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 […]

“When I was your age,” the Fourteenth Dalai Lama is telling a group of six hundred or so young female students at Chikushi Jagakoen school in Fukuoka, Japan, “I was a quite lazy student. I didn’t have much enthusiasm for studying.” Though sitting politely, their hands in their laps, the girls almost visibly come to […]

The traveler, I decided one day, is part photographer and part philosopher: His aim, as he sets out, is to catch some aspect of his subject—a tilt of head, a glint of eye—that exists out of time, and so to show us, as a portrait-painter might once have done, that aspect of a place that […]

It was already clear, in December of 1999, that books were a dying species. Already more people seemed interested in producing novels than consuming them, and when it came to serious works there seemed more fascination with the writer than the writing. Books, I heard from two serious, bewildered editors in New York on the […]

“Dream–nothing!” is one of the many things the Fourteenth Dalai Lama regularly says to large audiences that startles the unprepared. Just before I did an onstage conversation at New York Town’s Hall with him this month, he told me, “If I had magical powers, I’d never need an operation!” and broke into guffaws as he […]

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]