Sunday, February 10, 2008

"Every day is a journey," wrote Basho, "and the journey itself is home." If the great Japanese poet hadn't penned that line more than 300 years ago, we might easily attribute it to Pico Iyer, a journalist who writes ostensibly about travel, but is more interested in the humanity it reveals. "Travel doesn't interest me," Iyer says, "except as a handy way to undertake explorations that are fundamentally emotional, moral or even spiritual."

It will come as no surprise, then, that this essayist and author is the child of philosophers. His parents, who are from India, were both professors at Oxford, where he was born 51 years ago, tomorrow.

By the time he was seven, his family had moved and he had taken on a third culture: California. Commuting to England for school, he quickly learned that spending summers with American hippies was as exotic to friends at Eton as attending class in a tuxedo might be to Santa Barbara pals. "I can remember distinctly," he says, "changing my accent, my interests, even my attitudes, as I flew between LAX and Heathrow." The process trained him to see how cultures dream of one another, how they project fears and fantasies -- a central theme of his work.

His big break came in 1982, as he "languished in graduate school at Harvard," working on a doctorate in literature and feeling his love of books quietly slip away. He had published essays here and there in magazines, and an editor at Time suddenly offered him a job writing about world affairs. He says now that Time taught him to be aware of a reader, to write concisely and with clarity, to research subjects quickly and to free himself from the scholarly conviction that complex and obscure perceptions are superior to what an ordinary human can see.

Iyer is the author of nine books, among them Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Cuba and the Night and Global Soul. In March, he will publish The Open Road, the culmination of a long fascination with the Dalai Lama. "I first encountered him through my philosopher father when I was three -- he sent me a picture of himself as a little boy on the Lion Throne of Lhasa in 1960, and it sat on my desk for 30 years until our house burned down in a fire."

He was born an outsider, he says, the way some people are born Ethiopians, or others are born farmers, or still others are born raconteurs. "Writers work with what they're given, and in my case, outsiderness seems to be part of the package. The outsider can, after all, see things that someone trapped in his own neighborhood (or assumptions) cannot."

He is as comfortable writing about monks and monasteries as he is about planes and airports -- "Thomas Merton on a frequent flyer pass," a writer at The Hindu once remarked.

Sometimes an airplane "can jump-start the metaphysical," Iyer muses. And sometimes the search becomes the seeker's shrine.

-- Marie Arana