Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Author: admin

A Mind on the Road

I wake up in my bed at home and know the time without looking at my watch. Thick fog is blanketing the city below, which seems a potent metaphor. I walk in my sleep up the stairs to the kitchen and almost reflexively get out some tea bags, heat some water. I shower and shave and go to my desk. I know how this day will go, I think, and a part of me is right; I’m on top of my life—in the middle of it—and I can guide and control its flow.

That part is almost entirely wrong.

Three days later, I get off a plane in Shanghai. Lights are streaming all around me from the city’s 7,000 skyscrapers, each of them bathed in a different neon glow, purple or electric blue or green. A Maglev train, flying a few inches above the ground, whisks me into the heart of the labyrinth at 250 miles per hour. I walk through narrow alleyways, Chinese characters exploding around me, and all the teeming energies of 23 million people trying to make their future before tomorrow. I can’t read anything around me—can’t tell north from south or right from wrong; I only know that, 16 hours out of sync, I’ve stepped into some realm in my subconscious where certainties are gone and I have to give myself over to a larger logic.

Attention levels fall by 500% under jet leg, experts tell us, but in another way, I’m suddenly wide-awake, quickened by the foreign, alert to everything around me, all my senses at the setting marked “ON.” I’ve also stepped out of my daily haze, the somnambulism that is my life, and now the world can work on me as it sends me careening, pinball-like, from one shadowy corner to another. My possessions take up no more than a carry-on and small suitcase. I’m sleeping in a tiny, bare room that is not my own. Nobody knows me or can begin to place me; even better, I know nothing and exist outside all definitions. Everything is up for grabs.

This is not what everyone understands by “mindful,” but any real trip has at least some of the qualities of a retreat: you step a little back from the world you know, walk out of what you too easily call your life and look around, astonished. Objects come to you with a heightened clarity, and in the relative starkness of your circumstances, you can better make out the patterns of the mind and life, as everything is highlighted against a single, bold-color backdrop. Many a meditation retreat involves a kind of shock therapy; I get the same riding the bus for ten hours in India. Many a silent retreat is about clearing your head so as to see the passing clouds of the mind; I get that when I’m sitting on a mountain in treeless Iceland, looking out across great spaces of emptiness in the lunar light, the wind whistling in my ears.

The true traveler knows that Antarctica and the Sahara are as nothing to the empty spaces and icy crevasses inside us, which travel can sometimes help us to confront. The person interested in movement knows that most of it takes place when one is absolutely still. Travel is only as good as the non-travel that lies at the heart of it

Jim Harrison, robust Zen maverick, has written that whenever he feels himself slipping into the deadness of routine, his eyelids growing heavy, he gets into a car and drives to some small-town motel for a few days, to recover his love of bars and the human form, the immensities of the American landscape. Ishmael, of course, begins his story in Moby-Dick by confiding, “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” I find that I use travel—almost as much as I do writing—as a kind of meditation exercise, a training in mindfulness. As soon as I’m on the road, my eyes are open—and with them, my heart—life has real stakes and somehow I am far enough from the illusion of a life of my own to try to find a kinder way of moving through the world.

With the blinkers gone and the markers uncertain, I am confronted every hour with a riddle of right action or a stab to the heart. A child comes up to me in the Haitian street, hand extended, his eyes a plaintive search: what is the right thing to do? I can’t hide behind the flimsy structures of my life. I stumble into a movie-house in Beirut, and somehow The Human Stain affects me with an intensity that it would never find in the more populated, distracted busy street that is my life at home. My resume, my contacts are not going to get me anywhere in the wastelands around Los Angeles Airport; I have to find something human that’s not going to disappear in the next minute.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in The Secret JourneyPosted on

Natsume Soseki

Japanese literature is often about nothing happening, because Japanese life is, too. There are few emphases in spoken Japanese—the aim is to remain as level, even as neutral as possible—and in a classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” As in the old-fashioned England in which I grew up—though more unforgivingly so—an individual’s job in public Japan is to keep his private concerns and feelings to himself and to present a surface that gives little away. That the relation of surface to depth is uncertain is part of the point; it offers a degree of protection and makes for absolute consistency. The fewer words are spoken, the easier it is to believe you’re standing on common ground.

One effect of this careful evenness—a maintenance of the larger harmony, whatever is happening within—is that to live in Japan, to walk through its complex nets of unstatedness, is to receive a rigorous training in attention. You learn to read the small print of life—to notice how the flowers placed in front of the tokonoma scroll have just been changed, in response to a shift in the season, or to register how your visitor is talking about everything except the husband who’s just run out on her. It’s what’s not expressed that sits at the heart of a haiku; a classic sumi-e brush-and-ink drawing leaves as much open space as possible at its center so that it becomes not a statement but a suggestion, an invitation to a collaboration.

