at an unprecedented rate. But what is more of a vexation in our modern times–a temporal Tower of Babel, as you could call it–is that everything’s mixed up: fast and slow are present in every country, often, and in every household. Ancient cultures, as in India and China, are eager to invite the future to come to stay, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the way things have always been; software technicians in the Silicon Valley–many of Indian or Chinese descent–try to bring neighborhood to a virtual borderless world (even as their parents are cursing Sikhs, or debating about Mao Zedong). As James Gleick describes in his sobering new book Faster, a man with a watch knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure.

The single biggest strangeness of the American Century we’re leaving is that it has been shaped, to a startling extent, by a technology that encourages us to believe that progress is a good in itself, and by a global power, the world’s youngest, that is more interested in where it’s going than in where it’s been. His Alliance for Progress, Bill Clinton wrote recently in an editorial for the New York Times, is pledged to “elevate hope over fear and tomorrow over yesterday.” Rousing words, but who’s to say that tomorrow is better than yesterday, those in Sri Lanka or Peru might retort, and why should we put hope (based on what might happen) over fear (based on what has palpably happened)? It isn’t self-evident that mankind is really progressing, at a level deeper than machines, any more than it is that any of us is wiser than our parents.

As the clock ticks down toward the millennium, which has the air of being the largest future in some time (and as, paradoxically, that clock moves more and more of us to dwell on the past, our anchor), we find ourselves, more than ever, doing the splits, with one foot racing toward the future and the other firmly rooted in the past. “Fast” cultures fret over Y2K, and slower ones, some even with their own calendar (in Nepal or Ethiopia, say) hardly acknowledge that a new millennium is coming at all. The jangledness of inhabiting several time frames at once is the hallmark of our jet-lagged age. The clappers bang together on the sidewalk in Toronto, but they mark a clock without a face.

Posted in The Global CityPosted on January 3, 2000

Lawrence by Lightning

Growing up within the tightly guarded confines of a fifteenth-century English boarding school, my friends and I took as our tokens of accomplishment the somewhat recherche gray volumes known as Penguin Modern Classics. When I was in college, in the midseventies, Picador books would become the rage (Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Richard Brautigan–outlaw American energy packaged as real literature!); and, a decade later, in the sleek Manhattan of the eighties, the Vintage Contemporaries series (born, it seemed, out of Bright Lights, Big City) would have a special cachet as some of us hobbled off to Area at 3:00 A.M. But in 1972, in rural, changeless England, where our allowances were scarcely large enough to stretch to three packages of McVitie’s digestives every six months, and where we had to attend chapel twice a day, Latin hymns on Sunday nights, and class at 7:30 A.M.–all in white tie and tails–we could think of no better way to distinguish ourselves than through amassing these formidable gray paperbacks on our shelves. Canetti, Capek, Svevo, Vian: even now the names, nearly all foreign and unpronounceable, reek of forbidden cigarettes and the cafes we weren’t allowed to visit. To this day I remember next to nothing of any of these books, and even the authors’ names are increasingly strange to me. But in anxious adolescence, they were the last word, so it seemed, in worldliness and sophistication, to be displayed beside our beds like the conquests (in this all-male internment camp) we hadn’t made. The funeral-black Penguin Classics–Xenophon and Sir Thomas More and Plutarch–were too much like everything we were trying to escape; the jaunty contemporary orange Penguins–Laurie Lee and Keith Waterhouse and Kingsley Amis–seemed too much a part of the dreary English landscape all around; but the Penguin Modern Classics-The Magic Mountain, The Counterfeiters, Nausea–were everything we sought (and found most efficiently, as it happened, in the cinema, among Pasolini renditions of Boccaccio and Chaucer)–namely, grown-up European works of high culture that packed the punch of illicit magazines.

