admin, Author at Pico Iyer Journeys

Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk takes the pundit’s dry talk of a “clash of civilizations” and gives it a human face, turns it on its head and sends it spinning wildly. In his early novel, The White Castle, a Venetian slave and his Ottoman master swap clothes, exchange ideas and squabble like siblings till soon you can no longer tell who is who–or who’s on top. “I enjoy sitting at my desk,” Pamuk told the Paris Review, in an interview included in his new book, “like a child playing with his toys.” This gift for taking the urgent issues of the day and presenting them as detective stories that race past like footfalls down an alleyway has made Pamuk at once the best-selling writer in the history of his native Turkey and the deserving winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, at the unvenerable age of 54. Serving up 16th century murder stories that investigate shifts in the history of Islamic art, offering us seriously entertaining wild goose tales that ask the deepest questions about identity, Pamuk is that rarest of creatures, a fabulist of ideas.

Each of his seven novels is written in a different style and even as you hear echoes of Borges and Dostoevsky and Proust in them, he makes out of the compound something entirely his own. Pamuk sits, as every profile-writer notes, at a desk in Istanbul overlooking the bridge that links–and separates–Asia and Europe, and he has taken on the existential riddles that have traditionally preoccupied European literature and wrapped them up in brightly colored fables, Sufi allegories about the quest for the hidden self, arabesques that could have come from the Thousand and One Nights. By chance, the pressing questions facing both him and his country–how much to define themselves in terms of an Islamic past, how much in terms of a future in the European Union–have, in some form, become the questions haunting the global village as a whole, as more and more of us find ourselves living within earshot of the mosque even as Hollywood movies play down the street. Who better to turn to for illumination than the rare writer who can put Sufism and Hegel on the same page (page 76 of The Black Book, for those who are counting)?

In Other Colors, his first big assemblage of non-fiction, Pamuk gives us all his many selves in a typically centrifugal gathering of memory-pieces, sketches (both literal and verbal), interviews and unexpected flights. The result is what could be called a gallery of Pamuks: here is the author of the haunted, half-lit enquiry into melancholy and neglectedness, Istanbul: Memories and the City, with further glimpses of the “forest of secret stairways” that is his home; here is the man who so loves books that he wrote a whole novel, The New Life, about a character whose life is turned around by a book, with essays on the writers who possess him. Here, too, is the author of the fearlessly topical Islamic novel, Snow, who, two years ago, was brought to trial by his government after telling a Swiss newspaper that it was taboo in Turkey to mention the local slaughter of 1 million Armenians and up to 30,000 Kurds, with public statements on freedom of expression; and here, round every corner, is the whimsical, endlessly inventive juggler of possibilities writing pieces in the voice of the subjects of a painting, and of Meaning itself.

These essays are more an afterword than an introduction to his work–those who haven’t met him before might feel more comfortable beginning with Snow or Istanbul. And though Pamuk (lover of doubles) assures us that this is a different book from the collection that came out under the same name in Turkey eight years ago, newly shaped to form a “continuous narrative” that is also an autobiography in disguise, it feels more like an incomparably rich and suggestive set of explorations than a single story. Yet mostly what this collection gives us, by swiveling the lens from the window out towards the Bosphorus to the man taking it in from different angles, is a chance to savor one of the inimitable literary storytellers of our time, who, as Marilynne Robinson puts it in her classic novel Housekeeping, is set upon a “resurrection of the ordinary.”

Pamuk has two enduring loves: books and Istanbul. Often they converge as his journeys through the snowbound, darkened passageways of his hometown come to resemble excursions through memory itself, and through the baffling labyrinths of Borges. Like Proust, Pamuk has spent almost all his adult life–15,300 days, he here calculates–in the same room in his beloved birthplace, alone with his books and his thoughts. Yet his window is always open to catch the sound of the sandwich vendors in the street, the men in the teahouse, urging him, “Write, journalist, write!”, the metallic whine of the ferries in the Bosphorus as they dock “at any of the little wooden tire-ringed landing stations.” Turkish literature prides itself on its long sentences and Pamuk’s most virtuoso catalogues, some stretching across hundreds of words, take in all the barber-shops, the horse-drawn carriages, the winter afternoons and rainy back-passages of old Istanbul till he seems an Istanbullu Whitman, ready to contain all contrarieties.

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Posted in The Global CityPosted on April 26, 2012

How Music Lifts Us Up

I step into the great vaulted space, and very soon I am greeted by a voice, which lifts and penetrates me all at once. It issues from a tiny figure at the far end of the candled building—Vietnamese, I suspect, of indeterminate age, and singing in a language I can barely follow. She is dressed in a gown the color of dusk, and sometimes she slowly waves her arm above her head—a date-palm flapping in a lazy wind—to invite us all to join her. The sound is so pure that it might be coming down from the heavens as much as rising up to them. The stained-glass windows around Notre Dame convey light, the possibility of even the foggiest surface being illuminated; the candles convey mystery, all we cannot and will never see fully; the statues on every side place the human figure within the celestial drama.

But it is the music that makes me feel there is a light and resonance within us all—a higher harmony—and not just outside.

I’m often asked, as a writer, if the book is dead; what hopes does the novel have, people ask, in the face of the multi-media distractions of the moment? That is very much the wrong question: the real one should be, “How can contemporary fiction convey soul, struggle, the possibility of something more—submission–if it refuses to believe in something beyond us that might be within us?

I turn on the radio and I hear Bono exhorting a crowd of 53,000 to “Turn this song into a prayer.” Then putting Psalm 40 to music. Bruce Springsteen is offering praise for the light that comes to us from something eternal, even as he chafes against the suffering and struggle that seem the human lot. Handel, Bach and Mozart are carrying us to a music of the spheres that declines to believe only in human limitation; gospel music, delivered by the likes of the Reverend Al Green, is not even shy about proclaiming its message in its Virgin Records category heading.

