Pico Iyer on the wisdom of travellers
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Pico Iyer on the wisdom of travellers
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Pico Iyer’s latest book, The Half Known Life, looks at the ways in which we seek paradise on earth, sometimes in places that are fraught with risk. In this episode, he and Katherine talk about the similarities in their work, particularly the ways in which they explore secular understandings of big spiritual questions, and they touch on the differences, too.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Well, welcome to the new season of How We Live Now. I'm Katherine May, and I'm recording this in slightly less lovely circumstances than I'd normally record an intro. I am, truth be known, in an environment with rocks and waterfalls, amid a bamboo forest. But you might be able to hear from the ambient noise that this is not a peaceful place. I'm in Euro Disney. Now, long-term fans of the show will probably guess that this is not my natural habitat. It is noisy and full of people. And I love the concept of people, but up close, on mass, not so keen. And there's piped music everywhere and roller coasters. Did you hear the screaming? Ah! You'll also imagine that I'm not a rollercoaster rider. And of course, I'm here for Bert. It's his birthday. Well, no, I won't lie. I lost an extended negotiation in which I thought I was going to Paris-Paris, and he thought he was going to Disneyland Paris.
I never win against Bert. He's smarter than me, already. Find it very disturbing. But it's interesting to open up the new season of the podcast here because this time our guiding question is, how can we enchant this world? And of course, that's partly a reference to my latest book Enchantment. But I also am so interested to speak to lots of other writers and thinkers who are working with the same concepts as me, really, who are thinking in this space. And I'm recording the intro here because of course this is an enchanted place for so many people. This is a fantasy place for loads and loads of people. And maybe some of you who are listening now love Disneyland. And I have not fallen in love with it. But you know what I do love, is being here and watching the kids who totally buy into the magic that's being offered here, and they buy into it sincerely and "uncynically" and their little faces light up when they see a character.
And I used to have a very good friend who worked for Disney who worked on the cruise ships, and she was a Disney true believer. And I really got to witness the magic firsthand from her, the way that she felt like it offered a vision of a society that was more perfect than the mundane and often cruel one that we lived in, one where justice was served, one that was clean and consistent and magical. And I'm afraid I probably took Mickey out of her, excuse the reference, more often than was fair because it was real for her. And that's an interesting part of this, isn't it? That enchantment is personal, it's subjective, and it changes over the course of our lifetime. 10 years ago, I couldn't have tolerated a day in this place. You'd have never dragged me in here.
But it's my son's 11th birthday today and I get it a little bit more. Not for me, but for him for sure. And it's worth it, isn't it? Maybe. Although, woo, I'm looking forward to some peace and quiet tonight after the fireworks, which is way past my bedtime. So anyway, today I want to talk to you about our first guest of the season, is the veteran travel writer Pico Iyer, who has up the pages of so many books over so many years now talking about his travels. And also talking about different spiritual traditions, the ways in which we find enchantment across the world, across different cultures, across different belief systems and how that differs between us and obviously the similarities. And we both share a publisher and we both had our most recent books coming out a similar time. His is The Half Known Life where he's thinking about different conceptions of paradise, the way that different people seek it, the way that different people conceive of it.
And what interests me about me and Pico is that we are both thinking about very similar things. How can we find magic in the world? How do people do it? How does it happen? And we both write from quite a secular perspective, but he goes looking all over the world for it. And I go looking close to home. Between the two of us, we might have some answers. Who knows? But I was delighted to talk to him because recently he and I have shared a couple of interviews when our books came out. I interviewed him when his came out, he interviewed me. I'll put links in the shownotes to both of those so that you can see those establishing shots. And it was great to have a third conversation that was much more freeform, much less based around our books and where we really got to dig into those thoughts about this world and the magic we find and the magic we sometimes find hard to find. Anyway, hope you'll really enjoy that. Got some fantastic guests coming up this season.
Haven't recorded all the interviews yet, but they're a are some really great conversations that I've enjoyed so much and I hope you will too. I'm really wondering how much of the different music you can hear as I walk through the Disney Park. We're in adventure-land, people. Currently, there's a little Sitar Raga going on and I've just been passed by a pirate with a litter-picker and I'm heading my way towards a big tree house thing where my son is exploring and having the time of his life. Even though he's 11 years old now and very grown up, and I'm very cynical he still had this little dance when he walked in and saw the pink castle. We all find our magic in different ways. I will find my magic later tonight when I get into my bed and close my eyes and promise myself that I never have to come here again against my will, promise myself actual Paris next time. But that's quite enough from me. Enjoy the episode. I'll see you a little later.
Pico, welcome to How We Live Now. Thank you so much for coming on my podcast.
Pico Iyer:
I am so happy to talk to you again, Katherine. It's a real treat.
Katherine May:
Well, we've had a couple of conversations lately, haven't we? Once about your book. I interviewed you about your book and then you interviewed me about my book. And I actually think what I'll do is I'll put links to both of those conversations in the shownotes so that everyone listening can listen to us talking specifically about our books, which frees us up to not talk about our books for a change. Because I think sometimes you get tired of talking about your work so specifically, don't you?
Pico Iyer:
Yes, exactly. And that'll be a nice bonus. And one of the things I noticed was they're basically the same book.
Katherine May:
Yes.
Pico Iyer:
We were having a similar conversation whether my book on Paradise or your book on Enchantment, really the same spirit at work, I feel.