The viewer or reader has to supply much of the decoration to a nearly empty room (or sentence), and so the no-color surfaces again advance a sense of collusion, which in turn leads to a kind of intimacy (“Kyoto is lovely, isn’t it?” is one of the most important sentences in Soseki’s novel The Gate, and the other protagonist’s response to it, quintessence of Japan, is to think to himself, “Yes, Kyoto was lovely indeed”). For the visitor who has just arrived in the country of conflict avoidance, the innocent browser who’s just picked up a 20th century Japanese novel, it means that the first impression may be of scrupulous blandness, an evasion of all stress, self-erasure. For those who’ve begun to inhabit this world, it means living in a world of constant inner explosions, under the surface and between the lines.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Soseki (his family name is Natsume, but he’s usually known by the pen name he gave himself, which means “stubborn”) is still, 96 years after his death, the Japanese novelist most honored in the nation’s classrooms and until recently featured on the back of every 1000-yen note (equivalent to our $10 bill). His protagonists are masters of doing nothing at all. They abhor action and decision as scrupulously as Bartleby the scrivener does with his “I prefer not to”; the drama in their stories nearly always takes place within, in secrets revealed to or by them. This creed of doing nothing is a curious one in a country that seems constantly on the move, but in Soseki’s world doing nothing should never be mistaken for feeling too little or lacking a vision or doctrine.

The Gate is a perfect example of this. On its surface, it’s just the story of Sosuke and Oyone, a determinedly self-erasing couple in a small house in Tokyo in the first decade of the 20th century, when the book was written. Sosuke, for reasons that furnish the gradual drama of his story, has all but stepped out of the official world, even though (and sometimes because) he feels such a rich sense of duty towards so many of its members. The book delights, as few of Soseki’s others do, in the everyday details of the late-Meiji landscape, from gas lamps to cigarettes and men in greatcoats to the sound of a wooden fish-block from the local temple. Yet its author, unexpectedly, goes out of his way to stress that his protagonists are living in “mundane circumstances,” as befits those who are “lackluster and thoroughly ordinary to begin with.” In a certain light, the entire story is about what never comes to pass: a character falls ill, and then nothing much happens; a long-feared reunion doesn’t come to pass; a search for spiritual revelation seems to reveal very little.

But look closer, and you see how everything is happening, between the spaces and in the silences. To take an example almost at random, Chapter 5 begins with Sosuke’s aunt, much discussed but always somewhere else, finally visiting his house, and exchanging pleasantries—you could call them platitudes—with her nephew’s wife. Nothing could be more ordinary or without effect. Yet notice that the aunt’s first comment is about how unnaturally “chilly” the room is, and recall that the external temperature, and especially the slow cycling of the seasons, are always telling us something about mood and tone in this book. Part of the beauty of the novel comes from the way that it very carefully begins in autumn, takes us through the dark and cold of winter and ends, in its final passage, with the arrival of spring.

We also learn, in the chapter’s opening paragraph, that Sosuke’s aunt (on whom his welfare seems to depend) looks strikingly young for her age; we’ve already been told that Sosuke—as his aunt likes to stress—looks unreasonably old for his. We read that Sosuke ascribes his aunt’s healthy appearance to her having only one child, yet even that thought underlines the fact that he and Oyone have none. As the laughter of kids comes down from the landlord’s house up the embankment—the location itself is no coincidence and sounds coming in from outside are at least as important here as the words that are never exchanged–Sosuke’s wife can’t help “feeling insignificant, even remorseful.” The aunt then says that she owes the couple an apology—which conspicuously prevents her from actually offering one—and refers pointedly to her son’s graduation from university (since Sosuke, we’ve already been told, owes much of his present predicament to having dropped out).

The whole scene might be taking place around me, every hour, in the modern Western suburb of the 8th century Japanese capital, Nara, where I’ve been living for 20 years. “Oh, you look so well,” a woman says to another, outside the post office, emphasizing, with a craft worthy of a Jane Austen character, that she didn’t before, and might not be expected to now. “It’s only because I have so little to worry about,” the other will respond, to put the first one in her place. “It’s hot, isn’t it?” the first will now say, perhaps to suggest that nothing lasts forever. “Isn’t it?” says the second, and no observer could find any evidence for the combat that’s just been concluded.

As Sosuke’s aunt, in The Gate, goes on about how her son is getting into “com-buschon enignes”, and on his way to profits so “huge” they could ruin his health, she’s drawing attention to the money she’s not giving to Sosuke, the success of her son by comparison and, in Meiji Japan, the fact that her progeny is eagerly taking on the Western and the modern world, and not stuck in his Japanese ways, and the past, as Sosuke seems to be. Sosuke himself, meanwhile, is characteristically absent, at the dentist’s office, taking care of a problem that his wife ascribes to age.

One magazine he picks up in the dentist’s waiting room is called Success, and in its pages he reads of the furious forward movement that is exactly what seems closed to him. He also reads therein a Chinese poem, about drifting clouds and the moon, and finds himself at once moved by the realm of changeless acceptance and natural calm it describes, yet excluded from its quietude, too. When the dentist appears—he also has a “youthful-looking face” despite his thinning hair—he tells Sosuke that his teeth are rotting and his condition “incurable.” He then removes a “thin strand” of nerve. Back home, Sosuke picks up a copy of Confucius’s Analects before going to sleep, but they have “not a thing” to offer him.

Nothing much has happened, you might say, if you consider the seven pages that have just passed. But we’ve learned more about Sosuke, his anxiety, his relations with his aunt, his premature sense of decay and his (and his culture’s) inability to commit themselves either to Success or to old China than any amount of drama could provide. Everything is there, if only you can savor the ellipses.

Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in The Death Of Nuance, The Inner WorldPosted on

Upcoming events (December 2012)

If you’re interested in hearing Pico Iyer talk, mostly in connection with his new book, The Man Within My Head, here are a few dates and places to try:

January 10-13 Key West Literary Seminar: “Writers on Writers”

Key West, Florida
January 24-28 Jaipur Writers’ Festival

Jaipur, India
January 30-31 Kolkata Writers’ Festival

Kolkata, India
March 1-3 Japan International Literary Festival

Tokyo, Japan
March 22-23 Families in Global Transition annual conference

Silver Spring, Maryland

April 2 Carnegie Mellon University,

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

April 4 Master’s Tea, Davenport House Yale University
April 8-13 Distinguished Presidential Fellow, Chapman University

Orange, California
April 11 Conversation with Amy Wilentz on Creative Non-Fiction

University of California, Irvine, California

April 15-19 Golo Mann Distinguished Visiting Lecturer

Claremont College, Claremony, California
April 20-21 Los Angeles Festival of Books,

Los Angeles, California
May 13 Conversation with Jim Doty, CCARE program, Stanford

Palo Alto, California
May 14-17 New Camadoli 1000-Year Celebration and Gathering

Carmel, California
January 2015 KeyWest Literary Seminar: “Literature and the Spirit”

Key West, Florida

Many more engagements are currently in the works.

Posted in News, Upcoming EventsPosted on

The Beauty of Siddhartha’s Weaknesses

(The following is an introduction to a new edition of Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the author’s death and the 90th anniversary of the book’s first appearance, by Peter Owen, in August 2012).

“I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” As an innocent fifteen year-old, incarcerated in a 15th century boarding-school in suburban Berkshire, I scribbled down those words upon my first encounter with Siddhartha and felt transformed. How could wisdom be at once so simply phrased, I thought, and yet so radical—so much deeper than everything I heard from my teachers or my parents? After many years of chapel, I was trained to tune out any word that began with a capital letter, and I didn’t have a clue what Hesse was going on about with all his talk of “Brahmins” and “the Illustrious One.” But something in the clarity and directness of Siddhartha’s arrowed proclamation stirred me, spoke to a secret restlessness—and I didn’t read closely enough to see that even that bold assertion will be undercut, as so many of Siddhartha’a illuminations are, before the novel is over.

I’d already devoured Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund, whose tale of a romantic adventurer and a monk seemed made for us boys in our medieval, monastic cells, longing for foreign places and girls. I’d guessed that it was acceptable to read Hesse, because he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and so seemed as legitimate as the Thomas Mann or Jean-Paul Sartre with which we precocious boys were so eager to impress one another. I knew, too, that Hesse’s starting-point—that there must be something more to life than comfort and material possessions—had truth, since all of us were living in a luxurious sanctuary with its own secret gardens and rivers and Gutenberg Bible, and still we wanted to be out in the world, confounded.

What I didn’t know—couldn’t have accepted then—was that literally millions of others were thrilling to the same book across the world, in much the same way; to me—and this is part of Hesse’s strength–it seemed the story of me alone, someone whose ideas and destiny were apart from those of the normal world. As a boy, I could not make out the complexity of the book, its suppleness and ease with paradox, and was in no position to discover how, for Hesse (a patient of Jung’s while completing Siddhartha), his story was less about finding the light than about confronting the shadow, and looking past a high-minded boy’s ideas of being superior or apart. For a teenager, the novel touched the same hidden place as some of the simpler parables of D.H. Lawrence (The Virgin and the Gypsy, “The Man Who Died”), the questing ballads of Leonard Cohen, the novels we eagerly slipped one another under our desks, Le Grand Meaulnes and The Magus.

Those books that capture the world’s imagination, at least as cosmic, universal fairy-tales—from The Little Prince to The Alchemist—depend for their power on a disarming combination of parable and complexity; they can be read by any kid, in other words (“age 14 and up,” advises my edition of Siddhartha), but they’re best savoured by someone who’s known suffering and loss. They speak in several languages at once.. As a boy, I was too young to follow most of the implications of Hesse’s attack on “spiritual materialism,” as it’s called, the sense of ambition and pride and self that lies even in the wish to be free of self; I couldn’t see that his wisest line here might be that “The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.” I simply responded to the vague outlines of the tale, its sense of yearning. When I go back to it now, it’s the refusal to accept any answers, Siddhartha’s final assertion that it’s seeking itself that obscures the truth, that impress me more with their unexpectedness. Inside the guise of a simple Eastern fable, Hesse is delivering an anguished German Bildungsroman about a young man who comes upon a new self-cancelling revelation every day and has finally to shed his cleverness, his pride and most of all his love of nothing but the quest.

When I was young, in short, I thrilled to the beginning of Siddhartha {itals}. Now, a lifetime later, I am more moved by the end, with its many separations, its renunciation of all exalted notions, its touching human accounting of friendship and of loss.