But literature, more and more in the last 150 years, is afraid of wearing its soul on its sleeve, and so leaves us stuck inside the kitchen, the dirty dishes piling up, and no way out. We turn, occasionally, to Marilynne Robinson, to Annie Dillard, even to the ones who rage against religion—from Dostoevksy to James Wood—and are made aware of a grander dimension in life, forces we can’t anticipate or bribe; we listen to Leonard Cohen, singing about “The Nameless and the Name” and declaring, “If It Be Your Will,” and begin to understand why something in us is so parched that Rumi, the 13^th century Islamic singer of divinity and the Beloved, has become the best-selling poet in America. But still writing comes up against an older and more stubborn truth: words are the stuff of men, and have to do with division, distinction, discrimination. Music, like silence, is the language of dissolving.

I go even to the most secular concert because it offers the traditional consolations of church: a large crowd singing as one, a language that the mind can’t argue away; transmission, transport and transcendence; and a reminder that we and our small lives are not the be-all and the end-all, alpha and omega.

Once, high up in the nosebleed seats of Osaka Castle Hall in Japan, I closed my eyes and heard Eric Clapton take off on long silvery riffs on his guitar. He stood alone, completely motionless at the back of the stage. His head lifted up, his eyes clearly shut. The music was playing him, more than the other way round. In fact it seemed to be streaming through him—he and his instrument just vessels—and enveloping us all in something beyond the reach of explanations. I didn’t have the words for it—I was embarrassed to hear myself saying it—but I didn’t care what his religion was or wasn’t (or mine, either): this was what the world sounded like when it was unbroken.

So often, listening to music, we close our eyes and shake our heads. Our fingers, legs start to move in spite of us; we speak in the language that begins when words run out. It could be ghazal or raga or hymn; it’s only the sound of a soul giving itself up and over to something changeless and illuminated.

The man at the front of Notre Dame offers a few words, his hands outstretched. Tourists cluck along the aisles, trying to capture mystery with their point-and-shoots. A tour-guide recites facts, figures and dates. Then the tiny woman at the front lifts her head and sings again, and we are in the company of angels once more.

Turn the song into a prayer. Turn the prayer into a song.

Posted in Home Is Every PlacePosted on April 26, 2012

Before the Fall

It is the light, on summer evenings, drifting on till 9:00 p.m. or later, and slanting above the elms, the musky river; it is the scratchy small of grass, the thunk of bat on cricket ball. It is the flow of a brackish stream, the twittery, gnattish nothingness that is a drowsy English town on a summer day going nowhere. It is the sound of bells tolling across the fields, and the morning walk to class when the dew is still on the grass.

It is, of course, nostalgia–geography’s deju vu—that marks a large part of what we call “the sacred.” Born in England on a winter’s day, I grew up thinking of it only as the place I longed to flee. As soon as I could, upon the completion of my studies there, I got on a plane and never looked back. England is red-brick houses to me, and lowering grey afternoons, the inertia of a social system that has no room for growth, the soot and filth and dreariness of Industrial Revolution factories that blacken the already smudged sky on winter afternoons. Even on summer days, when I return, almost all that I can see is porridge-colored tower-blocks and circumscribed lives and hopes, the milk-bottles lined up outside the scruffy gardens as for a rain-storm that will never come.

Yet for all the unyielding griminess, England remains the place where I was a child, careless of the future and in a state of perpetual discovery. It is the place where I stepped outside the hours, and had no sense of yesterday or tomorrow. And so, even now, half a world and half a lifetime away, in the country where I’ve chosen to make my home (a romantic England, you could say, or at least an exotic one, so much like the place of my boyhood that on these rainy Japanese afternoons I half-expect to hear the cricket scores recited on TV), I find myself returning to some quality of light and languidness and suspension that belongs to an English summer evening, the insects twittering as the lights come on in a garden production of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A sacred place, I mean so suggest, is only a place where we get a taste of Eternity—and that taste comes strongest of all, or most repeatedly, when we are hardly conscious of it (children, the Romantics, among others, believed, still carry with them a memory of the Heaven they have just quit). The past is the site of our wounds, our fears, the habits that cripple us, the tangles we long to escape; yet it is—only it can be—the place from which we derive our most palpable sense of Heaven. Every visit to Eden has a quality of recollection.

Many of us travel, more and more, to the “sacred places” of the globe—to Angkor and Luxor and Cuzco—and partake there of the sacraments and rites of someone else’s paradise; we are visitors, even trespassers, in a foreigner’s alien church. Those powerful places have a sacrednesss that hits us as the glance from a magnetic stranger’s eyes, but their magic is one that is not really ours to claim. The “sacred places” that lie in memory, individual as a thumbprint, or a scar above one’s right eye, are the personal pieces of Heaven that are ours to carry round with us, our barely discernible memories of life before the fall. The place, the life, the weather may all be everyday and unremarkable, but when I hear the opening strains of a certain hymn, I am walking through the lanes of a never-ending twilight, the sound of a choir coming from behind some stained-glass windows, in a place as magical to me as Tibet. A place whose tiny limits give out upon sheer boundlessness.

Closing my eyes, I see the sun declining over fields and fields. I hear a tennis-ball being thwacked, and the return of a quiet unsmudged for a thousand years. I see the first outlines of a moon rising above the trees, the sluggish water, the silhouette of ancient spires. I think that sacredness means only having so strong a sense of trust that we hardly know the meaning of the word, and find a world without change even in the midst of “dark Satanic mills” and a land so familiar that we know it’s home only because it’s the place we always—always—long to flee.

Posted in Home Is Every PlacePosted on April 26, 2012

The Long and Winding Sentence

“Your sentences are so long,” said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment. The copy-editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes onscreen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn’t want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn’t have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I’m using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against—and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from—the bombardment of the moment.

When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn’t get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV. Facts were what we needed most. And if you watched the world closely enough, I believed (and still do), you could begin to see what it would do next, just as you can with a sibling or a friend; Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie aren’t mystics, but they can tell us what the world is going to do tomorrow because they follow it so attentively.

Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news-flashes or RSS feeds; but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances—the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them–that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants her being reduced to a sound-byte or a bumper sticker.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head, her heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into either/ors. With each clause, we’re taken deeper, further from trite conclusions—or so at least is the hope—and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender and neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).

