You come in over a grey, flat desert that looks like lunar emptiness: the great shrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini as you pull out of the southern suburbs of Tehran, a mosque here and there along the road, and then, for hours on end, nothing but the no-color, arid vacancy. Your mind grows almost numb […]
When I walk out of the little apartment where I live, for much of the year, in Japan, I have to shake myself and tell myself I’m not in southern California. The little lanes are straight, and run between two-storey Western houses with two-car garages and name-plates on their front walls to commemorate their owners. […]
To live in Japan without eating Japanese food seems an advanced kind of heresy. My sushi-loving friends in California regard me as a lost cause; my housemates in Japan simply shrug and see this as ultimate confirmation — me dragging at some lasagna in a plastic box while they gobble down dried fish — that […]
You touch down two and a half miles above the sea, in the world’s highest international airport, and the city below is a bowl of shining light cradled between snowcaps. The cholas, or Indian women, are tromping along in their multicoloured ponchos and bowler hats as if no one had told them that this was […]
There is a square in Mexico, just across the border, where a foreigner is sitting, looking at the bright lights, the big hotels across the bridge. Like everyone in town, he’s also been watching another foreigner–a reflection of himself, we somehow feel–who is, as it happens, a celebrated con man, in flight from his creditors, […]
This is the place where all selves and words burn up, I say defiantly, triumphantly, as I settle into the silent Catholic hermitage where I spend much of my life. Names fall away, and with them all the divisions that names enforce. I look out on an ocean become a blue plate extending below me, […]
How to say goodbye to the world with peace ? How accept everything around us, including the fact that “us” itself is something of an illusion, and certainly about to be no longer ? How take leave of things with light ? Those questions have been circling around the later songs of Leonard Cohen, as […]
“Then northward with the spring into Kashmir,” begins a paragraph in the book you are holding in your hand, “past valley after lovely valley, shepherds and their flocks moving across the greenery in the day, men squatting by their hillside fires in the night. Soft-lipped boys with enormous turbans shrieking at us from their dark […]
We stumble toward another election that can look, to the disenchanted, like a choice between one shade of grey and another. A liberation theologian is violently deposed in Haiti. Guerrillas, in Russia and everywhere, say that even the deaths of children are justified in the light of a larger cause. And a Tibetan monk flies […]