*****

It’s tempting, I know, to dismiss Siddhartha as one of those diversions one has to put away with childish things; it casts such a spell over so many of us in our formative years that we’re inclined to think of it in the same breath as the purple passages and sappy love-songs we loved when we were too young to know better. Going back to it now, I do indeed find much of the book even shakier and gauzier than I recall. But many other parts are far subtler, if only because the book is shaped according to an Eastern sense of time as cyclical instead of the more linear pattern I was brought up to honour. The more Siddhartha comes to appreciate the circular nature of life—when he becomes a father, in short, and not just a son—the more he comes to understand what may be the central idea in all Hesse’s writing, that the life of holiness and truth runs right through the centre of the world and all its confusions, squalour and humiliation. It’s Siddhartha’s mistakes in the book (as he tries to impose holiness on his young son, for example) that appeal to me more than Siddhartha’s discoveries.

The book’s relation to the Buddha story intensifies this complexity. If you’d asked me what Siddhartha {itals} was about before my most recent rereading, I’d have answered, airily, “Hermann Hesse’s retelling of the Buddha story.” I’d completely forgotten, in other words, that Siddhartha deliberately walks away from the Buddha–much though he respects that great contemporary’s teachings–and repeatedly scorns those who follow any doctrine (the scorn itself, of course, part of what Siddhartha has to work through). There are aspects of this that may sound like heresy to certain pious Buddhists; but after having lived in deeply Buddhist Japan for 25 years now, and talked and travelled with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama for 38, I can see that there’s also a Buddhist aptness to Hesse’s highly individualistic telling of the story. The Buddha himself, after all, always urged people not to blindly follow his word—not to become “Buddhists,” as it were—and not to rely on the testimony of others; each of us has to wake up (to use the central metaphor of the book) by ourselves, and see things as they are, beyond the reach of projection or “some imaginary vision of perfection.”

This may sound like the “pathless path” of Jiddu Krishnamurti, or even the “No Guru, No Method, No Teacher” chorus of Van Morrison; but in Hesse’s sometimes ironic telling, it also sounds wonderfully akin to that German traveller you’re likely to meet in Dharamsala tomorrow, who dogmatically rants about how he hates all dogmas and opinions.

Hesse was in his mid-forties when he published Siddhartha and, coming out in the same year as “The Waste Land” and Ulysses, it deliberately turned its back on the dailiness and sometimes self-annihilating learning of those modernist masterpieces, to face another direction, more timeless and less, you could say, Brahminical. The book may seem young to those of us anxious to outrun our youth, and parade our knowingness and maturity, but when Siddhartha says, “In every truth the opposite is equally true,” he’s delivering exactiy the sentence that the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Nils Bohr enunciated around about the same time. And when he says, “It also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another,” he serves up a kind of modesty, a realism, that I can well appreciate at 55.

Perhaps that’s one reason the book outlasts fashion and speaks to so many, in every kind of circumstance. When I wanted to write this foreword, I headed to the nearest book-shop in a small town in California, where I happened to be staying, and there discovered—to my surprise—nine separate editions of Siddhartha vying for my attention; the one I bought was in its 87th reprinting

“I’m glad it still sells,” I told the ear-ringed man at the cash-register.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I sell these all the time. They read it in schools a lot; well, all kinds of people are picking it up.”

It doesn’t matter, I think, that Siddhartha himself is not a very individualised character—more, really, of a soul with an auspicious name, a shadow attached to a longing and walking through a compact lyric poem. It doesn’t matter that so many of us, when young, read the book in our own way, and take it to be exactly what it later doesn’t seem to be at all: a call to find and listen to your “bright and clear inward voice” and not, in fact, a reminder that knowledge “has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge.” It doesn’t even matter if this seeker’s scripture is associated more with dreadlocked kids tramping around the Himalayas than with the existential searchingness of Hesse’s Magister Ludi or Steppenwolf.

Precisely through its looseness, Siddhartha can encompass many more readings than one first supposes, and can become a touchstone that somehow keeps one company through life, growing older and more mature as the reader does. At seventeen, two years after my discovery of the book, I was asked to deliver a formal recitation in an imposing hall at school, furnished with busts of Pitt the Elder and Gladstone and other eminences who had walked the corridors before us; I chose, instead of the expected Xenophon or Seneca, some passages about the river in Siddhartha, to horrify the assembled worthies. When I was twenty-nine, and left the job of my dreams—writing on world affairs for Time magazine in a 25th-floor office four blocks from Times Square—to stay in a monastery in Kyoto, I knew I couldn’t liken myself to the Buddha, leaving his gilded palace at twenty-nine, but perhaps I had something of the unformed and often annoying Siddhartha in me.

When I met my (Japanese) future wife in Kyoto, a little later, one of the main things that we shared was a youthful appreciation for Herman Hesse’s books about seminaries and adventure. And as it happens, like many boys of Hindu origins, I was given at birth by my parents the first name of the Buddha, Siddharth, though they also gave me a shorter, Italian name that has served me well on my global journeys.

Travelling the world for the past thirty years, I’ve noticed the same thing happening again and again, from Havana to Singapore and Paris to Peru. I’ll hand over my credit-card—or my passport—and an immigration official or cashier will see my official first name inscribed upon it.

“Like the Hesse novel?” she will say.

“Yes,” I confess. “Same name, but without an `a.’ “

“I love that book” comes the answer. “It really and permanently changed my life.”