“There was a little stoop of humility,” Alan Hollinghurst writes in a sentence chosen almost at random from his recent Stranger’s Child, “as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted” (and the reader may notice—though she doesn’t have to–that “humility” has rather quickly elided into “affectation,” and the point of view has shifted by the end of the sentence and the physical movement through the rooms accompanies a gradual inner movement that progresses through four parallel clauses, each of which, though legato, suggests a slightly different take on things).

Many a reader will have no time for this; William Gass or Sir Thomas Browne may seem long-winded to him, the equivalent of driving from L.A., to San Francisco by way of Death Valley, Tijuana and the Sierras. And a highly skilled writer, a Hemingway or James Salter, can get plenty of shading and suggestion into even the shortest and straightest of sentences. But too often nowadays our writing is telegraphic as a way of keeping our thinking simplistic, our feeling slogan-crude. The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity’s greatest adornment).

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Posted in The Death Of NuancePosted on April 26, 2012

The Joy of Quiet

Last year, I flew to Singapore to join Malcolm Gladwell, Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising folks on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived at the Crowne Plaza next to Changi Airport’s Terminal 3—some of the conference’s guests had flown in that morning, would attend the day’s events and then fly home without ever really leaving the airport—the C.E.O. of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began—I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign—was stillness.

A few months later, I happened to see an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Phillipe Starck. What allowed him so consistently to remain ahead of the curve, he was asked? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” said Starck, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2285 a night to stay in a clifftop suite at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay all that partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online or find cell-phone coverage in their rooms.

Has it really come to this? In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them. Often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen, while cafes at home put up signs advertising, “No Wi-Fi.” Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not so long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of “Quiet Time” every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers (the average office worker today, studies have found, enjoys no more than three minutes without interruption). During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or deal with e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. The majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

At this point, the average American spends more than eight and a half hours a day before a screen, Nicholas Carr notes, in his eye-opening book The Shallows, in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing). The average American teenager sends or receives 60 texts a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the child of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave her feeling empty and too full all at once

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Posted in The Joy Of LessPosted on April 26, 2012

An interview with Pico Iyer on The Man Within My Head

Q: This is an eccentric book, and I’m not sure what readers will make of it.

A: That’s not so terrible; one of the things I tried very hard to do here was create a weird, hybrid form of sorts, in which you never know what’s going to happen next—or who exactly is going to be the subject. A very full biography of Graham Greene, 2200 pages long, has already been written; novel after memoir after romance has been published by those who knew him and those who didn’t, yet feel haunted by him. The world has no need of another straight book on “Following Graham Greene” or evoking his personality.

But I hoped there might be room for a book that hovers unexpectedly somewhere between autobiography and biography, and tries to see how much what I say about Greene may really be about me, or vice versa; and a book that cuts back and forth between fairly quiet and private introspection and scenes of tumult in the world (which is just the back-and-forth I see and love in Greene). A year before I’d finished this book, I had a full subtitle to explain what it was about; six months later, my subtitle said only “An Enquiry”; now, the book has no subtitle at all. That’s meant to be a way of suggesting the mysterious, neither-here-nor-there quality of the book and of its subject. Is the “man within my head” Greene—or my father, or me? I don’t want to settle those questions.

The fact I was trying to make up my own genre didn’t make the book easy to write, of course; I had to devise my own structure, and follow a kind of emotional, improvised logic more than that of chronology or A-B-C. And I wanted to expand the form to accommodate many different angles, which meant that I wrote maybe twenty times more than I ultimately had room for. But writing has to do something startling to justify its existence, especially as rivals to books multiply these days. After seven books of non-fiction and thousands, literally, of articles, I longed to do something new, to keep myself engaged; I’m a traveler at heart.

It wouldn’t be hard, I think, to write an interesting and fun book on Graham Greene, and many have done so splendidly. But I thought it would be more interesting to try something trickier, true to his shifting sense of identity—and maybe even to dramatize that sensation that every writer knows whereby you start writing a work on something that possesses you, and, as you proceed, you realize that it’s really about something very different, and a presence within you that you never even thought to explore is taking over.

Q:But doesn’t Greene these days feel like a figure out of the distant past? I don’t know how many young people read him now.

A: Nor do I. But the book, as I see it, is about soul possession of a kind, imaginary friends, those people who haunt us and take residence in our heads even if, especially if, they seem very remote to us. And that is timeless, perhaps even more common now than it was twenty years ago, thanks to our virtual, bodiless lives. It could be Steve Jobs among certain kids today, or Jay-Z—or Jane Austen; but I’m interested in what places them there–why Jay-Z and not Kanye West?–and what purpose they serve. What do they say about the people who ought to be prominent in our heads, often our parents, and what does it say about the nature of affinity? Why, for example, do I dream so often of Paris even though I’ve spent so little time there? Why do I never dream of the places where I’ve lived all my life?

Apart from all that, I think rumors of Greene’s literary death or irrelevance may be premature. He belongs very firmly to an age that seems vanished—the 1950s, you could say—and yet for me his real themes are the ageless ones, of fear and faith and betrayal. His books are almost allegories about a man on his knees by his bed in the dark, as mortarfire explodes outside, and his seeming enemy extends a hand. Friends of mine who teach tell me that some of their students find Greene an imperialist, or retrograde in his attitude to women, an emblem of the faded British Empire; yet those same teachers tell me that their students can’t stop talking about him!

It’s no coincidence, I think, that, together with Somerset Maugham, Greene keeps inspiring new movie versions of his books, every other year. He has often been a target of sniggers in the academy, for being so readable and traditional in his techniques and popular; but for most of us, those are precisely the reasons why he endures. The most recent film of The Quiet American had to be held back after it was screened for its producers on September 10, 2001—not because it was so irrelevant, but the opposite: because, 24 hours after the screening, it seemed much too close—again!—to the world we live in.

Q: There’s a lot about your father in this book. Is he its real subject?

A: No, though fatherhood might be, in part, and the nature of influence, and why, as I write in it, blood relations are not the only important ones.

