On Travel, Technology, Kindness: An Evening with Pico Iyer

Pico

Last night I went to the Lobrero to hear Pico Iyer "in conversation" with Don George. Wow. One of the world's most revered travel writers and essayists, Iyer was born in England to intellectual Indian parents, raised partly in Santa Barbara, and educated at Eton, Oxford, Harvard...and the world.  A multinational soul ("I fold up my self and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag")  he has described himself as "a global village on two legs". He is an incisive observer of the modern world whose commentary is not only brilliant but also poetic and humorous.

Although  I've had  the privilege of hearing him before, Iyer was even more eloquent and insightful than I'd remembered.  Conversation? Well, Don George is surely an impressive man in his own right, but all he had to do is send a spark now and then and step aside while Iyer illuminated the room.  

I took a few notes, and you'll see words from Iyer in quotes below, even though I may not have captured them exactly or typed them in the precise order in which they were spoken. Delve into one of his many books if this whets your appetite for more. 

Having lived in Oxford and Santa Barbara, Iyer discovered his true home in Japan, specifically  Narita, where he was delayed at the airport and impulsively decided to head into town for a few hours: "The most unconsidered moment can change the course of your life."

He expected it to be like the area outside of LAX or JFK...instead, he found a place that enchanted him: 

"But it pierced me with a sense of familiarity. It was more home to me than Oxford, more home than the house in Santa Barbara where I keep my things."

He's been living there for 28 years now. "Technology enables us to live in the places that make sense to us."

A few more random bits and pieces...on travel, technology, writing, and other important things:

"I majored in English literature. I was learning to read the world."

"Every person has a key to perception that would be locked to the rest of us."

"The longer you know a person or a place, the less you are able to say about it."

"The beauty of travel is not that it gives you knowledge, but that it reminds you of all that you cannot know."

"When I began, the world had too little information. Now we have too much information. The role of the writer has changed."

"The uncharted places–of memory and spirit–are not online.""Writing is more important than ever.  Take the reader somewhere inside herself."

On his newest book The Man Within My Head about his obsession with Graham Greene: "It is nonlinear, not resolved, and full of long sentences...intentionally the opposite of the experience you get watching a screen."

"We have more and more ways to communicate but less and less to say."

"The joy of quiet. It is essential to disconnect sometimes."

"Traveling and taking a holiday are two different things. Travel is a perceptual exercise. You choose to ask questions, you choose what you will bring to it."

"Travel is an exchange.  You must open yourself up to it, and cultivate the art of vulnerability."

"Travel is a moral examination (that Graham Greene always failed). It's about the riddle of kindness.""I have the illusion of knowing Paris. I know nothing of Yemen. But you can't make simple assumptions. People I met in Yemen were kind. Nothing bad happened to me in Yemen. Santa Barbara is where your house burns down."

"The most charismatic cities: Havana, Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut."

"Jerusalem: a confounding and compelling place where man's aspirations and human-ness are in constant conflict."

"What would I advise young people? Don’t listen to me, your parents, or your teachers. Take two years off to get to know the world. Or look through the eyes of someone radically different from your self and see what she'd say."

"The first imperative is to dream your way into another's perspective. How does the world look to my neighbor? (As a Hindu, how does the world look to my Muslim neighbor?)"

"To quote Thoreau, it matters not how far you go, but how alive you are."

"A good place is one that never leaves you."

"I want to keep finding the places that challenge me, seeing the world through fresh eyes. Or as Proust said, not new sights, but new eyes."

"Kindness is more important than doctrine. What you do is more important than what you believe."

"Travel is like falling in love. You surrender to something beyond your control; you don't know where it's going to take you, but you know you will be transformed."