Katherine May:
Yeah, there's a definite unity in our purpose. But we both approach it in really different ways, which is so pleasurable to find someone thinking through the same things as you, but taking a completely different angle on them. That's why I love talking to you. But I think maybe we should just outline a little about your most recent book, just so that people know a little bit about you. Because you've been thinking about the idea of paradise most recently, haven't you?
Pico Iyer:
Yes. And I think thinking, as everybody does nowadays, about how to find hope and light in this really difficult world. Because life's always going to be difficult and death is always going to be around the corner. But none of that precludes the chance to find inspiration and joy and hope.
Katherine May:
And it's so interesting to me that this point in time seems to be drawing us to those bigger questions, those literal life and death questions. And maybe making us ask questions that we thought we were over as a society about meaning and about whether there's anything more out there and how we should think about the universe. How we should conceptualize it. It seems like we've come almost a full circle.
Pico Iyer:
Yeah. I think that's exactly what we're craving in this age of the small screen. We're longing for the larger picture. And at this time when we're so bombarded with soundbites and pieces of information, all we really want is something that releases from that and brings us back to the heavens or something vaster. And in a curious way, I think I was grateful for the pandemic for all the sorrows and losses it brought everybody. Because it seemed to me it was almost nature's or life's way of trying to force us to stop and to think about life and death. And whoever you are across the planet, I think lockdown made us think very urgently about life and death and about our priorities and really therefore about what we really care about and how we want to live.
Katherine May:
And there's something going on in the world at the moment, which feels a bit like nature rising up again and reminding us how powerful it is. We've spent a long time thinking of it as a tame thing, as a pretty thing, as a place to visit on a Sunday, maybe not fully commit to. But we're really feeling that red in tooth and claw sense of nature again with pandemics, with flooding, with wildfires. It's revisiting us violently now.
Pico Iyer:
Yeah. We're reminded it's our servant. We're not the master of the universe. We're the servants of the universe and all these bigger forces. And of course you are speaking to me here in California and I'm just very close to my mother's house. And our house was completely burnt to the ground. We lost everything in the world a few years ago. We rebuilt the house on the same property and we've had to evacuate that house maybe 10 or 12 times. And then-
Katherine May:
Gosh!
Pico Iyer:
... after years of drought where we were told even not to take showers and not to water the garden. Suddenly this winter, 12 torrential storms, 12 inches of rain in less than 24 hours that have closed down the whole town and blocked the roads and caused mudslides. So we feel it very, very keenly in a place of this great natural beauty. I find California socially and culturally quite a difficult place because I was brought up in England and it's so different. But the great redeeming value of California, as you know, is the natural splendor.
And during the pandemic, my wife and I suddenly noticed the great luxury of being able to walk through the mountains every morning and walk along the empty golden beach in the afternoon. And we were savoring the nature until nature started knocking on our door and reminding us, "Remember who's boss here? And you are here at my sufferance," kind of. And I think that too is a tonic lesson because, I haven't thought about this before, but maybe technology is encouraging us more and more in the way maybe the Victorians couldn't to think of ourselves as in control of everything and able to, as you say, manipulate nature in the world as we wish. I remember the first month of the new millennium, I wrote a book in which I began by saying it felt to me at that point, in the year 2000, that we were driving a Porsche at very high speed around blind curves with our eyes closed. Which is exhilarating, but very, very dangerous.
And then suddenly nature, as you say, has been giving us these roadblocks, especially with the pandemic. And we need that because otherwise we're just going to veer off the cliff, I think.
Katherine May:
And I was thinking very recently that when I did my A-level history, we studied medieval history and we looked at the events around the year 1000. And I remember being taught that the guiding spirit of the age was that people in their attitude were eschatological and millenarian, which basically meant they were very concerned with the end of the world or the second coming. And we thought about this as a very medieval mindset, a very, quite superstitious way of seeing the world. But it struck me forcibly recently that we are back in that state of mind. We are back in this concern with the end-times or this feeling that the apocalypse is coming and that we are being visited by something. And it turns out that's not such a medieval mindset after all.
Pico Iyer:
Yes. And I think it turns out it's not such a terrible mindset after all if it suggests some humility. So I didn't do history A-levels, but I did English A-level., and so we had to read Shakespeare. And what I take away all these years later is all those plays of Shakespeare, those suddenly comets surging through the heavens or lions walking through the main street, which remind us exactly of what our floods and wildfires are giving now. We also had to read Homer and the ancient Greeks in that sense that all the gods are all these forces in the heavens and they're playing with us, and it's precarious to forget about that. Oddly enough, for my next book, I was doing some reading and I came upon a sentence from, in fact, a British historian, R. H. Towney. And he said something like, "Traditionally, we were spiritual people who, for practical purposes, turned to material tools. Nowadays, we are..." You can see where it's going. "... material beings who turn for prudence's sake to spiritual tools." But there's been this huge inversion.
And I remember when I read your book Enchantment, I was feeling that part of it was about recovering ancient wisdom and "unforgetting" all the things that people a thousand years ago did know and were sensitive to and attuned to. Because it's not as if we are wiser than they. We have more tools than they, and we're in danger of facing the wisdom that has gathered over millennia. And it's not to say that thinking about the apocalypse is a good thing, but thinking about the end of life may not be such a terrible thing if it moves us to live life with more urgency and clarity and a stronger sense of priorities. I think I was just reading Annie Dillard, whom I've always loved saying, more or less, she was addressing writers, "Imagine your reader has 30 days to live. What you do want to say to her? And what do you want to say and what do you want to do?"
