#277:  THE WHEREABOUTS OF EDEN.  It may not have been inevitable that Pico Iyer should end up (in part) a travel writer, but circumstances do seem to have edged him in that direction.  He was born to Indian parents, academics, in England; he recalls, “in our chill, gray flat in North Oxford,” being read stories from the Ramayana.  The family eventually relocated to California, very nicely giving him ground points from which to go easily east or west.  His full name is Siddarth Pico Raghavan Iyer, his first name after the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, his second after Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance philosopher.  He went to Eton, did his degree work at Magdalen College in Oxford and further work at Harvard; his father was an associate of the Dalai Lama, whom Iyer has known since childhood; he worked for Time writing about international affairs, was a writer-in-residence in Singapore, and has taught at Princeton.  He is married to a Japanese woman and lives part of the year in Nara, a quiet city overseen by the great temple of Todai-ji and a park full of small Sika deer, some of whom will bow to you if you feed them.  He makes frequent forays as well to a Catholic hermitage to California.  His birth certificate might well have come with a complimentary international passport.

       So, the question arises:  if you can go almost anywhere, where do you want to end up?  What’s the best place in the world to be?  Iyer’s 2023 book The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise takes us on a broad itinerary of the possibiles.  In part he writes about places of great natural beauty: he begins with Iran, whose language first equated the great good place—paradaijah—with a garden, and it leads, not at all for the last time, to a tomb, the shrine to the Imam Reza.  Where Iyer goes, he invokes the place’s poets: in Iran, we hear of Ferdowsi and Rumi and Omar Khayyam and Hafiz.  And where he goes—the Koreas, Belfast, Kashmir, Australia, Jerusalem—he evokes the arguments and terrors, the violence traded and imposed by the various communities.  Here as with his other books and online talks, Iyer is observant, thoughtful, the last person in the world to clamp a place shut in conclusions.  He brings with him an equable temper and a marvelous, far-reaching literacy: in Belfast he visits the places he knows from Van Morrison’s songs; he reminds us that it was a Hindu swami that urged Thomas Merton to read St. Augustine, and Iyer in turn scours Merton’s Asian Journals while in Sri Lanka.  In Iran he reaches past Ferdowsi to The Cloud of Unknowing: “By our love, the divine may be reached and held; by our thinking, never.”  Not vast history, but conversations, people, scenes, the twists of anecdote.  Iyer’s thinking never presumes to have anything like the last word.

       In the penultimate chapter, “Afterworld,” the earlier descriptions of shrines and graveyards climax with a visit to Koyasan, the mountain home of the Shingon Buddhist monastery founded by Kobo Daishi—and where, almost twelve hundred years after his death, he is believed still to be sitting in meditation. “There are two celebrated gateways to paradise,” Iyer writes: “One hinges on vision, the other on death.” and the chapter is a splendid evocation of the permeable borders between the living and the dead as experienced in Japan.   Shangri-La, James Hilton’s now-famed name for a Himalayan paradise, is likely a corruption of Shambhala, a Buddhist kingdom that is actually a state of vision.  A Korean man assures the Dalai Lama that he will go to the Pure Land, the Buddhist paradise, only to be answered, “I don’t want to go to the Pure Land. I want to serve where I’m needed.”  Leaving the monastery’s vast graveyard, Iyer concludes, “The thought that we must die, I might have heard the two hundred thousand graves saying, is the reason we must live well.”

       The Half Known Life’s final chapter, “The Flames of Heaven,” is set in Varanasi, the Hindu holy city: “the Boschian riddle at the eye of the storm that entices many, horrifies others, and leaves most of us feeling we’re losing our minds, and don’t know quite what to replace them with.”  The violent incongruities of Varanasi—the funeral processions heading for the ghats while a man tries to sell you phone memory cards, the scents of cow dung and incense, the seekers and sellers, the winter fogs and cremation fires—all cram into this last handful of pages.  Sarnath is only a few miles away, where the Buddha gave his first teaching, and pilgrims circumambulate the remains of the old stupa, but Varanasi is another matter altogether.  “Different colors.  Different spirit.  Different energy,” Iyer’s guide tells him. “You have to be on high alert when you come to my city.”  Here is where Iyer lays our idea of any idyllic paradise finally to rest.  “What startled me most as I began to walk its streets was that the city of extinction was, without question, a city of joy.  The people hurrying past me towards the burning pyres, bearing dead bodies towards the sacred river, were raising their voices in praise, and in a great, overwhelming cry of thanks.”  This is the perfect ending for the book, and reminds us of the phrase from Thoreau with which it opens: “With all your science can you tell me how it is--& whence it is, that light comes into the soul?”  No telling the how or whence, but, just some times and in some places, thank heavens, we know it when we see it.  Iyer spots those moments and speaks of them as well as anyone I know.

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, by Pico Iyer.  Riverhead Books, 2023.