Posted in UncategorizedPosted on

Death of a Globalized Salesman

Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? It’s startling, fifty years on, to look back at the work of Mailer and others in the 1960s—from The Presidential Papers to The Armies of the Night—and see such unabashed ambition, such reckless audacity and such a stubborn American readiness to try to save the republic from itself and bring it back to its original promise. Mailer’s very titles—Advertisements for Myself, An American Dream—told us he was on a mission, committed to the transformation of country and self, and even as he gave himself over to unremittingly private (and epic) meditations on God, the Devil, cancer and plastics, he was also clearly determined to remake the public order. He ran for mayor of New York City, he made movies, he helped start an alternative weekly known as The Village Voice. Part of the exhilaration of Mailer was that he cared so ravenously, and was shooting for the moon even when he shot himself in the foot.

Dave Eggers comes from a much more sober, humbled, craft-loving time, and his latest novel is the opposite of a failure: it’s a clear, supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad. But for all the difference between their generations, you can feel in Eggers some of the hunger, the range and the unembarrassedly serious engagement with his country that gave Mailer such a kick. Eggers asserted his bravado–along with some tonic self-mockery–in the very title of his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (a title of which Mailer would surely have approved); he followed it up with a very different kind of book, a novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, about the impenitent determination of two young Americans to travel the world giving money away. Yet even as he has brought out seven substantial books in thirteen years, Eggers has also established his own publishing house, bristling with attitude and backward-looking invention. He’s started two magazines whose names (Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and The Believer) openly declare their interest in home-made whimsy and optimism (or, you could say, of the past and of the future). He’s established non-profit writing and tutorial centers across the country and, in his spare minutes, written two feature movies, Where the Wild Things Are and Away We Go.

Like Mailer, he’s almost underrated precisely because he’s so ubiquitous and dares us to mock him with his unapologetic ambitions. Yet where a Mailer was consciously working in a deeply American grain, with his talk of revolution and transcendence, Eggers speaks for a new America that has to think globally and is worried about where it fits on the planetary screen. And where Mailer was bent on showing us how America could remake the world, Eggers, with ferocious energy and versatility, has been studying how the world is remaking America. Most of our great contemporary examinations of cultural sampling and bipolar belonging come from writers themselves of immigrant families; it’s invigorating, in that context, to see how Dave Eggers, born in Boston, to classic 5th generation Irish stock, and raised in Lake Forest, Illinois, has devoted himself to chronicling the shifting melting-pot, seeming to tell others’ stories more than his own.

In his fourth major book, What is the What, he gave us a non-fiction novel about Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese “Lost Boy” who survives wars at home and refugee camps abroad only to find that his problems are by no means behind him when finally he gets to Atlanta, and the Land of the Free; some critics may have bristled at the notion of a young white American writing the story of a real-life African villager, but it took a writer of Eggers’s artistry (and vulnerability) to give Deng’s story its heartbreaking power. In his next (non-fictional) work, Zeitoun, Eggers turned the story of Hurricane Katrina into a brilliantly structured and propulsive story whose all-American protagonist just happened to be a Moslem house-painter brought up in the Syrian coastal town of Jableh, married to a former Southern Baptist from Baton Rouge and eager to construct a new life through hard work and tending to others. The American Dream, the author was reminding us, is coming to us now in Arabic.

In both books, Eggers’s heroically self-effacing prose opened up the stories of people we blindly walk past in our cities every day. Zeitoun, in fact, was the first in a Voice of Witness series of oral histories through which Eggers is hoping to inform us of those faraway places whose destinies are ever more central to our own. Like Mailer, Eggers seems ready to take America by the scruff of its neck and ask us what we’re going to do about injustice and a sense of community; but where a writer like Tracy Kidder, in his inspiring tale of a refugee from Burundi, Strength in What Remains, gives us America as a home for second lives and triumphant reinvention, Eggers seems bracingly wary of happy endings, as if convinced that our hard work is still ahead of us.

In A Hologram for the King—a kind of Death of a Globalized Salesman, alight with all of Arthur Miller’s compassion and humanism—Eggers at once pushes that project forward and, characteristically, gives us an entirely different and unexpected story. Alan Clay is a 54 year-old self-employed consultant (as everyday and malleable as his name), whom we meet on the tenth floor of an anonymous glass hotel in Jeddah, where he’s come to try to redeem his fortune, and America’s. Day after day Alan is driven, usually late, to a little white tent in the desert—part of the King Abdullah Economic City, or KAEC (as in “cake”)—where three young colleagues sit around with laptops waiting to show a holographic teleconferencing system to King Abdullah, on behalf of Reliant, an American company that is “the largest IT supplier in the world.” Day after day, the king fails to arrive and the Americans lie around, fret about the absence of wi-fi and kill time in the emptiness. Sometimes Alan gets so desperate for something to happen that he lances a cyst on his neck with a crude knife—and later a needle—just to feel the blood flow.