Katherine May:
That's a lot of pressure.
Pico Iyer:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
I don't think I can take the pressure. Honestly, I think I'm too ambulatory as a writer to deal with that question.
Pico Iyer:
Yes, well, you're right. And it's a nice thing to aspire to. But maybe just as a human being, I found that, during the pandemic, suddenly a lot of trivial stuff that I get caught up in rather fell away. And I was thinking, "What is the most essential stuff in life?" Funnily enough, I was just leading a workshop, which I don't do often, last week, with a group of high-tech people, mostly in Silicon Valley. So I didn't know what to do with them. I don't know anything about their world and they probably don't much care about mine. But at the outset, I gave them three questions along these lines. And I told them about losing everything in a forest fire. And I said, "If you had 10 minutes to evacuate your house, what would you save? If you lost everything in the world, what would you replace? And if you were back to ground zero and having to start your life again, how would you begin to live it differently?"
So as you say, these are not necessarily questions all of us need or want to think about all the time. But in my case, I find there's so much coming in on me now that I can't sift the trivial from the essential. And I think that's one of the big losses. And I lose sense of what's important because there's so much that's unimportant around me. So sometimes I think of questions like that just to try and reorient myself to, "Whom do I care about? What do I want to do with my life?" And I'm much older than you, so I think as one gets old, those questions become more urgent perhaps.
Katherine May:
Well, certainly. But you've had to confront those questions, haven't you, in your life with losing your house? What are your answers to that question of what you take with you, what you save? Where did you go with that when you had to face it?
Pico Iyer:
Well, interestingly, I had the same response as pretty much all the people from the tech industry to whom I gave this exercise. Which is, "Anything you can replace is what you don't need. New furniture, clothes, books. And what you really need are the things charged with sentimental value, photos, keepsakes and your childhood teddy bear." And those things, if you lose, you can never get them back. But I think the other thing I felt, and I apologize if I said this to you before, but the older I get, the more I'm freed of the illusion that any event is really good or really bad. And so of course it was a big shock the night of the fire, but pretty soon I also saw that in certain ways it opened doors and windows that would've been closed otherwise and did allow me to live differently. For example, you as a fellow writer can understand, I lost my next three books, which were all in handwritten notes.
Katherine May:
Your next three?
Pico Iyer:
Yes.
Katherine May:
You are hyper-productive. That's horrifying.
Pico Iyer:
Eight years of writing. Worst Nightmare.
Katherine May:
Oof, yeah.
Pico Iyer:
And I called up my wise, kind editor who was in London at the time and he commiserated. But then he said, "Actually, writing without notes may be the best thing for you because that will move you to write from your heart, to write from memory, to write from imagination. Something much deeper than those index cards, which keep you tethered to the ground." And also, losing my physical home made me think, which place really feels like home? And I realized my heart's home, my spirit's home is in Japan. So I essentially moved across the Pacific Ocean. And also, of course, lived much more likely because the insurance company generously gave us a sum with which to replace our goods. And I realized, as I said a minute ago, I didn't need most of the stuff I'd lost. I could live with three books instead of 30 and six shirts instead of 60. And most of us are probably in that position though none of us want such a dramatic editing of our lives.
Katherine May:
No. That that's a pretty brutal way for it to happen. But it's really common actually, isn't it, for writers to lose books? As I've done a few years around the houses, I've known so many people, normally through a computer fault rather than a house fire, but who've lost a whole draft and have had to sit down and write it again. And I've never met anyone who didn't say, "Oh, actually, when I rewrote it was better."
Pico Iyer:
Oh, that's beautiful. Yes, I've been thinking a lot about loss because all of us lose a lot of things in our lives, including loved ones. And 10 years after the fire, I did lose all my files in a computer glitch that worst of all was caused only by me. I can't blame the computer. It's just my incompetence. The computer very kindly said, "Do you want to initiate?" And I thought, "Initiation? Yeah! Sign me up!" And then the computer said, "Are you sure you want to initiate?" "Yes, please!" And then I wiped out every file in my computer.
Katherine May:
Oh, God!
Pico Iyer:
And I suppose I could have gone to some wizard who might have been able to retrieve it. But I thought, as you just said, "No, it's all right. My mistake. Let me start again."
Katherine May:
It's really funny. And I've found actually in most recent years, I get rid of more stuff than I bring into the house now. I'm constantly throwing things out. And actually, I've put a lot of furniture out the front of my house in the last couple of years for people to take. And it always goes within a couple of hours. And I'm beginning to suspect that the same person is taking all my stuff and has a replica of my house inside that house.
That's my most paranoid moments. But you see, so last week I decided that I finally had to replace the table I've been working on for years and years, since I was 12. Because I couldn't fit a chair under it properly and it was giving me a bad back, and everything was at the wrong level. And it just wasn't doing me any good anymore, and I needed to let it go. And I posted about it on Instagram. And most people were very sweet about it and saying, "Oh, yes, bye-bye table. Thank you very much." Which is exactly how I felt. I felt like the table was a person. But some people, you could see it was really triggering for them, the idea of even me as a distant stranger letting go of that sentimental object.