To be honest, I never saw much of my father while I was growing up, because I was mostly at boarding-school, 6000 miles from home; like Greene in a way, I was a product of an ancient, cloistered system, in which one is taught to live alone, very far from family, and to take one’s family from among one’s friends, and not always one’s relatives. And my father, though a strong and very vivid figure, was gracious enough to let me gain my education far away from him.

But, like most of us, I found—and find, as the years go on—that there’s far more of my father in me than I would ever have imagined. The same person I grew away from is in my face and in my voice daily. And in that regard, too, the great project of self-invention—so many of us are proud of seeming to have made ourselves up, as it were, from scratch–has failed, or is a myth.

My father was a wonderfully colorful soul, who came out of nowhere to win India’s only Rhodes Scholarship in 1950 and seemed likely to become a leading figure in India until he went to California in the ‘60s; but possibly for that very reason, I never felt I knew exactly who he was beneath the surface. That becomes even more interesting when I see how much of him is in me, and how little I know of myself, perhaps, underneath my gestures and reflexes.

I invoke Greene here because to me he is the great model of unflinching self-questioning, of honesty and of intimacy on the page, if not in life; you can say that he was slippery, treacherous, self-enclosed and a model of non-commitment, but then you’d have to add that he said all of that about himself, and much better, in his books.

Plus, the more I reread his work, the more I found that fathers, actual and imagined, were one of his great themes, which haunt every book from the first published novel, in 1926, to the last, in 1989. I don’t know nearly enough about my father to write a memoir, and not all the things I do know would fit into a book such as this; but it’s the larger dynamic that intrigues me, of how you can best see yourself when reflected back to you in another person. Unriddling an unmet writer may be a wonderful way of unriddling yourself. “Most people,” as Oscar Wilde said, “are other people”; that’s arguably the launching-pad of much fiction and drama.

Q: You’re mostly known as a writer of travel books. Isn’t this a departure?

A: Not to me. Who traveled more than Greene, especially in some inward sense? That’s part of what I love about him: the mobility, the ability to see things from many different angles, the refusal to remain fixed within dogma or seeming certainty. Even faith was something he traveled around, constantly, rather than something he settled into.

As Thoreau often said, it takes much more courage to venture into the icy depths and dark caverns within oneself than just to go to Haiti or Saigon—especially these days, when the latter merely involves jumping on a plane.

This book moves, of course, with deliberate abruptness, from Bolivia to Mexico to Vietnam to Ethiopia to Cuba to Colombia to Sri Lanka to Bhutan and back to Bolivia; its central poles are California and England. But its real theme, as I say somewhere, is how travel can affect one’s approach to the world, make one a relativist, or help one see the point of almost every position and sympathize, sometimes fatally, with both sides in an argument. And how travel, more than anything, dramatizes the moral and emotional struggles that often we look past or shy away from when we’re at home.

In some ways—though people may be shocked to hear this—I see this book as being very much a sequel to my last book, on the Dalai Lama. Friends of mine have asked, “How can you possibly liken a famous man of spiritual clarity and goodness to one of literature’s most celebrated sinners and doubters?” But Greene, for me—or the Greene I choose to imagine—was always preoccupied with the Dalai Lama’s questions: how to act with conscience and kindness in the world, and how to be a realist and yet have faith? One wise friend of mine in New York said to me, a few years ago, “Every time you come to the city, it’s either to talk about Raymond Chandler or the Dalai Lama.” Now I’ve brought the two together a bit.

Like most writers, I suppose, I see all my books as being of a piece. My first two were explicitly about the exchange of dreams (or sometimes illusions) between cultures on far sides of the world. One of the central themes in this book is my commute between my parents’ home in the California of the ‘60s and the 15^th century boarding-school in which I grew up in England. Between faith and skepticism, you could say; between the very fluid and the very settled. In each of them, it seemed to me, people were dreaming of what the other had, and in some ways Greene’s own commute, between his father, headmaster of such a school, and his rebellions against him, his shadow-fathers—like the Jungian dream analyst he stayed with as a teenager–reflected my situation exactly, in reverse. His great novel, for me, The Quiet American, is about nothing other than the haunted fascination and closeness between an aging Englishman and a young idealistic American.

I think most readers have some equivalent in their lives, and one of the stories of the age is how we move between centuries and completely disparate lives at greater speed and with greater ease than ever before. One thing that has always moved me about Greene is that he writes in such a personal way, about the most private and often agonizing issues, yet somehow he reaches and speaks to millions of the rest of us.

Q: Did you enjoy writing this book?

A: I really did. In part because it was such a challenge, so different in terms of structure from anything I’d written before, so unexpected even to me. It may not look like it, because I worked very hard to give it a haunted and even troubled feel, to be loyal to what I see and admire in Greene, and because I see Greene as an incitement to look at precisely the shadows and uncertainties I’d rather look away from. And I deliberately took myself to places that are edgy and murky, that ask difficult questions. But that’s the fun of writing for me, and that’s what makes it such an adventure. I’ve written quite a bit about the externals of the world, books of observation; so it’s intriguing for me to try something more inward and to make myself a subject of investigation.

I’ve never worked so hard on any book before; I spent more than eight years producing what is only a slim work, and I sent my first finished draft to my editor six and a half years ago. Indeed, I wrote the whole book as fiction—a series of imaginative approaches to Greene—and then decided that that would serve just as “back story,” a way of getting deeper into him, as I took him on in non-fictional form. I would say that I wrote 3000 highly polished, finished, fact-checked pages to generate the 250 I finally sent in. And even read the entire manuscript aloud to make sure the commas and cadences fell in the right places.

But that’s all part of the joy of the process! My first books I wrote very quickly—I was a full-time journalist then—and I feel they read amusingly and speedily and are full of facts and brisk sentences; but they may evaporate equally fast. My more recent books are much harder to read and enjoy; but my hope is that, for a handful at least, they may linger in the mind or prompt occasional rereadings. Of course, I’m writing against the curve, producing ever slower, more inward and more recessive books as the culture as a whole moves towards speed, immediacy, pell-mell stimulation. But that’s deliberate. And if readers want very quick diversion, they can find it much more excitingly in many other places.