Hologram flashes past in an appropriately quick series of brief, displacing passages with plenty of space around them for us to feel the vacancy and nowhereness; if Norman Mailer attached himself to Hemingway in honor of the older writer’s unabashed competitiveness and macho gestures, Eggers typically draws on his better side, in a style of clean lines and sharp edges. Scene after scene is so clear and precise—“A plume of smoke unzipped the blue sky beyond the mountains,” a “pair of headlights appeared as a blue sunrise beyond the ridge’s rugged silhouette”—that it’s easy to overlook just how strong and well-wrought the writing is.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in TravelersPosted on

The Man Within My Head – Pico Iyer 2012

If you’re interested in hearing Pico Iyer talk in 2012, mostly in connection with a new book, The Man Within My Head, here are a few dates and places to try:

May 7 Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture, Brown University, 6:00p.m.

Providence. Rhode Island
May 14 Conversation with Dr. James Doty, Director, Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University, 4:00p.m.

Palo Alto, California
May 16 Geographic Expeditions 30th Anniversary conversation with Don George, Lobero Theater, 7:00 p.m.

Santa Barbara, California
May 17 Live Talks L.A. conversation with Lisa Napoli, Fowler Museum, 7:30p.m.

Los Angeles, California
May 21 1st annual H. Peter Stern lecture, World Monuments Fund, 6:30p.m.

New York, New York
June 13-15 Idea City

Toronto, Ontario
August 31 – September 2 Melbourne Writers Festival

Melbourne, Australia
September 13 Conversation with Taryn Simon, Getty Center

Los Angeles, California
September 22 Conversation with Salman Rushdie (by invitation only)

Santa Barbara, California
November 10 Singapore Writers Festival

Singapore
January 10-13, 2013 Key West Literary Seminar

Key West, Florida
January 24-28 Jaipur Writers’ Festival

Jaipur, India
March 22-23 Families in Global Transition annual conference

Silver Spring, Maryland
April 2 Carnegie Mellon University,

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
April 8-13 Distinguished Presidential Fellow, Chapman University

Orange, California
April 11 Conversation with Amy Wilentz on Creative Non-Fiction

University of California, Irvine, California
April 15-19 Golo Mann Distinguished Visiting Lecturer

Claremont College, Claremony, California
April 20-21 Los Angeles Festival of Books,

Los Angeles, California
January 2015 KeyWest Literary Seminar: “Literature and the Spirit”

Key West, Florida

Many more engagements are currently in the works.

Posted in News, Upcoming EventsPosted on

Songs From The Deep

(An introduction to the 17-set complete collection of Leonard Cohen albums released by Sony Records for online sales, 2011)

Some artists come from the Mississippi Delta, some from the South Side of Chicago. But a few, a very few, come from nowhere you can name and you’ll never get to the bottom of them. People will tell you that Leonard Cohen was a 33 year-old novelist out of Montreal and one of Canada’s leading poets when he brought out his first record,  “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” in 1968. But how does the romantic young seeker of those early gypsy ballads go with the ordained Zen monk of the early 21st century, and how does that wise elder writing about death and loss begin to fit with the smooth, Armani-clad field commander, declaring “I’m Your Man”? How does either jibe with the singer whose dark laments were buried under Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, or the ancient psalmist whose work has been covered by Bon Jovi and Willie Nelson? Who could have guessed that a 74 year-old grandfather, in the middle of a two-and-a-half year world tour, would see his 23 year-old song, “Hallelujah,” at number 1, number 2 and number 34 in the British Top 40 simultaneously?

Cohen sits outside every category, and throws together high culture and street slang, Buddha and the blues, so you never know what’s coming next.  He’s less one man than an anthology of selves, waltzer and country singer and techno-maestro all knitted at the core in some mysterious recess. He’s lived in Nashville, in L.A. (and in the high dark mountains behind L.A. at the Mount Baldy Zen Center) as well as on the carless Greek island of Hydra, known for its donkeys and faraway monasteries. He’s inspired film-makers from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Oliver Stone and acted as the head of Interpol on Miami Vice. He’s written a classic Old Testament book of psalms and sung on “Duets” with Elton John. Everything you know of him is wrong.

The sixteen albums collected in this set, though, give you a compendious, almost a comprehensive introduction to many, many of the dapper, searching, droll and ceremonial men called Leonard Cohen. You’ll meet the earnest troubadour with “one hand on a hexagram and one hand on a girl” and you’ll see the grave old philosopher who could be met on the backstreets of Jerusalem. You’ll hear the sound of a soul, alone, raising a cry to the heavens, and that of the silky man of the world accompanied by a chorus of female voices. You’ll think you’re listening to one of the great ironists of rock ‘n’ roll—“We met when we were almost young”—and then you’ll hear him calling out for surrender. Passing, as his fellow poet Thom Gunn once said of his own work, “the romantic impulse through a classical scrutiny,” he’ll give you what a fellow monk, Thomas Merton, liked to call the “smoke self.”

You’ll learn, of course, about sin and punishment and pride, and then you’ll lose yourself amidst the raucous, overturning chorus of “Closing Time.” You’ll recall, perhaps, that many of the more than 20 million records he has sold have been in Norway and Malaysia, and you’ll remember that one of his deepest albums, “Various Positions,” barely came out in the U.S. You’ll hear him deliver words like “naked” and “thighs” and “ache” as if he’s burning; but then he’s giving up everything in “If It Be Your Will” or singing of “Stalin and St. Paul.” These are songs from the deep, but it’s not always easy to see if he’s going deep into a woman, or into his own pain and unworthiness, or into the moment when “I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too.”  As John Donne wrote, four centuries ago, “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow/But yet his body is his book.”