And people were saying things like, "Could you put it in another room? Could you put it in the garden?" Someone said, "Could you turn it into art?" Which I thought was hilarious because I can't turn anything into art. Trust me. But it really struck me that I could feel that I'd created this gut feeling of discomfort in some people. And it made me realize how comfortable I was with it. Yes, I felt a pang about letting go of my table that I've written all my books on. But I also felt like it was time, and I ultimately felt like it was just a possession, and it wasn't that painful for me.
Pico Iyer:
I am one of those people who would've written to you in horror, Katherine, Really, I envy you. As soon as you began talking about your ability to throw things out I thought, "I don't have that courage." And there I was blindly talking about starting a new life, but I can't do that. Especially something that had been with me since the age of 12. You're absolutely right. We're all attached in very different ways. Yes. And maybe that's why life had to do it for me. And nowadays, my wife does it for me. She realizes that I'm too sentimentally attached to things. So she comes, and when I'm not looking, throws out all my stuff.
Katherine May:
Oh, goodness! That's brutal.
Pico Iyer:
At some level, yes. But at some level, of course I'm grateful because it's all stuff I will never look at again and never need or use. But I just don't have the heart to throw it out. So it's so interesting. As you say, trigger is the right word. And even though I'm pretty elderly now, and as I said, I've been through so many losses, I still clinging to my childhood teddy bear or whatever it might be, if it's still around.
Katherine May:
Yeah. It's understandable. Can I get you to talk a little bit about how you defied your year? Because it's relevant to what we are saying at the moment, because you don't spend all year in one place, generally.
Pico Iyer:
I don't. I must say my heart is in Japan, my adopted home. And left to my own devices, I would want to spend every day of the rest of my life there. But until recently, my mother's been here in California, and to some extent, my work is here. So I have to spend some time here. And, like all of us, I try to make the best of that commute. And I tell myself that Japan is a very old and seasoned culture. And a Buddhist culture can teach me about just the things we've been talking about, loss in permanence, grief. And so I always spend autumn the season of things falling away and coming darkness and coming cold. I always spend that season in Japan. And spring, right now, I'm often in California because California is so much the place of eternal hope and light and long horizons, a sense of the future.
Katherine May:
Sorry, this is a huge question, but do you notice different attitudes towards those bigger questions that we are thinking about in different places? And of course you're a travel writer as well, so you spend a lot of time investigating how people think in different places. And are we so different? Does anyone have it right or more right than everyone else? Or are we all basically the same?
Pico Iyer:
It's probably politically incorrect to say this, but I think we're very, very different. And so making this commute between Japan and California, California, I think, more than anywhere in the U.S. is founded on the pursuit of happiness, and as I said, the possibility and the notion that you can make a perfect world. And Japan is founded on that Buddhist idea of the reality of suffering and doing what we can with our imperfect selves and imperfect world. And especially during the pandemic, when I was going back and forth, every time I returned to Japan, everything seems completely unperturbed. People were going about life as normal, children were going to school, trains and elevators were crowded. Everybody to this day is completely masked all the time. But Japan doesn't think of reality as an affront or a shock. It's been through 1,400 years of fires and earthquakes and warfare and viruses too.
And so that's almost the expectation. Life is going to be difficult, but let's find the joy in the middle of that difficulty. Whereas every time I flew back to California, people were in such a state of panic and rage as if, "Nobody told us that life was going to be toppled like this. And why is the world so unfair?" And it couldn't have been a greater difference. And to speak to your question about cultures being different, I think they speak to different parts of us. So I think of Japan as a wise elder, as I think of many of the older cultures of the world. And so the older I get, the more grateful I am to be in the company of this wise presence that's been around for a long time. But of course, when I was a little boy growing up in England, all I wanted was to be in California, the home of youth and the summer of love and endless possibility.
And I think for a young person, California is exhilarating, which is why so many people gravitate. So I found different phases of my life propel me towards different places, the way they would propel me towards different people. I think I seek out women in their 90s now because I feel they have so much wisdom to pass on. And when I was a teenager, all I wanted was to meet some cool other 16 year old who could fill me up with energy and excitement.
Katherine May:
Of course.
Pico Iyer:
Of course. Like all of us.
Katherine May:
Or preferably early 20 year olds, because they just seemed unbelievably sophisticated when you're 16.
Pico Iyer:
Yes. Can turn you onto all the real excitements of life. Yes.
Katherine May:
And it's a curve because then at 29 you become very boring indeed. So yours is a secular interest, but it's definitely very spiritual. I think we're, again, quite similar in that sense in, in that neither of us have ever managed to adopt any grand set of beliefs around our spiritual practices. Is that fair to say before I carry on with this line of inquiry?
Pico Iyer:
You took the words out of my mouth. And before you continue, I was thinking both of us are open to transcendence and wonder and enchantments probably.
Katherine May:
Yeah, love it. But I see it as, for me, a quality of attention that doesn't require belief. I don't need belief to access that, what seems to me like a very fundamental human experience. And so, again, it's another thing that I can let go of quite easily, the idea that I need a big explanation, I think.
Pico Iyer:
Yes, I completely agree. And I've been thinking since I last talked to you. Another way of saying this is that And I think maybe when we spoke before, I might have spoken in the context of my book about going to Jerusalem and this sense that some longing, some intimation of something vast and transforming is very real. And every human feels it, whether on a mountaintop or when in love or watching a sunset or moved to tears by a book. We all have that. But the ideas and ideologies we build around that just cut us up. And it's like we take something from the heavens and we humans mess it up by bringing it down to earth.
