Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer, known as Pico Iyer, is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian origin, best known for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionWriter
CountryIndia
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If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.
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I'm very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can't think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not.
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A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.
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We readily go to the health club when our doctor suggests we need more exercise, but we regularly neglect the 'mental health club' that our well-being more truly requires.
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I suppose even when I was growing up, I noticed I was most happy when I was absorbed in something, lost in the moment and forgot the time, whether was conversation, movie, or a game I was playing. That was my definition of happiness. And I was least happy when I was all over the place, distracted and restless.
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Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music - Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his 'Various Positions' - and let your mind cool down. Soon you'll forget there's a word called 'stress.'
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The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with.
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Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.
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I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.
perhaps technology
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
people
Places have charisma, in short, as much as people do.
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Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure.
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Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
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I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.