Occasionally, almost flukily, a volume would surface that had so much to do with adolescent boys escaping from their military surroundings (and brandishing, as status symbols, philosophical tomes) that we would actually read it in its entirety and with a palpitating, almost awestruck sense of recognition. Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes was one such work, inevitably, with its haunting evocation of a paradise glimpsed in boyhood and never found again; Raymond Radiguet’s Le Diable au Corps (or The Devil in the Flesh, as it was translated for us) was another, a highly French tale of an eighteen-year-old boy taking on an older mistress, which convinced us all we were actually Frenchmen under the skin. A fifteen-year-old housemate (now, of course, one of England’s most distinguished moral voices) once slipped me a copy of Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund with the blunt Anglo-Saxon commendation, “It’s got a hundred screws.” I read it immediately, and almost instantly felt at home in it: not only because of its austere gray cover, depicting a chestnut tree outside a wintry monastery that looked uncannily similar to the monastery-in-mufti where we were working on our chastity, poverty, and obedience; and not only because of its earnest, almost sacramental hallowing of a friendship between two young men, one immersed in the world of books, the other committed to finding the meaning of life through a series of adventures (in short, as my friend had promised, an archetypal Hellenic quest with R-rated props); but also, I suppose, because–like all our favorite books–it was about a seeker pledged to the holiness of the heart’s affections and committed to individuality at any cost. (Much later, I would see that part of its appeal might even have had to do with the fact that it was the only common link between my surplice-choired medieval school and the vagrant hippie California of my parents’ home, to which I returned on holidays–and, of course, it took that very commute, the dialogue between Apollo and Dionysus, as its theme).

But before I could fall completely under Hesse’s spell, another book came along that touched a sudden flame in me in some more mysterious way. D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Virgin and the Gypsy (written not long before his death, in France, in 1930, and found only after it) was an orange Penguin of the kind we affected to despise, and came from someone as much of the countryside around us as the Huxleys and Orwells we were force-fed in class (and the poems that rhymed with the memorial plaques that surrounded us–“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”). Yet it had to it something foreign and subversive that seemed to place it among the gray books we regarded as canonical. Part of its attraction came no doubt from the photograph it bore on its cover–of the Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus, as ethereal and undefiled as a Botticelli angel, looking into the distance as she is approached by a movie Minotaur (Franco Nero, then at the height of his fame). Part of it no doubt came from its bringing together of young English girl and alien wanderer–as if Narziss and Goldmund were of different sexes, and could interact in newly electric ways! But whatever the source of its magic, as familiar and unfathomed as a loved one, I opened the book on the afternoon of my fifteenth birthday, and closed it that evening, feeling that a chapter in my boyhood now had ended.

Later, of course, I would find any number of clearer reasons for the way in which it possessed me. Virgins and gypsies were the two kinds of beings most outside our orbit then, and most subject to our fascination; and Lawrence’s heroic energy, his unvarnished romanticism, his relentless, burning determination to tell a story about a young and inexperienced soul awakening to its destiny (its passion) were guaranteed to appeal to overeducated inmates like ourselves. The book was everything that was denied us (girls and movement and rebellion). It was escape–from the dark and draughty classrooms on whose desks 530 years of predecessors had scribbled their names; from the unreal rites of reciting the principal parts of the Greek verb (“baino”) (“I walk”) in our pajamas and then donning black robes to go to class at dawn; from, in fact, all the cultural weight and sense of expectation embodied by those Penguin Modern Classics.

But it was something more than that, too. At college a few years later (where beginning students of literature were allowed to read “modern” authors for their first year only-“modern” meaning later than 1832, though earlier than 1945), Lawrence was far and away the most explosive novelist on offer–and, we soon found, the only male novelist, other than Henry James, that girls seemed to like too. And there was something about his raw, passionate intensity, scrupulously unrevised and incorrigibly restless, that felt (as Emily Bronte did) like the way we might write in our diaries, if we admitted to them. Not forbidding like Joyce, not rich with metropolitan polish like Woolf, Lawrence came across as less a text than a man, shouting in our ears.

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Posted in TravelersPosted on December 1, 1999