So organized religion, I think, is how we deface the heavens in some ways. But organized religion, for all its flaws, can't remove the fact that the heavens are still there and that one well wonder is still there. Every other sentence in your new book is really a reminder of, I think you call it the luminous ordinary or the wonder all around us.
Katherine May:
Luminous, mundane. Yeah.
Pico Iyer:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
And it seems very evident to me that is there, and it's an external reality that's there to be experienced. And it doesn't seem remotely esoteric to me, I guess. Whereas, I think, maybe for some other people it's more difficult to find. And therefore it seems for those people there's a need for a spiritual toolkit that's given to you that almost hands you that faith that it's allowed, that you're allowed to seek, that it's there to be witnessed. And I think for some people, they would struggle to believe in it if they didn't have an external framework. I just don't happen to need that. Because I like to do my own thing, I guess.
Pico Iyer:
That's interesting. As I hear you say that I think for many people, community is a large part of their sense of wonder.
Katherine May:
Yes, absolutely.
Pico Iyer:
And community often needs to wear the name of a religion, which is quite understandable. And ritual too. Since we last spoke, I've been thinking how right in the middle of the word enchantment is chant. And the power of chant, both as something collective and something that doesn't necessarily have a logical meaning, but does tap something very deep inside us. That spirit is very powerful to me. But when you use the word esoteric, I was thinking books and our ideas are esoteric, but reality isn't, it's right around us. And when I was thinking about paradise, I came to feel, this is a variation on what you just said, that the only paradise I could trust is one that's open to everybody, completely democratic.
Katherine May:
Yes.
Pico Iyer:
I don't think it can be a province of a few people who partake of a certain belief or who've read a certain book. I think it has to be a universal for me to have faith in it.
Katherine May:
I can't reconcile the idea of a just God with someone who insists that people follow one very specific man-made set of rules. I can't reconcile those two things. I think that's one of my fundamental problems with religion, really.
Pico Iyer:
Yes. And I think what I've found is that the wisest spirits in the world who are the most grounded in a certain faith are often the most open to every other. By which, I mean I remember for example, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said something akin to what you just said, and he said, "How could I possibly believe in a God who would exclude the Dalai Lama or Gandhi from heaven because they're not Christians?" He said, "That's not a God who could possibly exist in my sphere."
Katherine May:
And I wouldn't follow a God that didn't think that.
Pico Iyer:
Yes.
Katherine May:
There's the rebellious teenager in me, but I don't care if you're God, I don't agree with you.
Pico Iyer:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
I don't my chances in the long term with that attitude. But that's the way it hits me. But you've spent more time than most in the company of deeply religious people, with the Dalai Lama. You spent time in a Benedictine Monastery, I think. Am I right in saying that?
Pico Iyer:
You are right. Yes. And I suppose that it speaks for many things. It speaks for that yearning that I think all of us have for stillness and solitude, and the space to awaken what is deepest in us. It also speaks for my practical sense that... Well, I think everybody listening to our conversation knows that if you step into a convent or a monastery of any order, there's a certain silence that's not just the absence of noise, but it's a positive presence, maybe created by years and years of prayer and devotion and meditation, whatever it is. And that is emancipation. That brings you to a different place inside yourself. And also, I do find monks to be wise about the matters of life and love and death. So yes, I've made more than 100 retreats now with this group of Benedictines, three hours from where I'm sitting.
And I'm not a Christian, I don't really go to their services. Their beliefs probably don't entirely chime with mine. But I find them very decent, kind, and actually very, very tolerant people. So they have no interest in imposing any design on any visitor. There're 15 rooms where people can stay. And I think they figure that whoever you are, you will find what is deepest or truest in you in silence. And so I sometimes think that my great religious teacher in life has been silence. And it's been people like Leonard Cohen a Zen monk and the Benedictine monks who've brought me to that understanding. But it's as if they open the door for me and then I can step through to something else, which is just this positive silence. Suddenly all the things I was worrying about fall away. As I say, it's a three and a half hour drive.
And in the course of that drive, as all the time, I'm fretting about some deadline and carrying on an argument with a friend and upset about some mistake. Always, always, always. And then literally I step out of my car and I step into this very simple room overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and all of that's gone. I can't even imagine entertaining those thoughts or those worries. And sometimes I stay there only for three days, but those three days really illuminate and transform the rest of my life. So I try to go once every season for three days, and that will take care of the next three months. And I remember sometime when I began staying there 32 years ago, I was washing my dishes and I poured a little blue dish washing liquid into my glass of water. And I suddenly thought, "Look at this! One drop of the dish washing liquid completely transforms the glass of water."
And that's just what's happening with me as I spend three days in silence. As long as I can do that, I think it'll take care of the next 87 days of clutter and confusion and noise in my head and in the world.
Katherine May:
That is a perfect way to think about retreating. And I'm in need of that right now. I think as you're speaking, I'm feeling this physical craving towards that kind of silence, and the space opens up. But I've been thinking a lot lately about place. And I think you've just expressed it too, correct me if I'm wrong, but this feeling that places where people have bought their devotion or their silence or their prayerful attention seem to hold a certain quality for me that I find it hard to understand. It's almost like they become imbued with that silence or that reverence. And I suppose my question, and I don't know if you can answer that, and I don't know if I can answer that, but which way does enchantment flow? Do we bring the enchantment to places or do they, I don't know, leech it out towards us? How does that exchange work? Because you spending time in a monastery, I think you must have experienced that.
