However the more interesting aspect of Iyer's books for me are his thoughts on other great authors which I tend to lap up. While these are presented rather dryly without context below - for getting the juice from these quotations you need to read these in the foil of their full context within the travelogues of Iyer.
Camus
The great blessing of his
upbringing, writes Albert Camus, was being born halfway between poverty and the
sun…….the daily difficulties and hardship of life and survival on the one hand
and the imminent possibilities from the bright horizons of the sun:
·
‘’I feel humility in my heart of hearts only in
the presence of the poorest lives and the greatest adventures of the mind.
Between the two is a society I find ludicrous‘’.
Explorations of the poorest lives
became one of the great adventures of his mind. Camus was a traveler for life,
a stranger able to bring news to the place wherever he happened to find
himself. He threw into question what was central, what the margins, and saw how
the two circle each other like fascinated strangers, each haunted by the other.
Thoreau
True and serious travelling is no
pastime, but is as serious as the grave.
Travel remains a journey into
whatever we can’t explain, or explain away.
Leonard Cohen
This connection, the unavoidable
presence of the ‘other’, has driven us to religion. We form ourselves around
these problems. A human is a gathering around the perplexity. Great religion is
great work of art.
My comment
Not sure why, but here I recollect the natural insight
into the nature of things that old people and tribals have…….one specific thing
I remember is from ‘Dances with wolves’ where the Indian warrior
‘Wind-in-his-hair’ tells Dunbar that he now understands why his friend (husband
of ‘stands-with-a-fist’) died…..it was to make way for Dances-with-wolves
! This I feel is in a sense the
gathering of a personality into the shape of a need. It is said great men have
formed at precisely the hour of need…….is this the gathering of a human ?
Religion - That’s the real deep entertainment. Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. Nothing touches it. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence. Except if you’re courting. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement.
Change is the prime aphrodisiac
’The older you get, the lonelier
you become; and deeper the love that you need’. For the old and the deep and
the lonely, change, it seems, may not be the only aphrodisiac.
A Zen discourse: a fearless
scripture as bracing as a sudden blow to the skull
’Anything you may find through
seeking will be only a wild fox spirit – it certainly wont be true Buddha ’
- if you stop the mind to look for stillness,
- arresting the flow of thought they don’t let arise,
- concentrate the mind to enter Samadhi
all you are doing is fashioning
models and creating patterns out of illusory transformations. It is artificial striving to seek which only
makes the sought retreat farther and farther, turn more and more the other way.
When you lack faith in yourself,
you run around seeking something outside…..tumbling along, bewilderingly
following after myriad circumstances through transformation after
transformation, and never be yourself.
If you want to act, then act –
don’t hesitate.
To be without joy or grief – is
the true state of awakening.
Pop Star Spiritual Leader –
His Holiness The Dalai Lama described as ‘a canny Tibetan scientist with a
surprising gift for repairing old watches, tending to sick parrots, and, as it
happens, making broken things whole once again.’
…if the majority of humanity
remains nonbelievers, it doesn’t matter. No problem! Dogs, cats, if we treat
them nicely, openly, trustingly, they also respond and show affection. And
without religion, without faith. Kindness is more fundamental than faith.
The problem is that the majority
have lost, or ignore, the deeper human values – compassion, a sense of
responsibility….even one single human
family cannot be a happy family in such a community without deeper human
values.
If part of the Dalai Lama
suggests that monks cannot afford to be unworldly hermits, another part
suggests that politicians need not be aggressive schemers. Compassion, he
argues over and over, only stands to reason.
Pico Iyer saahab
We travel, every time we dream or
return from a dream with a few haunted pieces we know we’ll never be able to
put together again. It is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of
everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know, and may never know. Confronted
by the foreign we grow newly attentive to the details of the world. A trip has been successful if I come back
sounding strange even to myself……if, in some sense, I never came back at all but am sorting away all those experiences unconsciously.
