Salon.com > Pico Iyer

Why we travel

Sat, 18 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

This is my home

Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Once, after I'd been living here, on and off, for three years, I decided I needed a typewriter. The machine I was using, an ancient Japanese manual, was as arthritic, almost, as myself, and the only other implements I had for composing my articles were a box of $1.19 pens, a limited supply of paper and an entirely illegible scrawl. I picked up a local magazine and started going through its classified section, finding at last the name of a company that offered simple, cheap electric typewriters similar to the one I'd had in college. I called them up, faxed them some forms, deposited a payment at the post office, and waited.

A few days later, as if by magic, a Black Cat messenger appeared at my door with my salvation in his hands. Eagerly, I began typing all the articles I'd previously handwritten, and before long, thanks to my expertise, the correction tape was all used up. Suddenly, I was helpless (having survived quite happily for years without a typewriter). Fretfully, I called up the company, got some more forms, faxed them back, deposited a further payment at the post office, and waited. Soon a whole box of correction tapes arrived. By then, however, the regular ribbon was worn out.

A very foreign life

Tue, 22 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

My daily life in Nara is itself a curious artifact, belonging to
a kind of existence that even I could not have imagined only a
decade ago, before "home office" fax machines and Global Village
modems, with international telephones on every other street
corner, made centrifugal lives possible. In terms of the world I
grew up in, almost none of it makes any sense, but in terms of
the world we're entering, it forms the outlines of a complete
sentence.

I go to sleep here every day by 9:00 p.m., in part so as to wake
up at 5:00 a.m., when my employers (thirteen time-zones away) are
at their desks (their office hours stretching from 11:00 p.m. to
7:00 a.m., Nara time). My research facility, if I need to check on something,
is an English language bookstore ninety minutes
away by train, and my version of the Internet is a copy of the
World Almanac. The person I see most often, outside my immediate
household, is the Federal Express boy who comes to collect and
deliver packages from distant Osaka. In this newly shrunken world,
I can complete articles or even books without having to exchange
a word with editors, and can draw out money in a local department
store from a bank account on the other side of the planet.

The alien home

Sat, 19 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

And so our dreams of distant places change as fast as images on MTV, and the immigrant arrives at the land that means freedom to him, only to find that it's already been recast by other hands. Some of the places around us look anonymous as airport lounges, some as strange as our living room suddenly flooded with foreign objects. The only home that any Global Soul can find these days is, it seems, in the midst of the alien and the indecipherable.

And so, a wanderer from birth, like more and more around me, I choose to live a long way from the place where I was born, the country in which I work, and the land to which my face and blood assign me -- on a distant island where I can't read any of the signs and will never be accepted as even a partial native. Specifically, I live in a two-room apartment in the middle of rural Japan, in a modern mock-Californian suburb, none of whose buildings are older than I am, with a longtime love whose English is as limited as my Japanese, and her two children, who have even fewer words in common with me. Once every few months, I see a foreign face in the neighborhood, and occasionally my secondhand laptop greets me with, "Good morning, Dick ... . The time is 6:03 p.m. [in Houston]," but otherwise, long weeks go by without my speaking my native tongue.

Pilgrim's passion

Wed, 15 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Every journey is a question of sorts, and the best journeys for me are the
ones in which every answer opens onto deeper and more searching questions. Every traveler is on a quest of sorts, but the pilgrim stands out because his every step is a leap of faith, and his journey is through such states as penitence and prayer. Unlike a typical adventurer, the pilgrim seeks not to conquer the worlds he visits but to surrender to them; and unlike a
missionary, he seeks not to preach but, in the silence of his supplication,
to listen. A pilgrim does not have to be moving toward something holy, I
think, so much as toward whatever resides in the deepest part of him: It
could be a poet who gave wings to his soul, or a lover who broke his heart
open. The most eternal pilgrim in literature -- always referred to as such --
is Romeo.