Leonard Cohen is probably the most literary spirit ever to look in on the pop charts, the one formal poet who will craft meticulous, clenched quatrains and a language of “thee”s and references to Cavafy and put them to melodies you might have heard in Krakow three hundred years ago. Many of his friends and contemporaries—Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, say—are clearly poets, yet both are first and foremost songwriters and singers who happen to have a wild way with words; Cohen is a man of words—“holy” and “lonely” and “broken”—fashioning verses as bottomless and riddled as those of Emily Dickinson (but set to bandurria and laud accompaniment that can hold 90,000 rapt at Glastonbury}.

Take away the music, though, and you feel bereft; these are songs, not poems. “Everyone says I know only three chords,” the singer said to me when I visited him once at his monastery. “I actually know five.” See the words on the page without the gravelly grumble, the arrangements that suggest a dark empty room in the dead of night, the raggedly simple tunes, and you’re missing half the point. The very imperfectness of the delivery is part of what gives the songs gravitas and humanness and history; it lets the light get in. Cohen’s melodies are so tuneful that some of his songs have received 200 or more cover versions; yet no one else singing “Suzanne” or “Bird on a Wire” or “Hallelujah” can give us the battered depth and weathered soulfulness that he does, and mix a song about King David and Bathsheba with invocations to a Zen master and a way of rhyming “do you” with “Hallelujah.”

Ever since the beginning, Cohen has been telling us not to believe in a fixed self and not to fall prey to expectation, especially of short cuts or easy answers. Even when young, he was giving us the growl of winter around the edge of longing, the crooked grin that rose above the pure-hearted hymn. Always he has taken us into the essential questions of life—death, sex, war, betrayal—without ever taking himself too seriously. So it’s a treat, in hearing his whole career tumble out on this set, to recall that he was writing, in his first novel, in 1963, “We all want to be Chinese mystics living in thatched huts, but getting laid frequently” forty years before he seemed to be living that part. In 2006 he gave Anjani Thomas a poem to sing that he’d published in 1961.

Listen to any or all of these sixteen albums, more than sixteen hundred times, and you’ll see that you’re constantly getting new things from them. The songs are built to last, even if they talk about impermanence. The verses are sturdy, impeccably crafted—Cohen spent a decade getting the stillness of a song like “Anthem” just right—and you’ll never find anything shoddy or casual. They’re aged, you could say, and given weight and power by the sound of the years in them, the ageless Biblical words, the perspective that will bring “the bloody cross on top of Calvary” and the “beach at Malibu” into the same frame.

The island of Hydra, another North American wanderer in Europe, Henry Miller, wrote in a notebook, is “the birthplace of the immaculate conception. An island built by a race of artists. Everything miraculously produced out of nothingness. Each house related to the other, as though by an unseen architect. Everything white as snow yet colorful. The whole town is like a dream creation: a dream built out of rock.” Hydra, Miller wrote, produces nothing but “heroes and emancipators.” Is it any wonder that, inheriting some money from his grandmother, the young Cohen paid $1500 for a house on the Greek island, and it was from there that his early songs from a room began to emerge?

A dream creation; and a dream built out of rock.

The Leonard Cohen Complete Collection can be bought only directly from the Popmarket store–http://www.popmarket.com/leonard-cohen-the-complete-columbia-albums-collection/details/25975999