The beauty of any flight is that
as soon as we leave the ground, we leave a sense of who we are behind. The four
walls that marked and enclosed our lives this morning grow smaller, less
distinct and finally disappear altogether………and the ‘’we’’ and ‘’I’’ that were
so urgent when we woke up become as remote, as hard to take seriously, as that
house far, far below, now invisible.
Pico Iyer on Kazuo Ishiguro
At the heart of the poignant and haunted
vision of Ishiguro - across his works - is
set just before or after the war, the reverberations of the larger struggle
rumbling underneath the action like the distant train. The heart of Ishiguro’s
strength is to bring the two forces into intricate collision, and to show how
displaced characters longing to be part of the larger whole and to serve a
cause attach themselves to the very forces that are tearing the world apart.
Ishiguro’s gift is blending tones – the mixing of effects: the poignancy and
absurdity of country-house manners brought to people struggling for
comprehension.
And also therein lies the Protagonist
who is typically unsettled and nervous that they don’t belong, fussy,
agonizingly self-conscious, possessed by truths he can’t acknowledge, never
quite sure of their place in the world, with overlapping anxieties of
dislocation & of being swept up in something outside one’s control and that
even the smallest thing can throw them off completely, bound by blind loyalty
and vanity (towards ones employee/job/nation….), always having an air of
apprehension or rather ‘terror’ of doing the wrong thing and elaborate unease attending
even the most everyday of activities – take one wrong step and you’ll get lost –
and the sense of being always on uncertain ground.
This protagonist keeps assuring himself
how well adjusted and popular he is even as the prose reveals otherwise –
groping in the dark searching the small print of the world around for clues as
to how to act & copying the sounds he hears around him, laboriously practicing
even his ‘bantering’ to fit in with the class he serves, researching over and
over how he would ‘modestly but with a certain dignity’ outline his ambitions. It
is indeed a foreigner’s plight – inability to tell friend from foe, or to see
the larger picture, always on the lookout for signs and prompts.
We might be misled into thinking
that the very notion of foreignness has changed in the digital age……but this
has only gone underground in our times and has never lost its age-old terrors,
of being left out or left behind. And one would feel at home with this pathetically
self-involved character, longing to keep the truth of his loneliness at bay and
training his magnifying glass on the alien world around him.
- Salman Rushdie, in his celebrations of the new deracination, looks back to Moorish Spain to show how different cultures can live together in relative harmony.
- Michael Ondaatje, in his The English Patient, imagines a desert in which individuals spin around one another like separate planets, no national divisions visible in the sand.
- Ishiguro is less sanguine and suggests National Identity is the language and currency we use. In his ‘When we were Orphans’, Ishiguro stitches together his almost microscopic examination of self-delusion as it plays out in lost individuals, with a much larger – often metaphorical - look at self-enclosure on a national scale. Ishiguro highlights and questions mingling of races (at an International Settlement) that represents the challenge (and possibility) of our Universal Otherness. An English parent responds to the resettled Japanese kid’s query ‘Uncle, how do you suppose one might become more English’ thus: ‘People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilization of ours, perhaps it’ll just collapse. And everything scatters’. While this was a more collected response, the Older Man’s initial sarcastic reply was that mongrels like the kid growing up amidst many cultures, may be lucky enough to exist outside traditional affiliations, and may even bring an end to war.This book traces the collapse of a civilization, and the scattering of just about everything revealing how the very wish to belong is complicit in that unraveling.
- Sebald is another writer living in England for over thirty years without ever becoming English and whose works most resembles that of Ishiguro. And ‘The Unconsoled’ could be the perfect title for all of Sebald’s work which is obsessed with how war affects those not directly involved in it. Both writers have been conducting enquiries into the end of Empire in an England where anti-Japanese and anti-German sentiment run high sixty years after the last war. For both these writers, thrown into motion by the turns oof history, foreignness in the modern floating world can only begin at home.
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