Sacred places: England before the fall

Sat, 28 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

It is the light, on summer evenings, drifting on till 9 p.m. or later, and slanting above the elms, the musky river; it is the scratchy smell of grass, the thunk of bat on cricket ball. It is the flow of a brackish stream, the twittery, gnattish nothingness that is a drowsy English town on a summer day going nowhere. It is the sound of bells tolling across the fields, and the morning walk to class when the dew is still on the grass.

It is, of course, nostalgia -- geography's déjà vu -- that marks a large part of what we call the "sacred." Born in England on a winter's day, I grew up thinking of it only as the place I longed to flee. As soon as I could, upon the completion of my studies there, I got on a plane and never looked back. England is red-brick houses to me, and lowering gray afternoons, the inertia of a social system that has no room for growth, the soot and filth and dreariness of Industrial Revolution factories that blacken the already smudged sky on winter afternoons. Even on summer days, when I return, almost all that I can see is porridge-colored tower-blocks and circumscribed lives and hopes, the milk bottles lined up outside the scruffy gardens as for a rainstorm that will never come.

My sacred place

Sat, 19 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

My sacred place is a makeshift, modern, entirely generic suburb in the
middle of Japan, which looks, alas, like a (badly translated) version of a
sitcom set from the San Fernando Valley. There are no temples in the
vicinity, no priests; there is almost nothing in sight that would remind a
typical visitor of Japan. A new McDonald's sits just down the road from me,
and a line of convenience stores stands across the street. A four-story
department store called Life has just replaced some empty fields, and a
health club nearby offers aerobics classes behind an entrance guarded
inscrutably by some Easter Island statues.

Yet what the place affords me is almost everything I associate with
sacredness: the chance to be still, and perfectly alone; people all around who
are always going places and doing something, but with an air of quiet self-
containment; and complete freedom from the TV or newspapers that would only
bring me down. A lifetime of traveling has brought home to me, perhaps, that
it makes little sense to go all the way to Jerusalem or Cuzco if you're still
carrying Sherman Oaks inside you; take an angry person to Nepal, and he'll
only find new things to be angry about.

Bewitched on Bali

Sat, 17 Apr 1999 19:04:00 +0000

It was dark when first I set foot on the island, and the jungle all around
was chattering. I heard gamelan music through the trees, saw oil-lamps
flickering along the narrow lanes. The last parties were breaking up along
the back streets of Kuta, and when the taxi dropped me off at an unknown
hotel, I was alone in a confounding darkness.

That first night in Bali, still jangled and discombobulated from two days
and nights in the air, from New York, through Tokyo, to Jakarta and then
here, I wandered out onto the beach at dead of night, and a figure
appeared, smiling, and asked if I'd like "jig-jig" or some carnal services
I couldn't follow. I woke up often in the dark, fitful and scratchy,
mosquitoes whining all around, and when I went out again at dawn, I found I
had landed up on a pockmarked lane, with psychedelic paintings hanging
from storefronts, and demon masks fringed with human hair, and a few
long-hairs slumped among the bushes, deadened by the magic they'd eaten or
smoked.

New York serenade

Wed, 13 Jan 1999 20:00:00 +0000

- - - - - - - - -
D A Y__O N E

A cold winter's day: I fly into La Guardia. You need a ticket, I find, just to enter the baggage claim area. A large sign on every carousel warns, "Keep an Eye on Your Bags." Another sign on the wall advises, "For Your Safety -- Don't Accept Unsolicited Ride Offers." Next to it, a poster showing some friendly, welcoming faces says, "Don't Ride With Them. They're Breaking the Law." The messages go oddly with the bright framed prints saying, "New York Is Art," "New York Is Dance," "New York Is Heritage."

Outside, in the chill, a Trinidadian helps me into his cab, and, taking instant note of my complexion, jams some Hindi film music into his tape system. What brought him to New York?

"Greener pastures," he says, catching my eye with an ironic glint in the rearview mirror.

"Do you still think the pastures are greener here ?"

"Now I don't know, man. You know how it is. My ex-wife's here with my kids, and I don't want to be too far from them."