I first encountered Pico Iyer in 1991. My wife and I were on our way to the Philippines for a two-year teaching stint at a college in a remote province. I wanted to write about the experience, so in preparation I read all of the travel essays I could find. At the time, two collections came out that I admired: Iyer’s “Video Night in Kathmandu” and P.J. O’Rourke’s “Holidays in Hell.” Both books included essays about visits to the Philippines, but their viewpoints varied greatly. O’Rourke stayed at the Manila Hotel, the most expensive and plush venue in the country.
He had maids, cocktails by the pool, and a car and driver at his beck and call. Iyer, on the other hand, arrived in Manila in the rain and lugged his suitcase from door to door looking for a room. He traveled by public buses and jeepney, and seemed to take the etymological root of the word “travel” seriously. Travail: labor, toil; suffering, trouble. This difference in perspective deeply affected each writer’s perception of the place. And though O’Rourke’s persona as a cynical tourist was entertaining, I preferred Iyer — the gritty traveler wandering through the streets and lives of ordinary Filipinos.
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Other than a few essays here and there, I lost touch with Iyer’s work until many years later, when “The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home” came out in 2000. This travel memoir was an inventive take on the increasingly elusive nature of cultural identity on the cusp of the new millennium. With the help of Teilhard de Chardin and Emerson, Iyer first defined the idea of the “global soul” as a collective unconscious. But after a couple of chapters the collective “global soul” shifted to designate the individual — Iyer and other people like him, who are often located on the semi-permeable social and linguistic membranes between cultures.
Iyer’s parents are from India; he grew up in England and the U.S. and now lives mainly in Japan. “The country where people look like me is the one where I can’t speak the language,” he wrote. “The country where people sound like me is a place where I look highly alien, and the country where people live like me is the most foreign space of all.”
Iyer continued to define “the global soul,” as including the “blessings of being unaffiliated” and being able to fit in everywhere. Though he seemed to long for his parents’ sense of tradition and morality, he was never able to find it. Rather than having a clear grasp of right and wrong, he had developed “a more unanchored, relativistic sense” of morality. In the world he inhabited, he “could get anywhere very soon, and nothing was final.”
Unlike “Video Night in Kathmandu,” in “The Global Soul” Iyer writes about the upper socio-economic tiers, and from a more privileged social position himself. Early on he draws a lengthy and complex portrait of a wealthy business friend, Richard, who, with his briefcase full of phone cards and plane tickets, needs no office. Though Richard lives in Hong Kong, his sense of home is similar to Iyer’s — nowhere and everywhere, necessarily foreign and finally only a state of mind. This idea is reinforced in a later chapter about the city of Atlanta, which he visited while covering the 1996 Olympics. For Iyer, Atlanta represented the hypocrisy of the new money multiculture — the “globalized” homogeneity and placelessness of endless malls and chain stores. Oddly, it seemed similar to Richard’s sense of “home”: nowhere and everywhere.
Iyer’s latest book, “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere,” is a departure from much of his prior work. Though he has always been a contemplative writer, he has also constantly been on the move. “As one who’d been crossing continents alone since the age of nine,” he writes. “I’d always found my delight in movement; I’d even become a travel writer so that my business and my pleasure could become one.” So the “Nowhere” in the subtitle of “The Art of Stillness” is not the predictable corporate sameness of an American mall as described in “The Global Soul,” but instead aligns with the subtitle of that book — the “Search for Home.” Now, nowhere is home, the place he seeks to arrive but never will — the emptiness that is wholeness, that is the art of stillness. “In an age of constant movement,” Iyer writes, “nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”
The theme here is not new — for Iyer or others: the problem/promise of being an artist (or anything else) in a frenetic, high-tech, 24/7 culture, where to slow down or reflect or unplug is countercultural — the antithesis of “success.” Iyer is not religious and has never engaged in regular meditative practice. The impetus for the book is one of Iyer’s musical heroes: Leonard Cohen, the celebrated singer-songwriter, who has practiced meditation with a Buddhist monk for more than 40 years. Cohen invites Iyer to a remote meditation center in California’s San Gabriel Mountains where the two spend a week together. Iyer seems to idolize Cohen, and the introduction of the book is a conversation between them about the necessity of meditation and “going nowhere,” for artists/writers. After this experience Iyer literally comes “down from the mountain” and writes a book that is essentially a meandering personal essay about his quest for a more balanced life.
The thesis of the book is suggested early on, in a line borrowed from Henry David Thoreau: “It matters not where or how far you travel — the farther commonly the worse — but how much alive you are.” In his exploration of how he might “travel” more deeply, and recover his spiritual vitality within the “tyranny of time” caused by a technological tsunami, Iyer weaves in a range of writers –– Thomas Merton, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Blaise Pascal and Emily Dickinson. Though they all offer similar advice to Thoreau’s: Slow down, pay attention, be fully present, and you’ll be a better artist/writer/person wherever you find yourself. Like Thoreau, Iyer implies that material obligations, and “making a living,” can prevent the deepest kind of travel — a wild, inward journey, which leads not to a place, but a way of seeing, and seeking.
Given this thematic focus, Iyer easily could have oversimplified and romanticized the difficult “inner work” of the writer/artist. But instead he struggles with the “gift” of quiet isolation. “A life of stillness,” he writes, “can sometimes lead not to art but to doubt or dereliction; anyone who longs to see the light is signing on for many long nights alone in the dark.” Merton, one of Iyer’s in-print mentors concurs: “The way of contemplation is not even a way, and if one follows it, what he finds is nothing.”
The book, then, is not a road map to the Nirvana of Nowhere, but rather an exploration of how to find and follow a moral and spiritual compass amid the whirring high-tech carnival of daily life, amid a culture of distraction and never-enoughness. And, as usual, Pico Iyer is a good companion for the journey.
Tom Montgomery Fate’s most recent book is “Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild.” He teaches creative writing at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn.
“The Art of Stillness”
By Pico Iyer, TED, 96 pages, $14.99