For me the value of reading, more than ever, is to take us to those places that the rest of life ignores. Writing can’t begin to compete against all the multi-media, split-screen, visual and auditory excitements of the time for pace or urgency; but it can offer us a few deeply inward pleasures—even silences—that none of those new technologies can match. I wanted this book to stake out that space, that sense of mystery and nuance, which almost nothing but writing can bring us towards. If the reader takes away questions, tremors, uncertainties—and not the facts or sensations that our onscreen lives so constantly bombard us with—I’ll be delighted!

Posted in New Writings, NewsPosted on November 4, 2011

After the Earthquake

One Japanese individual commits suicide every fifteen minutes. More than a million Japanese people are hikikomori, meaning that they almost never leave the house. Even as the country is suffering through one recession after another—shuttered stores seem to be as common as departing prime ministers—the social fabric of my adopted home, sustained and refined over centuries, is beginning to crack. Some older couples are hiring young actresses to visit them on Sundays, to say, “Hi, Mom! Hi, Pop!” because their own daughters no longer do.

Yet even as all the external registers suggest a society in collapse, and even as the horrifying earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 literally reduced parts of the country to rubble, the Japan I see around me seems much stronger and more durable than statistics suggest. It remains—becomes ever more, I sometimes feel—the pop cultural model that countries from Taiwan to Singapore are keen to follow, in its street fashions, its gizmos, its convenience-stores. It is still a byword for quality and efficiency. Its people, in moments of stress (as after the tsunami), summon a fortitude, a resolve and a community spirit that putsmost of us to shame.. And when Richard Florida at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto conducted a survey of 45 countries a few years ago, Japan ranked first in the “values index”—a register of how much it holds to the traditional. For Florida, this was not an advantage, but for those who worry that Japan has left its past behind without ever quite arriving at an international future, the result could be both a surprise and a consolation.

I look around me in the Western-style suburb near Nara where I’ve lived for eighteen years, and the external changes are startling. When first I arrived in Japan in 1987, my neighbors in California were being told that their towns were about to become suburbs of Shinjuku. Columbia Pictures was suddenly Japanese, Rockefeller Center was mostly Japanese—and magazines were reporting that the Imperial Palace in Tokyo alone was worth as much as the state of California.

In the decades since, the country’s economy has failed to consolidate that rise—or to take over the planet. And socially, on the surface, the place is ever more mongrel and untraditional. The teenage girls who looked so demure when I arrived, so different from their counterparts abroad in their ritualized innocence and lack of make-up, now look like tigerish creatures who could be modeling for Armani. Their boyfriends wear oversized Lakers T-shirts and baggy shorts, as if they’re auditioning for an L.A. street gang. Every few months, some new outrage — schoolgirl prostitution or a horrific act of violence– makes my Japanese wife and neighbors talk about the Land of Wa (or Harmony) as if it were a distant suburb of Detroit. Last year, on a train platform in Nara, a schoolboy, in the midst of morning commuter crowds, buried a kitchen knife, with a 17-centimeter blade, fatally, into a classmate. Why? “His attitude at school always made me sick.”

When I look around me, though — at the way people here speak, don’t speak, bow to their cell phones or instantly open their doors and share scarce water and food after a natural disaster–I wonder how far they have really moved from the traditional Japanese model. Reports of imminent changes in Japan are, after all, as regular as the harvest moon. People are always expecting this ancient archipelago to lose its distinctive character tomorrow. Every autumn, so it seems, the old in Japan express the fear that their country is going to lose its soul — and the young express their fear that it’s not.

Nara itself can serve as a diagram of the increasing tensions—the competing tenses—in Japan. At the heart of this city of 400,000 stands a deer park, in which 1,200 four-legged creatures wander freely among rolling hills, pagoda spires, a giant Buddha in what is said to be the largest wooden building in the world and pavilions sitting picturesquely on ponds. Nara became the first permanent Buddhist capital of Japan in 710, but it lost the court in 784. As a result, it has spent more than 1,200 years as a kind of forgotten place of ghosts, whose road-signs point to “Primaeval Forests” and whose maps direct you to “burial grounds.”

The most sacred Shinto shrine in the land (outside of Ise) is here, as is a treasure-hall remembering the city’s status as the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. White-gravel pathways lead through groves of trees, and past 2,000 stone lanterns. Turn one way, and you come to an old wooden building in a grove of wild plum trees that used to house Buddhist sutras; turn another, and you end up at the Nara Hotel, 100 years old in 2009, and adorned with photographs of the emperors who have offered sepulchral waves here.

Immediately outside the park, however, is all the clatter and cacophony of any post-war Japanese metropolis. Beeping machines, automated voices, flashing lights and pachinko clangor ricochet around a labyrinth of covered shopping arcades. Falafel joints, Vietnamese restaurants, McDonald’s outlets, and Indian cafes make you feel as if you’re walking through a World’s Fair, as giddy as it is globally generic. And as you move out into the suburbs, you come to areas such as mine, with Western-style homes laid out on straight, carless streets, and huge buildings called Life and Aeon (the local versions of Costco and Wal-Mart) standing guard above the commuter stations. The neighborhood where I sleep is called Shikanodai—or Deer’s Slope—and it includes no temples, no shrines, not even any jagged streets or alleyways. Late-model Mercedes doze outside hair-salons on School Dori, and almost nothing is older than my 30-year-old son.

Farther out, when I walk just beyond the boundaries of my ten-square block neighborhood, are valleys and large rural spaces filled with fantastical structures that look AS IF they have been airlifted from some science fiction writer’s imagination. One building has a nine-story front window that reflects a giant image of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue. Across from it is a research lab built in the shape of a seven-story retina. There are great telecommunications centers set along these broad, and largely silent boulevards; buildings with rainbowed surfaces bring home the face of the 23rd century. Established during the excitement of the bubble years to serve as a “Science Town” of the future, the structures look now like beached whales, monuments to outsized dreams, their parking lots empty and cobwebs clogging their state-of-the-art doors.

