by Iyer, Pico
Away from the Buddhist orbit, Annie Dillard and Bob Richardson spurred me on to become a bit more practical in supporting myself, and Caryl Phillips, Meredith Monk, and my incomparable editor at the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers, supported me in this effort. In bringing this book into print, I owe, as ever, huge thanks to my agent, Lynn Nesbit, and my longtime friends and sponsors at the Knopf Group, Sonny Mehta, Dan Frank, Marty Asher, and Robin Desser.
Dan Frank, in fact, pushed me and pushed me toward more rigor and sharpness, with the attention and challenging kindness one can expect only from the most understanding of friends, and Fran Bigman made every step of the process painless and friendly. In the production of the book I was buoyed and inspired, as many times before, by the incomparable book designer Abby Weintraub, whose art has now graced four of my covers, and by my engaging and inimitable photographer of choice, Derek Shapton in Toronto.
Stephen Mitchell, astonishingly, offered to read the whole manuscript although we had met only twice (again, I got a humbled sense of what Buddhist training and meditation are in the service of), and two days after I sent it to him offered me a beautifully informed and precise list of places where I’d misinterpreted the tradition. In Kyoto, my old, great friend Michael Hofmann, who first opened the door to Buddhism for me when we met in 1987, brought to both me and my writing great kindness, clarity, and insight, always trying to keep me honest and reminding me of how much I didn’t know.
It was my late father, as described in these pages, who handed down to me his acquaintance with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and, in fact, brought Tibetan monks and symbols into our living room when I was a very small boy; as the years have passed, I have come to see that this was one of his most precious bequests. My mother, to my delight and gratitude, shares her graces and gifts with me daily. In California, my friends at the New Camaldoli Benedictine hermitage have been teaching me for seventeen years why monks do what they do, and what the fruits of their stillness, devotion, and compassion really mean; and in Japan the indomitable and cheerful members of the Shikanodai Ping-Pong Club have offered something of the same in a less formal context.
When I began writing on Tibet, half a lifetime ago, it was very much a solo endeavor; I can still remember explaining a bit about the country and its traditions to my sweet and shining companion, Hiroko Takeuchi, when we met in 1987. Since then, Hiroko has taken Tibet to her great heart, become the uncrowned princess of her second home, Dharamsala, and has tried hard to implement what she has learned from the Tibetans, often breaking the ice in conversations with the Dalai Lama while I was dancing over the surface. When he heard I was working on this book, the Dalai Lama told her to “check on him and make sure he’s not going wrong,” a useful reminder to us both about how universal responsibility begins at home.
Finally, as one living in a small apartment in suburban Japan, I am always much influenced and colored by such works as visit me from afar. In this case, I feel a great debt to some of the material that really moved me and gave me food for thought while I was working on this book: Julie Taymor’s film Titus, Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me, the writings of Philip Roth, Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, the art of Bill Viola, and, as mentioned, the rigorous and self-mocking global optimism of U2, whose work for liberation and conscience soaringly chimes with much that this book is about. Insofar as this work, like all my books, is about how to find clarity and peace—a larger meaning—in the midst of our accelerating, jam-packed, exhilarating new global order, U2 clearly offer an example of how to laugh at one’s own claims to goodness while still working overtime to do some good for others. I appreciate the attempt of such individuals to take on the world, with open eyes and ferocious determination, without ever giving up on a devotion to what is not so often visible in the world.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pico Iyer has published five books on modern globalism, novels on Revolutionary Cuba and Islam, and a set of literary essays. A writer for Time since 1982, he has covered Tibet also for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Op-Ed page, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and many other magazines on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. He has been traveling in and around Tibetan communities and the Himalayas for more than thirty years.
ALSO BY PICO IYER
Sun After Dark
Abandon
The Global Soul
Tropical Classical
Cuba and the Night
Falling Off the Map
The Lady and the Monk
Video Night in Kathmandu
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 by Pico Iyer
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto..
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK
The author would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for its very generous and gracious support in making the research and writing of this book possible.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26865-5
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