ENDPAPER
In autumn radiance
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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He is best known as a travel writer but more recently he has taken his readers on inner journeys.
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"Travel is for me," he says, "just a way of talking about transformation."
PHOTO: R.V. MOORTHY
Journeys of spirit: Pico Iyer is a transfiguring voice for our times.
PICO IYER lives in a small, austere apartment in rural Japan. He checks e-mail but doesn't surf the Net. When he is not writing and travelling, he spends part of the year in a Benedictine hermitage, mostly in silence. He has never owned a cell phone, a Discman or an iPod. Often, in the evenings, he will turn out the lights in his flat and listen to U2 and Van Morrison and Jackson Browne or Leonard Cohen in the dark.
Richness of limits
"As for choices," he told me recently, "I think I came to Japan to explore the beauty of limitation. The richness of the empty room, the luxury of a life without car and television and newspaper, the liberation of a life lived in very tight margins. I cry out with delight at the passage of the day — the leaves, the light, the sudden sun on my walls — precisely because it is as tightly bounded as a haiku. No culture has so mastered the richness of tight limits as Japan."
He has tried as a journalist to live in (what he terms) "just autumn radiance". What I find astonishing, moving and inspiring about the way Iyer lives and works and travels is that he is neither reclusive nor worldly. I can think of no better contemporary example of a famous writer living the Middle Way that the Buddha spoke of. It would be tricky for anybody to negotiate life between extremes and live so mindfully but especially so for an accomplished, well travelled and celebrated author. And yet I can't think of another writer who has made journeying and living on the razor's edge so appealing and fulfilling.
Here is an unworldly writer recording the world in all its dark grace. He's probably the only author in the world whose work, in its published form, is seen by his readers even before he has laid eyes on it. Once Iyer sends his work out into the world — whether a book or an essay — he withdraws from finding out what became of it. And even when it comes out, he may not know of it for months!
Two instances: Once, not too long ago, browsing on the Net to find out what Iyer had essayed recently, I came across an introduction he had written to "A Wanderer in the Perfect City", essays by New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler. I wrote to Iyer saying how magically he had captured what the essays were doing, and he wrote back saying he had written that introduction six months ago and since had no idea what had become of it.
More recently I chanced on another essay by him in Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love (edited by Anne Fadiman) in a bookshop, only to discover that Iyer, in his austere apartment near Kyoto, was yet to see the book.
He is best known as a travel writer but more recently the journeys he has taken his readers on have been inner journeys. When he visited Tibet in 1985, for instance, he tried to give the reader every sound and smell and sight in a place that almost no one had seen or could hope to see; returning to Tibet for the third time in 2002, knowing that most of his readers could see places in remotest Tibet on the Internet or the Discovery Channel, he tried to give them what they couldn't get on screens, "the inner Tibet, the debates it sets up within our hearts and imaginations, the Tibet that plays out in parables."
The journeys of the spirit he writes of are not those twee, self-help writings but difficult, clarifying journeys narrated with luminous detail, irony, and compassion. And in a prose that is always uncompromisingly radiant and intense.
Literary spiritual essay
For some time now Iyer's essays have been steadily advancing a remarkable kind of writing: the literary spiritual essay. Whether it is the poet of longing, Leonard Cohen, he is writing about, the towering genius of theatre director Peter Brook, hope and light in poor countries, the transcendent in the films of Terrence Malick, or the healing paradoxes of the Dalai Lama's life, the real subject of the essays is the invisible, inner world: imagination, the subconscious, the soul.
His literary heroes, W.G. Sebald, Peter Matthiessen, James Wood, Derek Walcott, Emerson, Keats, Lawrence, Le Carre, Maugham, Melville, Greene, Robert Stone, and Annie Dillard are all chroniclers of the spirit. The theme in his essays and books has now become more and more about "the dissolving of Self, what happens when we lose our bearings, how the world looks different when we don't see ourselves at its centre. To explore beyond the self, deeper than the self, more permanent than the self."
In reviewing his novel, Abandon (which, by the way, is the best modern mystical love story ever written) and his essay anthology, Sun After Dark, I wrote "Iyer is a literary Thomas Merton on a frequent flyer pass" and while that blurb has a satisfying ring to it, I didn't realise how true the Merton part is in relation to the way he lives and works: a worldly monk, an unworldly writer. "Travel is for me," he says, "just a way of talking about transformation."
Iyer tries to root himself in the invisible — in the values and friendships and enthusiasms, the handful of books and tapes and ideas, that he takes everywhere he goes. "The beauty of writing," he notes, "is the paradox of writing: that it uses words (and the self) to try to get to those places where both give out."
Our commitment to movement, Iyer seems to be saying, is only as valuable as our commitment to stillness and vice versa. For Iyer, being too much in the world is as dangerous as being too far out of it. He is always trying, as Merton did, to keep himself honest by keeping both factors alive in him, and making one as strong as its connection to the other.
"If I were to summarise my writing", he told me, "it might be: it's relatively easy to live a life of clarity and peace if you take yourself on retreat to a mountaintop. But how do we bring the fruits of that stillness and clarity into the rush of the modern world and the need to be a real human being living in a world of change and flux."
"Writing for me is like a kind of scribbling in the air that tries to undo itself as it goes along; it's the best way I know — like prayer, I suppose — trying to transport us to those places where we have nothing to say and have to accept that we are beyond the reach of our thoughts. Those places where love and worship converge."
The Utne Reader named him one of 100 visionaries worldwide who could change your life. I am grateful for a writer like him, for sharing his journeys — both outer and inner — with us and for the example of his life, his writing and his concerns.
More than any contemporary writer today, he can instruct us on what Eliot meant when he wrote, `Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.' For all these reasons and more, Pico Iyer is a clarifying, transfiguring voice for our times and my literary hero.
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