I’ve never been in a position to offer the expert, Tokyo-driven diagnoses of the many professional Japan-watchers who fill this volume. My interest has always been in the private Japan. As I look around the city I’ve made my home—at the deer grazing just outside the glass-and-concrete City Hall—it’s hard not to wonder if the country’s strength lies not in its future but in its past, or at least in its traditional sense that time moves round rather than always pressing forward. Fashions change in Japan, famously, more furiously than anywhere else, and there are few places more full of surging crowds, flashing images, all the apparatus of tomorrow. But the ideas underlying all these spinning surfaces often suggest that progress is cyclical, not linear; that moments keep returning as the seasons do; and that change itself can be a constant, much as autumn’s rites of passage are. Every year, the details shift — but the pattern looks very much the same.

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Posted in The Joy Of LessPosted on July 1, 2011

Thubron's Holy Mountain

A powerful, unexpected scene glances through the beginning of Colin Thubron’s characteristically beautiful, though uncharacteristically haunted, new book of travel. As he walks through the mountains of Nepal, towards Mount Kailas in Tibet, suddenly he realizes that he’s only 140 miles from Naini Tal, the Indian hill-station whose name rang across his home as a boy, in his father’s reminiscences. His father had been a British soldier in India, he tells us, and the accounts of the father’s hunting trips from Naini Tal, recently excavated by the son, “are as detailed and exact as if he were on campaign.” His father’s hand-drawn maps “are meticulous, even beautiful, and his observations sometimes have the near-scientific exactitude of a Victorian explorer’s.” Maybe, Thubron writes, in a typically brief but resonant phrase, his father on these trips “became solitary, perhaps himself.”

This is a startling moment for those of us who have followed this patient explorer on his majestic series of rigorous and soulful accounts of travels across the great land mass that links the Middle East, Central Asia, China and Russia. For he renders these often forbidding places transparently, and with rare immediacy, precisely by keeping himself mostly out of the picture. Coming across as a model of the elegant, reticent and selfless British traveler of old, he offers records of foreign places at the other extreme from the richly subjective torrent of judgments, sexual confessions, digressions and pop-cultural references we find in a modern American traveler such as Paul Theroux. Thubron all but erases himself in order to give us full and exact observations we can trust.

Yet every phrase of his description of his father could, in fact, refer to himself; it may be the best (though still fleeting) evocation of him we’ve had in his works of non-fiction (in his seven novels Thubron is correspondingly passionate and unguarded). The passage reminds us that, in another age, he might have been exactly the kind of person—part explorer, part uncomplaining soldier, part exquisitely learned civil servant—who helped imperial Britain control and administer such a large part of the globe. It also tells us that, beyond just undertaking a strenuous, life-challenging trip to the 22,000-foot peak that is holy to Tibetans, Hindus, Jains and followers of Tibet’s pre-Buddhist Bon tradition, he is attempting something else in this short, late work: a coming to terms with his inheritance and a facing of those questions, however obscurely formulated, he finds buried in himself.

Those who have read Thubron’s indelible works of travel will know something of what to expect in To a Mountain in Tibet. After four short books—on Damascus, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus—culminating in 1975, he began his epic sequence of comprehensive and attentive excavations of the heart of Asia with Among the Russians, in 1983 and continued through Behind the Wall (about China), in 1987, The Lost Heart of Asia (1994), In Siberia (1999) and, most recently, Shadow of the Silk Road, in 2006. Each work reflects the special gifts of this uncannily observant and self-effacing wanderer: a strikingly deep and thoughtful immersion in the history and culture of the places he visits; a classic readiness to put himself through anything to get where he needs to do (he learns Russian and Mandarin, he travels rough, with nothing and no one but a rucksack and, in Shadow of the Silk Road, he gets incarcerated in a Chinese prison during the SARS epidemic, narrowly avoids a head-on collision and endures rural dentists in Iran performing a root canal operation on him without benefit of anesthetic); and a rare responsiveness to the modest souls he meets along the way, whose plights—of displacement, material need and restlessness—he catches with elegiac sympathy.

In his prose, likewise, there’s a refusal of all short cuts and a craftsman’s chiseled devotion: bespoke adjectives sit next to poet’s verbs and there’s never a loose or careless sentence, or anything written for effect. That you’re in the company of a preternaturally vivid and evocative writer is evident in the first paragraph of the new book: “There was no sound but the scrunch of our boots and the clink of the sherpa’s trekking pole.” Sentence after sentence rings out, to bring us onto the path he’s walking. “Our bodies dislodge cascades of shale or rustle over beds of pine needles. Giant fires and pines surge up between prickly oak and hemlock, and spruce trees hang their pink cones a hundred feet above.” Later, in a scrappy Nepali settlement, “the alleys are twilit ravines. All around us long ladders climb and descend to aerial yards and terraces, and the voices of invisible people sound from the sky.”

He begins his journey, in this new book, in Nepal, in May 2009—during the Buddhist holy month of Saga Dawa—accompanied by a guide, a cook and (to be discarded at the border) a horse man. The first half of the narrative describes his often heart-stopping ascent through the mountains of Nepal to the border with Tibet; the second takes us into the spirit-filled reaches of Kailas, where Thubron is “entering a zone of such charged sanctity that any penance, or any crime, trembles with heightened force.” Seamlessly woven through the day-to-day record are brief, plunging flashbacks to his family’s story, and verbal snapshots of monks he’s met in Kathmandu before embarking on the trip.

It takes a rare soul to describe Kailas in calm and unhyperbolic tones. Hindus believe it to be the haunt of their god Shiva, who sits in eternal meditation there; Tibetans hold that the Buddha visited, and their first kings descended from the sky there. Even the palaces of faroff Burma, the temples of Angkor are modeled on its shape. Each of its sides faces a cardinal compass point and four great rives flow down from within 70 miles of its summit—the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra. To complete a circumambulation of it, many believe, is to expiate the sins of a lifetime.

