Interview: On the Road Again with Pico Iyer
BHARTI KIRCHNER first met Pico Iyer, the celebrated travel author, at a book event in Seattle decades ago. An admirer of Iyer’s writing, she soon interviewed him for a newspaper. Over the years, until the pandemic came along, they met several times. Recently, after reading Iyer’s The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, which Kirchner greatly enjoyed, she got in touch with Iyer and interviewed him for Khabar.
The concept of paradise permeates the essays of your collection, The Half Known Life (Riverhead Books). “The struggle of your life,” you say at one point, quoting a Zen master, “is your paradise.” What would you say to readers who are yet to pick up this book as to what paradise is and why you are fascinated by the concept?
I was writing the book during the pandemic, as my 90-year-old mother was nearing her final breath. And I couldn’t help but feel that for all the anxiety and suffering on every side, that didn’t preclude the possibility of wonder and beauty and even joy. My job, I felt, was to find hope and inspiration even amid the sorrow. And the only paradise I could trust would be one that existed in the midst of real life and the face of death. After 49 years of constant travel, from Antarctica to Zanzibar, I know that a deserted sunlit beach is seldom paradise. Night will soon fall and if it’s truly paradisal, it won’t be deserted for long. And what’s idyllic for the visitor is something else for the local who’s working round the clock to make us comfortable.
It can be shocking to hear someone say that it’s the struggle of life that’s our paradise, but I’ve been talking and traveling with the Dalai Lama for almost 50 years now. He’s been cut off from his homeland for 64 years, he saw nine siblings die in childhood, he’s called an “evil spirit” by the government of one of the largest nations on earth. And none of that keeps him from finding peace, contentment, and delight wherever he finds himself. Paradise can only exist within, he reminds us. And by traveling to places of conflict in this book—from Iran and North Korea to Kashmir, war-torn Sri Lanka, and Jerusalem—I was suggesting that such paradise as we find in the midst of strife can surely survive anything.
Here’s a quote from a National Geographic article (‘Here Are 8 Ways Travel Will Change after the Pandemic,’ October 5, 2020): “[Travel] improves empathy, energy, attention, and focus.” What does travel look to you now that the pandemic is seemingly over?
In truth, travel has never been so chaotic, crowded, and tiring as after the pandemic. So many of us long to cram two years of travel dreams into two weeks of holiday time. I still travel a lot: even in March 2022, I was flying from Osaka to Tokyo to San Francisco to Santa Barbara and then from Los Angeles to Doha to Zanzibar in the space of five days—and, after sailing across the Indian Ocean, from Mahe to Dubai to Bangkok to Osaka the following week. But my greatest adventures will always unfold at my desk.
Here is a lament from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who is believed to have traveled to 30 countries in his lifetime: “I have spent a fortune traveling to distant shores and looked at lofty mountains and boundless oceans, and yet I haven’t found time to take a few steps from my house to look at a single dew drop on a single blade of grass.” Do you have a similar lament? What haven’t you encountered yet?
I don’t have a similar lament, but I do often have a similar realization. During the pandemic, I walked three minutes away from the two-room flat where my wife and I have lived for 30 years and discovered a whole bamboo forest and line of flowering cherry trees we’d never seen. Visiting my mother, I walked to the end of the road where I’d grown up for the first time ever—though it’s only twenty minutes away—and found scenes to rival that anyone might see in Cape Town or Rio. One does not have to travel far to be transformed. So, I ask myself less “What have I not yet encountered?” than “What have I yet not seen? Because I haven’t brought open eyes to what’s all around me.”
You show us how to break down the barriers between yourself and the people in the country you’re visiting. Please offer some tips to our readers on how to achieve similar meaningful connections.
Leave your assumptions at home, remember that you’re traveling to listen more than to lecture—and take each culture on its own terms. I’ve met many from California, say, who can’t forgive Japan for not being more like California. But the beauty of traveling to Japan is being stood on your head, having all your assumptions overturned—and realizing that you don’t know a thing.
What advice do you have for women travelers (regarding safety, meeting strangers, and confronting outdated attitudes)?
I’m keenly aware that, as a man, I can do things in foreign places I’d have to think about twice as a woman. At the same time, women have many advantages over me, in terms of how they can read and understand other cultures, how they can bond with other women everywhere, how they’re ready to approach people and places through intuition rather than crude analysis. In Japan, where I live, all the best writing by foreigners comes from women, because they’re not trying to eat sushi with a knife and fork. And one of the happiest developments in writing about places is that more and more of it is done by women, offering us fresh angles and intimate perspectives on the world.
Bharti Kirchner is the author of nine novels and four cookbooks. Her latest, Murder at Jaipur: A Maya Mallick Mystery, was reviewed in the July 2023 issue of Khabar.
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