“The situation inside Tibet is almost like a military occupation,” I saw the Dalai Lama tell an interviewer last November, when I spent a week traveling with him across Japan. “Everywhere. Everywhere, fear, terror. I cannot remain indifferent.” Just moments before, with equal directness and urgency, he had said, “I have to accept failure. In […]
Thirty minutes to the south of the bustling little town of Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, where the single-lane road runs along a palmy coastline, I saw a small island rising out of the Pacific with what seemed to be the turrets of a white castle poking through its trees. I pulled up along the […]
Slowly, the plane begins to descend, lower, still lower, till the pattern of fields and roads, visible from above, becomes a particular tree, a slow-moving car, a figure on a sidewalk. There is a sudden bump, a violent deceleration, and then you are out, in a slap of tropical air, the smell of clove cigarettes […]
You know you’re in somewhere special when the bathroom in your hotel offers, along with shower cap, razor and “vanity kit,” some condoms. The people you meet are speaking English (French, Italian) as if they’ve just stepped out of a conference-room in Paris with Umberto Eco and Susan Sontag, and the light is picking out […]
It was three days before the New Year in late 2006, and I was eating a burger with the traveler and writer Paul Theroux on Oahu’s North Shore. Beside us in the rickety little shack was a quintessentially Hawaiian group of Chinese Americans, African Americans, semi–Southeast Asians and kids who could have been any or […]
The Snow Leopard is an account of an expedition high into the seldom-seen Himalayan land of Inner Dolpo, to record the habits of the bharal, or rare Himalayan blue sheep. The book begins, as most scientific logs do, with a precise map, and ends with scholarly notes and an index. The leader of the climb […]
It is not answers that pull many people into the religious life, it is questions. The person who lives deeply and enduringly with, and within, a religion often finds that he is surrounded by ever more doubts as he goes on, not convictions. In an eloquent monk like Thomas Merton, say, the religious impulse is […]
On the longest day of the year I found myself on what is billed as the “highest motorable pass in the world,” though “motorable” seemed as much a stretch as did “road.” Icicles were hanging from the mountainside and plaques around every turn recalled those fellow travelers, most of them soldiers, who had “left for […]
“Since China wants to join the world community,” the 14th Dalai Lama said as I was traveling across Japan with him for a week last November, “the world community has a real responsibility to bring China into the mainstream.” The whole world stands to gain, he pointed out, from a peaceful and unified China—not least […]
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the artist most constantly invoked on my first day at the Sydney Readers’ and Writers’ Festival this spring was not Patrick White or Orhan Pamuk or W.G. Sebald, but that mumbling icon known as Robert De Niro. “I don’t want to start thinking of novels as if […]