Thubron is impressively restrained before what he likens to a “pious illusion,” even as he remains acutely aware of its chill magnetism (it has never been climbed). He is far from cynical or opposed to belief—if anything, the opposite; yet he is business-like and efficient in dispensing with all wishfulness and fancy. “We have entered holy land,” he writes at one important moment, as he sets eyes on Kailas for the first time, Lake Manasarovar before it; but in the very next sentence, opening a new paragraph, he coolly notes, “Yet the lake is only precariously sacred.”

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Posted in Holy PlacesPosted on April 7, 2011

Why I Travel

“What am I afraid of ?” I asked myself not long ago. Not many things. A traveller can’t afford to carry fears with him, leaping into the unknown on every trip. The only things I could think of were snakes, which sometimes fill my dreams–and heights, which induce in me a mad impulse to take a running jump. And the previous year I’d been involved in a near-fatal car crash in Bolivia, my taxi almost plunging off a ravine, at 12000 feet, as it rolled and rolled after being driven into a mountain at high speed, all its passengers (but me) ending up in the hospital. I’d been wary of narrow and unpaved roads ever since.

Five days later, I was being driven–at very high speed–on the wrong side of a two-lane road, bicycles and blaring trucks and overfull buses and children coming at us, towards a sheer rock face in the center of Sri Lanka. Sigiriya is reached by 1300 steps, straight up, it seems, and my guidebook had told me that the ascent of the great rise was “not for the faint-hearted,” perhaps better appreciated from the ground. Half way up the rockface, climbing a vertiginous spiral staircase–bought, I later learned, from the London Underground in the 1930s–I looked down and saw nothing but air. A three- or four-hundred foot drop at my feet, if I slipped, and jungle all around.

“Are there accidents here ?” I asked my guide, fumbling along the guide-rail, and wondering why my job demanded such trips of me.

“Oh, too many,” he said. “So many people are so crazy.”

We climbed up and up, passing some half-sensible travellers who had decided to climb part way, but not ascend further, through a staircase set between a sculpted lion’s paws. Signs everywhere warned against what my guide told me were swarms of “killer bees.” At the top of our ascent, he said, it was mostly snakes.

“Snakes ?”

“Only pythons, sir. No problem.”

Chameleons turned red and white and green in the sun at the top of the rock face. Huge lizards who might have been iguanas–“land monitors,” someone said–breathed evilly among the outcroppings. A man with a small wicker basket looked at me and said, “You want see cobra ?”

It could have been a compendium of my nightmares. “Leopards, wild elephants,” my driver had said, listing the occupants of the jungle we were driving through. “Also guerrillas, Tamil guerrillas, very close. You see the trucks ? They always drive together, too close, because of the wild elephants.”

Ten months before, when I’d volunteered to take the trip (to an editor who had offered me the chance to go anywhere from Iran to Mongolia), a cease-fire had been in place in Sri Lanka and it had lasted three years. A tsunami had swept through the ill-starred island less than two years before, but that, in my crazy logic, meant that the odds were against any other calamity visiting. Westerners were buying up property in the walled fort in Galle and deluxe six-star hotels were opening up everywhere.

Almost the minute I chose Sri Lanka as my dream destination, and began making plans to go there, a new hard-line government came into power, after elections, and fighting resumed with new intensity. My editor wrote to me excitedly that war made our story more exciting and topical than ever; I, not knowing where to turn, and with a sinking and unfamiliar feeling in my stomach, went to a chapel high in the hills two days before I left California and prayed for something and then, the next day, went again, as if for insurance.

Never, in a lifetime of travel, had I felt so uneasy about leaving the certainties of home behind; something, I was sure, was telling me not to go.

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Posted in The Joy Of Less, UncategorizedPosted on February 1, 2011

Henry Miller

The last major story that D.H. Lawrence published, six months before his death, was set in the ancient world and, characteristically, preoccupied with resurrection. “The Man Who Died” is a typically wild and visionary piece, sensual and impenitent, about the risen Jesus meeting a priestess of Isis and, true to his Chatterley origins, feeling that he can at last complete himself, as a fully living human being, by joining her pagan rites and having semi-sacramental sex with her. The story is set in a tenderly described Mediterranean world (an early title for Lady Chatterley was Tenderness) and when it came out, under its original title–“The Escaped Cock”– it was published by his friends Caresse and Harry Crosby (he the nephew of J.P. Morgan).

It’s tempting to think back on that story when you pick up The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller’s ecstatic ramble through Greece in 1939 (recently reissued by New Directions); Miller was a lifelong devotee of Lawrence and spent years planning, collecting notes for and finally completing an epic and rather chaotic work on his master. And never does he seem more Lawrentian than when hymning his own resurrection, as here, and, by extension, that of the wider world. The Colossus marks the moment when Miller, then 47, quit the cheap cafes and after-midnight streets of Paris and begun reconstructing himself, without apology, as a latter-day Transcendentalist. Gone are most of the earthy adventures and carnal excitements that made his early books both legendary and long unpublishable; in their place, as he moved towards a new home in Big Sur, are rapturous pronouncements, by way of Emerson, Whitman and surely Lawrence, about the divinity in man and the possibility of an inner renaissance.

Miller had decided to write a “joyous book of the mystic” before he even touched ground in Greece and, as war began to close in on Europe, to chronicle a “voyage into the light” towards “the heaven beyond heaven.” And for any reader who cherishes the grittiness and robust physical hunger of a 45 year-old boy loose on the backstreets of Paris, the Colossus represents the end of a golden age, precisely as Miller begins to announce, more and more insistently, the coming of a Golden Age. But for anyone who feels that the classic travel-writing of Europe was nearing its end, Miller’s book speaks for the birth of a new kind of travel– suggestible, radiant and distinctly forward-looking–which has today become almost a cottage industry.

Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Peter Fleming and others were journeying to Mexico, Abyssinia and Tibet at much the same time, after all, and most of them, classically educated, a bit detached and taking off for no compelling reason they will admit to, seemed determined to come back untransformed; Miller, by comparison, was so poised for take-off when he set foot in Greece that he hardly stopped to take in the everyday details of the country, let alone the oncoming war. Where the Brits tended to travel, implicitly, as rulers, surveying their terrain and in command of history and a sense of ancient cultures, Miller was coming as a supplicant of sorts, eager to see what the older world could teach him, as he refashioned himself for the future. In his mind, he might almost have been completing a project that Lawrence had begun, and putting a full-throated exclamation mark at the end. For us today his book all but registers the point when America began to eclipse Britain in the world’s imagination and, simultaneously, travel became unsponsored, democratic and driven by a fascination not with the actual but with the inner source of the Nile.

The Colossus of Maroussi is such a head-on assault on the linear that it can be hard to describe in simple terms. On Bastille Day in 1939 Miller boarded the Theophile Gautier in Marseilles to visit his young English admirer and fellow writer Lawrence Durrell in Corfu. He had, with characteristic exuberance (and, some would say, indifference to the world), mapped out for Durrell a huge list of the places he wanted to visit at just the moment war was propelling him out of France, including, among many other points, Killarney, New Orleans, Baghdad, Tehran, Jerusalem, Fez and almost everywhere on the way to and in India, China and Tibet. He had decided to take a short break from writing, to read only spiritual and occult literature and, as his somewhat frowning biographer Mary Dearborn has written, to enjoy “the only true vacation he would ever take.”

What followed was a wild, determinedly subjective series of flights, cries of liberation, rants and set pieces, a great unchaptered outburst of epiphanies and Whitmanic catalogues. Miller babbles about Sherwood Anderson to some dazed Greek writers and pantomimes life on the New York Stock Exchange for a tailor and a vice-consul. He riffs wildly on “a Boogie Woogie man whose name was Agamemnon.” He travels to such sacred sites as Epidaurus, Crete and Delphi and by page 15 is reporting, “I had entered a new realm as a free man.” And he leavens and grounds all this by frequently telling us that the one word he uses for everything he sees—“crazy”—perhaps best applies to himself.

For Miller, “Greece is the home of the gods” and the gods are of “human proportion”—himself, in other words, only more so. “In Greece,” he announces, very typically, “one is ever filled with the sense of eternality which is expressed in the here and now.” So enchanted is the world that he discovers (and longs to see, whether it’s there or not) that his night porter in one hotel is called Socrates and it is a man called Pericles who invites him to Delphi. In Europe he feels “Diana the huntress in the background and the Sphinx waiting for you at a bend in the road.”

In part, therefore, the book is a torrent of superlatives that even the Greek Tourist Board would be hard-pressed to match, a giddy if not always reciprocated love-letter. “Everywhere you go in Greece,” Miller assures us, “the atmosphere is pregnant with heroic deeds.” In Greece, we read, ”one has the conviction that genius is the norm” (though this may not be the impression of every tourist clambering past the merchants of the Plaka, then or now). “Wherever you go in Greece,” we are told, “the people open up like flowers,” though this, too, may be less true for those unprepared to mime scenes on a Wall Street trading floor. “The Greeks,” he has decided, before he arrives in Greece, “are an enthusiastic, curious-minded, passionate people. Passion—it was something I had long missed in France.”

What you quickly see—since relatively few concrete details or individuals interrupt the psalms—is that Miller is less interested in Greece than in the flights and transports it arouses in him; again, like a kind of counter-Victorian, he evinces little interest in the topography, customs or data of the place, and huge fascination with the way it can serve as a catalyst to the awakening of an ancient god within. And true to his preoccupation with the inner landscape, he redeems himself (at least for me) by always making the case against himself just before the reader can do the same. “Along the Sacred Way, from Daphni to the sea,” he confesses, “I was on the point of madness several times.” At another point, he recalls a friend trying to sell him on Rudolph Steiner in Paris and, just as “he was getting onto group souls and the exact nature of the difference between a cow and a mineral,” the two are interrupted by a chorus girl and “a dwarf, who ran a string of whorehouses.”

This element of clownishness is perhaps the one thing that could balance the flights into rebirth (and serve as an inspiration to later fellow travelers in the Lawrentian vein, like Norman Mailer, who likewise lurch between talk of devils and angels and disarming confessions that they are just fools—though foolishness can open doors that wisdom leaves untouched). If in British travel-writing the object of humor is often the native or just the zaniness of travel itself and all that is lost in translation, here the source of comedy is only and always the author, who cheerfully calls his effusions “juvenile and ecstatic.”

The admirer of Tropic of Cancer will pounce on both the saving moments of humor and the unlofty vernacular here with gratitude; “I knew we were going to be gypped,” Miller says, nine pages in, “and I looked forward to it with relish.” Both the attitude and the “gypped” give us what is most engaging about the man at his best. In the middle of one mad flight, he throws in a parenthesis—(“This is a Brooklyn lad talking. Not a word of truth in it, until the gods bring forth the evidence.”)—and it becomes hard to get too exasperated at his raptures about light and the god within. “An American myself,” as he once wrote to a friend, “not just a hundred per cent, but a hundred and one per cent,” he replaces the wry self-deprecation of the classic Brit abroad with a much more zesty sense of himself as a “gentle idiot” (and lets his barbaric yawps at once extend and complicate Mark Twain’s irreverence with an impenitent spiritual hunger).

More than that, Miller is never quite so simple as he likes to pretend. His description of Epidaurus is indeed so luminous and mystical that it may carry some readers up through “the road of creation” to “the peace which passeth all understanding,” even as it leaves others grumpily and unpersuadedly on the ground. But he never forgets that the Oresteia is as much a part of the soil as Apollo, and that “the ancient Greek was a murderer.” Herakleion for him is “a sore spot which one rubs like a horse while asleep on four legs.” Towns in the Balkans come “to an end abruptly, as though the monarch who had designed the weird creation had suddenly become demented, leaving the great gate swinging on one hinge.” Does he contradict himself? Very well then, he contradicts himself. Like Whitman, he is prepared to take so much in with his capacious appetite that much of it crowds out all the rest.

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Posted in TravelersPosted on December 23, 2010