Posted in New Writings, NewsPosted on

Beirut's Designs

I walked through the streets of East Beirut on a Saturday evening, and felt like a yokel suddenly translated to a cosmopolis. Sushi bars and tapas bars and a cafe where girls with glitter around their eyes were deep in this month’s copy of Vanity Fair; boites bathed in blue light, and cigar bars, and dance clubs that should have been in Soho. Rap music was pounding out of the late-model Mercedes and B.M.W.s that jammed the narrow streets, and on every side couples were walking towards the Che lounge, he in black leather jacket, with an air of savoir-faire, she in high white boots, with midriff bare, reminding one that Cleopatra more likely came from Beirut than from Cairo.
In the distance, I could see the heart of downtown Beirut with its arcades more rounded and soignes than in Paris, and illuminated churches and boutiques and palm trees lit up as in a museum display case. People were still buzzing in and out of the huge, mock-ancient Virgin Megastore (open till 1 a.m.), and across from it the spotlit mosque seemed at once place of worship and unlikely fashion statement.
I had heard, over and over–who has not?–that Beirut keeps rising from the ashes of its latest civil war, which ended in 1990, after fifteen years, with 150,000 dead. I had grown up thinking of the city as one of those weathered places, driven by the worldliest of wisdoms, that had managed to survive every change in political climate by bending to the times and making a killing out of chaos. But hearing about Beirut’s reconstruction, I had thought, I now saw foolishly, that it had managed to recreate the recent gilded past in which Brigitte Bardot and Marlon Brando took in the sun in Byblos nearby and the wealthy of the world sauntered down the Corniche, from the Phoenicia Hotel to the Bain Militaire, in the city that provided the entire Middle East with its nightlife and its dreams. I had never guessed that Beirut, characteristically, would be trying to design the future.
What I was seeing might have made New York or London seem retro by comparison, fueled though it was by something of the jumped-up energy of a boy joyriding in his parents’ Porsche and determined to take things fast because the escapade could end at any moment. The parents, in this scheme of things, are history and geography, and they have left Lebanon a tiny slice of a country, only three hours by car from end to end, that is made for people from elsewhere. Over the past 4000 years the descendants of Phoenicia have seen the Greeks, the Romans, the Assyrians, then the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the Europeans, among many others, pass through, and been home to the longtime exiles of Armenia and Palestine and Iran. For traders, this all means opportunity; for the young it means severe rootlessness. When I looked in on the American University of Beirut, I saw that six students were putting on a play they’d written called Fragments. On the striking, ice-cool poster, they had written, “We are ourselves geological sediments, left with no ancient concepts which will come to our rescue.”
Lebanon’s way of coping with this absence seems to be to seek pleasure and have faith in accommodation. When I got into the city, at 3 a.m. on a wet winter evening, a red light beckoned down the steps of the Godfather bar downtown, and the lights all around offered Sushi Xpress, X-rated “super-night clubs” and a shop that said simply, “Me and Me: A Life Philosophy.” When my Lufthansa plane had landed, teams of smooth young men with designer stubble and expensive jackets had shuffled off into the immigration hall, and in their midst had stood a tiny blond girl, no older than ten, traveling alone with a Goldman Sachs backpack and a carrier bag from the Ritz-Carlton Millennium Singapore. “Welcome to Lebanon,” said the sign at the counter where I bought my visa. “Please Count Your Money.”
I took myself down to the aged Mayflower Hotel, a monument to raffish insouciance and resilience, and my dark room came with a love seat and pictures of dallying French nymphs. In the corridors there were old British hunting prints, and in the nicely titled “Departure Lounge” next to the check-in desk, I found memoirs of Cuba, novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, left by departed guests. The kind man at the desk negotiated a price, and a check-out time (I half expected him to sell me a will), and told me not to use the hotel phones, because they were expensive. The waitress who served a traditional British breakfast in the morning came from the Philippines.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in City SketchesPosted on

Honolulu Overheard

A craggy man with leathery skin–from the American West, I’m guessing–is telling his slightly younger female friend about the world. I’m sitting at the next table from them at La Cucaracha restaurant in Waikiki, trying not to ask myself what Mexican restaurant, anywhere, names itself after a cockroach.
“I’ll have two enchiladas a la carte,” he says, when the waitress appears at their table.
“I don’t know what that means,” she says.
“Just on their own. No rice. No beans.”
She pads off, untroubled, towards the kitchen.
“I like her,” the almost-cowboy tells his friend. “She’s kind of cute. I like it when she says, `I don’t know what you mean.’ I like people who are direct, just say what they think.”
I’m a little less impressed: a waitress who’s never heard the phrase “a la carte” may not be cut out for this line of work, I think. But this is, after all, Hawaii, where America has stubbed its toe against Polynesia and created a perfect location for the Japanese. Things get lost in translation here.
*****
Around me, the sound of ukelele and slack-key guitar, a gentle, lilting sound that evokes the splash of surf upon the strand, the rocking of a hammock between the trees, is deafening. An Elvis “impressionist” is crooning through the window of the restaurant next door. A woman’s cell phone is beeping angrily as she pays for her coffee at Starbucks with a gold American Express card. There is a sudden trill of “Kirei!”s (or “How beautiful!”) as a group of Japanese young women translate a sunset into an image in their cute pink digital cameras, as tiny, each instrument, as a business card.
Perhaps, I think, on this trip, I’ll just try to catch Hawaii through its sounds. Enough already of the sights, even the smells (the frangipani and night-blooming jasmine that have bewitched generations of visitors, from Somerset Maugham to Paul Theroux). What can be more eloquent than the fact that the sun-kissed ukeleles are playing “Winter Wonderland ?”
*****
“The trouble was,” the friendly Kiwi, in his mid-thirties, is saying, at the table outside Starbucks, “the guy playing Elvis was in something of a hurry.” It’s a few days before New Year’s Eve and the New Zealander, dressed in shorts and summer shirt, looks like an enterprising businessman on a holiday.
“It being Christmas and all,” he goes on, forgivingly. “So he was in a bit of a hurry. I had expectations, but he just rushed through all the songs.”
“That’s totally inappropriate,” offers a woman from another table, early forties, perhaps, a dental hygienist, she will later acknowledge, from Alberta.
“Yeah, I was a bit disappointed.” Jeff, as I’ve dubbed him, is checking the classified ads in the Honolulu Advertiser for a 42’ TV to take back home. “Half the price. I mean, I go a lot to China, and they’re half price there, too. But the quality is questionable. Here, half the price, and it’s the same as home!”
“That is so, so inappropriate,” says Trudi, as I cast her, still rattled by the thought of Elvis’s name and image being besmirched, and revved up herself from having already made the three-hour ascent of Diamond Head this early morning.
“Yeah. It was–I think–sixty dollars. 4:45 you had to be seated. Then we were out of there by 7:15. He only played for an hour and a wee bit. So it was pretty short for dinner-and-a-show.”

Pages: 1 2
Posted in City SketchesPosted on
Scroll to top