Pico Iyer:
I love that thought. I've never actually thought about it before. I've always felt certain places do have a charisma. It's no coincidence that whether you're in England or the United States, people with a certain yearning are heading again and again to certain places, power spots. And then probably they make them more powerful, as you say, by everything that they bring to them. But yes, it's a mysterious thing. But I'm glad there are such places. And as you were talking, I was thinking that the converse is when we go into a supermarket or a bank, you can feel all the not so exalted thoughts and longings that people are bringing to those places. Few people get uplifted in one of those places. So I guess a really wise person could see the beauty and the luminous even there. But you're right. And I felt in your most recent book, you were seeking out these magical places across England. Some that many of us might not think of magical, like the sound mirrors you describe and others.
Katherine May:
Yes.
Pico Iyer:
These ancient patterning of stones, which we so often forget. But there's something there. The earth is vibrating there and it's hard to dispute that, however skeptical you are about many things.
Katherine May:
Yeah, that's it. My own skepticism falls down quite easily, it's very easily disrupted. And I suppose I feel like the planet we live on is more sentient than we acknowledge. And as I say that, I feel that's almost a very practical way of talking about living within a bigger system that has more going on than just us. We think we're so important. We think we're so central to everything. But actually we are tiny, tiny dots teaming around a massive planet in a unfathomably vast universe. And we rarely perceive the intelligence of the bigger system, which is different to our intelligence, it's not expressed through a brain, but it's distributed through this huge system that functions in a way that we barely comprehend and that we don't show enough respect for. And maybe that's how it works. That's how it feels to encounter that when you actually step up to it and notice it. I don't know.
Pico Iyer:
I think you're exactly right. I think that's exactly what's going on. That when we climb to the top of a mountain or when we look up at the stars, the liberation we feel is we disappear. We are just specks in the hands of something vast. And actually that's what I feel when I get out of my car and step into the silent little room in the monastery. So I can't think about my problems anymore because "my" doesn't exist anymore. I feel like a totally an empty vessel or an empty room surrounded by this radiant nature. And it's such a relief not to have Pico there anymore and to be emptied out and just filled with the beauty of everything around me. So I think you've just described what transcendence is really about and what we're longing for, which is actually to be relieved of ourselves and released from ourselves.
And the tinier we are, probably the greater we feel. Isn't that interesting? That with the more we're reminded of our smallness, the more spacious we are within, as if we're filled up with the universe instead of being this tiny mortal creature struggling to walk down the road in a complicated world. We are the whole world in some ways.
Katherine May:
Well, which we are. Those are the basic insights of the Eastern religions, aren't they? That we are both part of God and we are God and everything is completely interconnected. And again, to me, I'm really comfortable with that on a practical level. It just seems essentially true that we compose this idea of a greater being ourselves and that all of it is held within us. And I guess that's when I struggle when people add extra beliefs on top of that. It seems to me that's just obscuring the basic fact of our link-ness and the way that we are connected to the whole universe. And I feel I don't need any more than that. I just need to keep returning to it.
Pico Iyer:
Yes. Well, it's exactly that. I remember that when I was talking to you about your recent book, at the end I asked you if you were a Buddhist because that vision of interconnectedness is so integral to that. And I often think how, for example, the Dalai Lama was in some ways an environmentalist before most of us knew the term back in the 1970s, precisely because he sees the whole world as Indra's net, as this interlocking network. And we talk now about the butterfly effect. Somebody sneezes in China and somebody in California catches a cold or feels the effects. And I think in the globalized world, whether it's economically or in the context of a virus, we are more and more aware of how our destinies are intertwined and we can't separate ourselves from 8 billion other people.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Pico Iyer:
It's actually quite a nice reminder of that vision that you were speaking for about interconnectedness. As you probably know, the Buddhists have this word Śūnyatā, which is usually translated as emptiness, and I think leaves many of us a bit perplexed. What's with emptiness? But the Dalai Lama always says it actually means empty of independent existence. In other words, that's another word for interconnectedness.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Pico Iyer:
That's actually what that term means. And therefore the welfare of any person depends on all the rest of us. Which is why I think he always stresses responsibility because he knows every little thing he does, or you do or I do, is going to determine the health and wellbeing of everybody around us.
Katherine May:
And of course I've certainly grown up in a very individualistic society in a particularly individualistic age. And maybe that's an insight from being in a monastery as well. But there's a very different understanding of the self that comes from more communitarian societies, however big or small they are. And again, that begins to look, to me, it must be such a relief to let your identity be held in a wider net than having to be encased in this body and constantly reasserted, and my views held and my agency expressed. It's very tiring to keep doing that.
Pico Iyer:
Yes. And our body is so mortal and tiny and perishable. So you've just explained why I moved to Japan. Having grown up in England in the U.S., which are very individualistic, as you said, I knew that I could learn a lot from an old society absolutely based on the notion that each person is only as happy as the whole around him. So that was my answer to it. And I think the challenge, you have a family and you are rooted in England, is I think what your books are about are reawakening that spirit in the middle of England. In other words, living in an individualistic society, but never forgetting the importance of a communitarian vision and trying to find the places in contemporary 21st Century England where you can revive that. I took the shortcut by moving to a society where there's no word "I" really, the only word is "we".
