John Walters is an American writer who returned
to the United States after living abroad for thirty-five
years in India, Bangladesh, Italy, Greece, and other countries
and now resides in Seattle, Washington. He writes novels,
short stories, essays, and memoirs of his wanderings around
the world. You can find his website/blog and links to his
books at: http://www.johnwalterswriter.com.This
Pico
Iyer's The Half Known Life is well-written and takes
us to fascinating places, but it is suffused with irony. Iyer
tours locations that for one reason or another have been considered
forms of paradise, but most of them are fraught with violence,
and some are among the most dangerous locales in the world.
He writes: “A true paradise has meaning only after one
has outgrown all notions of perfection and taken the measure
of the fallen world.” Additionally, though he writes
of a search for paradise, he makes it clear that he is approaching
the subject from a secular viewpoint. He is not a religious
person, and though his prose is beautifully wrought, he maintains
a distance, a sort of remoteness from his material, as if
he is reporting on situations that do not touch him personally.
This is not necessarily a drawback, but it is clear that another
writer, one who is searching for meaning and fulfillment,
might approach the task with much more empathy and emotion.
Iyer also indulges in privileged traveling, which I find hard
to relate to – that is, a method of traveling that only
the wealthy can afford: flying in a carefree manner from one
spot to another halfway around the world, staying in luxury
hotels, and hiring cars, drivers, and guides. Although I have
traveled extensively too, I have always had to stick to budget
transport and find my own way around as best I can.
The
tour of holy places begins in Iran, where Iyer visits mosques
and palaces and other historic and contemporary sites. Iran’s
claim to fame as a repository of paradise, according to Iyer,
is its spiritual poetry from many centuries ago. As he travels
around modern-day Iran, it is clear that foreigners are restricted
to certain areas, he has clearly defined boundaries, and he
is not altogether safe. From Iran, Iyer takes us to, of all
places, Pyongyang, North Korea. He justifies this stop because
to the North Korean leadership the country is a “people’s
paradise” – but his stay there is fraught with
paranoia and tension. Paradise? No thanks.
Onward
to Belfast, Ireland: another zone of incessant conflict. He
alludes to a “History of Terror” tour, which takes
participants “to the site of Bloody Friday – almost
two dozen bombs exploding in barely an hour – and the
homes of terrorists.” He later writes of the musician
Van Morrison, a native of Belfast, who transformed a squalid
world through his music. “He’d made of the unpromising
landscape a world as magically illuminated as Avalon.”
Next, he takes us to another global hotspot: Kashmir. He writes
of the British attempting to create a sort of paradise by
building houseboats on the lake; however, since partition
this natural paradise has been the site of almost constant
conflict – surrounded by opposing forces and barbed
wire.
When
Iyer moves on to a remote corner of the Australian outback,
a coastal town called Broome, it seems like a pleasant interlude
– until we read of tumultuous weather and the ongoing
ill-treatment of the aboriginal population. From the Australian
wastelands he cuts to Jerusalem, the site of many competing
faiths and sects and of continual discord and violence. In
all of these situations, he observes and reports but has no
answers – he does not even attempt any. He merely describes
– with eloquence – what he sees. Then there is
Ladakh, a place of ongoing conflict between India, Pakistan,
and China, and then Sri Lanka, where the decades-long battle
is between Tamils and Singhalese. Both Ladakh and Sri Lanka
are natural paradises that humankind has ripped apart with
violence.
The
final two places Iyer visits are not war zones, however. One
is holy Mount Koyasan near Osaka, the site of numerous temples,
and the other is Varanasi on the Ganges River in India. Of
Koyasan he writes that “joy, for a monk, is never the
same as pleasure, because it has nothing to do with changing
circumstance.” This seems to be one of the themes of
his book: that paradise continues to exist despite human conflicts
around it.
At
first I found Iyer’s choices of destinations to be jarring
in a book that is supposed to be about his pilgrimage from
one paradisiacal location to another. However, in reality,
in our present era the entire world is full of conflict, and
we have to look beyond the discord and mayhem for natural
beauties and spiritual truths. This book, poetically written,
brings home that point. Recommended.