I look around me sometimes in the Japanese suburb where I choose to live and all I can see are versions of the most passing surfaces from the America I came here to leave behind. The area in which I make my home, doing its best to approximate to the San Fernando Valley, has no […]
Stay too far away from a spiritual teacher, the Tibetans famously warn us, and you cannot feel the heat; draw too close, and you get burned. The fire warnings grow especially urgent when that teacher attracts students through her warmth, and all the more so when the students, in turn, try to put words to […]
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently […]
When you step into a classic ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, you step into decades, perhaps centuries, of silence. I was reminded of this as soon as I returned, not long ago, to Tawaraya, a nineteen-room inn that sits on a tiny lane of lanterns near the heart of old Kyoto. Though the place is […]
In Shanghai, just behind the area where elderly couples gather each day at dawn to go through the ghostly motions of Tai Chi, cranes are busy erecting the world’s tallest building, to go with the tallest tower in Asia and the largest department store on the continent. In downtown Toronto, on a jam-packed sidewalk, a […]
Growing up within the tightly guarded confines of a fifteenth-century English boarding school, my friends and I took as our tokens of accomplishment the somewhat recherche gray volumes known as Penguin Modern Classics. When I was in college, in the midseventies, Picador books would become the rage (Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Richard Brautigan–outlaw American energy […]
For many of us, Japan has come to mean crowded trains, high-tech gadgets, efficient systems, cool reserve–a neon blur, in the imagination, of pencil-thin high-rises in which traders in dark suits mutter into cell phones. Or, if not the hard realism of Tokyo’s office blocks, then the gossamer romance of Kyoto’s teahouses, all exquisite restraint […]
Tibet has always cast a dangerously strong spell upon visitors from abroad. When the first major European expedition marched on Lhasa in 1904, led by Colonel Younghusband at the behest of his old friend Lord Curzon, it ended up slaughtering in just four minutes, near the village of Guru, almost seven hundred bewildered Tibetans, who […]
The 9-year-old Cuban boy with the cataract in his eye showed me the condoms he had used as balloons at his birthday party. He pulled out the single stick of gum he’d been chewing for a week. He brought over the two tattered photo albums he’d stuffed with pieces of Carnation labels, stickers that said […]
The ironies, of course, begin to multiply as soon as a life comes unraveled: in retrospect, everything seems an augury. One night before, the local TV station had announced that the conditions — 106 degrees heat, gale-force winds and drought-stricken hills — were the best for a fire in 100 years. That day, at lunch, […]