Katherine May:
Wow. But I have to say that I've never grown up with it. I would struggle with genuinely enacting it. Even though I believe in it as a principle, I don't know if I know how to do it if I'm completely honest. And I think I'd find it very unsettling at first, certainly. And I wonder how long it would take me to adapt to it if I lived that lie.
Pico Iyer:
Yes. I suppose in my experience, I sought out Japan because I knew it'd be very different from the New York City where I was living. And the people there are so kind and welcoming and patient, that made a big difference. My first week there I met a Californian who'd been living there for a long time, and he said, "The beauty of this place is nobody is imposing her business card or her dogma or her trip on you." Which is absolutely true. And so I felt that growing up in the West I'd been taught to speak, and by going there I would learn a little bit about how to listen. And it's helped by the fact I speak limited Japanese. But apart from that, Japanese are so good at listening. And their first thought always when they meet somebody is not what they're going to say and how they're going to share their experiences and wisdom, but trying to figure out what that person needs most and how to make her most comfortable.
I played ping pong with my elderly neighbors three times a week in Japan. And what's fascinating is we never play singles. We change partners every five minutes. So if you win one game, you'll likely to lose the next time. And we keep score during the games to make them exciting, but nobody keeps score of who's winning overall. And so the notion is there were no winners and losers. Everybody comes home feeling that she's won. And it's so different from as soon as I come back to this country, actually my arch rival on the ping pong table is another English writer, and we play these fearless games.
Katherine May:
Can you reveal their names?
Pico Iyer:
Yes, because he would reveal my name. Jeff Dyer.
Katherine May:
Oh, wonderful.
Pico Iyer:
Another English writer here in California. But we have pursued our ping pong rivalry in Japan, in Key West; Florida, in London, on stage in San Francisco at a tournament in New York, everywhere. And whenever I play Jeff, if I win, I can't sleep after I go home because I know he's going to hatch revenge. And so I'm unsettled. And of course if I lose, I can't sleep all night because I'm thinking, "Why did I miss that backhand slam when the score was 16:15?" And so, one way or another, that sense that one person has to come out ahead is a torment to everybody, whether you are a winner or a loser. And when I come back every other day from the ping pong club in Japan and my wife says, "How was it?" I'll say, "Fantastic."
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Pico Iyer:
Because I don't know who's won or lost. I just know that everybody's worked really hard to make sure everybody has a good time. And it's a trivial example, but it speaks for this entirely different visual.
Katherine May:
Yes. This is Clifford Geertz's deep play, isn't it? This is the game that represents all of life and death. Absolutely. It's a perfect example. The whole of the cosmos is involved in ping pong, and I never knew it. But as a traveler, do you feel you can ever understand the depth of a place as well as a local? Do you have a different encounter with people who are native to a place or can you ever pick up that lived experience?
Pico Iyer:
I can never understand it as a local does, but I can usually see something that a local would never notice. And I've found this in reverse because I spent my first 21 years in England, mostly in Oxford. And all I wanted to do was escape as quickly as possible. And I did and very seldom return. And then 20, 30 years later, my wife wanted to see the places where I grew up. And so we started making trips to England. And when she would walk around my neighborhood, she would be aglow with excitement and enthusiasm. She would remind me of all the things I'd sleep-walked past or edited out and literally be giving me fresh, appreciative eyes. And then when we go back to Japan, we take walks around her hometown of Kyoto, and I'm always very excited to go and see the festivals and temples, which she might not because she grew up among them.
And so my hope is I can bring fresh eyes to her. And so the outsider is almost by definition attuned to things that the local wants to take for granted or can't afford to pay attention to. So of course the local is more tuned into nuances and depths and intimacies. But I've always felt that the outsider has something to offer. And the other thing that privileged outsider has to offer is a reminder of what its strengths and graces are. I remember when I used to go to Cuba a lot, and of course almost no Cuban I met was ever able to leave her island. So they were rightly chafing against the oppressions and frustrations of Cuba.
And the one thing I thought I could bring to them other than toothpaste and soap and basic necessities was to say, "I've been to so many other countries in the world. And I really have to tell you, you have a spirit, a resilience, a resourcefulness, an energy that almost every country would be grateful for. And it's hard for you to see because you've never seen the alternatives and because you're aware of everything that's going wrong. But please know that we in England would really envy many of the qualities you have in Cuba."
Katherine May:
Actually I think that whenever I hear people say that the internet is all bad, for example, because I think about the number of opportunities it's given me over the last 20, 25 years to really encounter somebody else's culture. And therefore to completely revolutionize my understanding of what my culture is and how it can be different. The last couple of years I've spent such a lot of time being interviewed by Americans and having grown up with American culture all around me, I never understood it until now. I never understood the very different mindset between the UK and the U.S. You must be ultra conscious of it now. But the very different ways of seeing life and how it's constructed and how we think about it and how we take care of it. I thought I understood even that culture that seemed like the closest culture to ours. But I've realized how far away it is. And it's been so informative. I think it's been changing for me honestly. I think it's really altered my understanding of how humans work.
Pico Iyer:
So interesting. I've often been telling my friends recently, I've been officially resident in the United States since the age of seven. So this is 58 years now. And it feels completely a foreign country. And I don't actually claim to understand it at all. And I don't even feel I'm speaking the same language. And I think this is something you perhaps share from a distance, I'm such a grateful alien here.
Katherine May:
Yes.
Pico Iyer:
And I don't understand America, but I do feel it's hospitable and I do feel it's a land of openness and opportunity as many of the older cultures in the world are not. And I remember you and I, when we were finishing our last conversation, we got onto the fact that many of the things we'd be very embarrassed about saying or thinking in the UK are warmly encouraged and actually cultivated here. And I think that's a good thing.
As a little boy, I was going back and forth as between my English boarding school and California. And England was training me in skepticism. And I'm very grateful for that. But I really felt I needed some counter to the skepticism. And I'm so grateful to the U.S. as a whole for not giving up on hope and possibility and really consecrating their lives to it. For all that I was saying earlier about the dangers of the pursuit of happiness, nonetheless there is a freshness and a youthfulness here that one can gain from. And when you began talking a minute ago about how grateful you are to the internet, I was also thinking, "There you are in England and here I am in California and Japan." But the more we were in impoverished or imprisoned cultures, the more grateful we would be for the internet.
Katherine May:
Oh my goodness. Yeah.
Pico Iyer:
You and I are relatively lucky because we have access to many things. But if you were stuck in Cuba or Tibet or [inaudible 00:52:44] or Ethiopia or wherever you'd be doubly glad for the huge horizons suddenly brought to you if you're not able to travel in any other way.
Katherine May:
I'm absolutely certain of it. And I worry that we are being so negative about these aspects of our culture at the moment. And there's so much discourse about how we get rid of them, how we let go of them. And I don't think that's the question for me at all. I think the question is how do we imbue them with the same deep understanding of cultural practice that we do with the world outside? How do we become less zombie-like in those spaces and more conscious and more active and at the same time really appreciate what they do give us. Because there's definitely a huge benefit to them being there. It's just that we need to learn to tame them a little better.
Pico Iyer:
How to be less jaded and how to be a foreigner at home. And when I read Enchantment, I thought, "At some level, this is a book about coming to your senses, getting out of your head and living in your senses." And that's what I love about travel, that as soon as I go to a place I think of as foreign, even if it's within the United States or across town from where I live, all my senses are at the setting marked on and I'm wide awake. And therefore I can appreciate everything. And these days I often enjoy it when visitors come to my hometown. And dutifully I'll take them to all the tourist sites I would never dream of going to. And of course, it's wonderful. They're tourist sites because they're beautiful. And literally they're importing fresh eyes to me.
And the other thing, when I was thinking about going to Cuba as an example, is that as you almost suggested a minute ago, everyone, wherever she lives, is conscious of what's wrong in her society. And the one thing that a foreigner can bring useful is a reminder of what's right and what's enviable. And I suppose, as you said, the reminder to be conscious and awake. And I think probably that's the lesson of your writing and my writing, which is just, how do we wake up and stay awake to everything that's around us? And the news will tell us, most things around us are bad. But our senses tell us many of the things around us are wondrous and uplifting, transforming.
Katherine May:
That was a beautiful place to finish. Pico, thank you so much. I just was completely immersed in that conversation. I suddenly looked at the time and realized we'd been talking for an hour.
Pico Iyer:
What a joy it is to talk to you under any pretext, Katherine. Thank you so much for inviting me and for having this podcast. We could have constant fun talking together because actually I was going to talk a little bit about your first book too, when I was talking about retreat. And I think in Enchantment you have this lovely line about something like, "Resting does not mean doing nothing." And I was thinking, when I go on retreat, resting is really how I prepare to do everything right and anything. It's only by resting that I know how to move it with clarity and directness through the world. May this be the first of many conversations that we can hatch.
Katherine May:
Oh, absolutely. Lifelong conversations. Completely.
Pico Iyer:
Yes.
Katherine May:
And I enjoy it.
Here I am back again. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. The sun is setting here at Disneyland. There is the most beautiful red cloud in the sky. Currently, I'm looking at a pirate ship silhouetted against it, and my son is blowing bubbles at me. You brought out bubbles. No, you haven't. Thank goodness. So I'm speaking to you enrobed in bubbles. Unfortunately, there are electric bubbles. Thank you, Burt. That's so nice. There's a little bit of magic left here tonight. And of course we're staying for the big firework display. But welcome to the new series. I hope that was a great introduction for you and I will see you really soon. I'm off to find Captain Jack Sparrow. Bye.
Show Notes
Pico Iyer’s latest book, The Half Known Life, looks at the ways in which we seek paradise on earth, sometimes in places that are fraught with risk. In this episode, he and Katherine talk about the similarities in their work, particularly the ways in which they explore secular understandings of big spiritual questions, and they touch on the differences, too. Where Katherine is drawn to the local and the known, Pico quests after the insights that come to travellers and strangers. They are two different ways of looking at the same question: that of how to live a good and peaceful life, via the practice of enchantment.
Pico can truly be called a veteran travel writer, having published his first book in 1984, and gone on to publish fourteen more, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road and The Art of Stillness. His writing regularly features in Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the Financial Times among many others, and his four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far.
Links from the episode:
Pico and Katherine in conversation about The Half Known Life
Pico's website
Pico's book, The Half Known Life
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Enchantment - Available Now
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
