Book review: The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer

The Half-known Life, In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer. Penguin Books.

The gifted writer sets out in search of a paradise on earth as well as in the mind. No prizes for guessing where the true paradise is to be found, of course.

Iyer gets  in a deeply reflective state of mind as he traverses some of the world`s most troubled places. Mashhad and Qom in Iran, North and South Korea, Belfast in Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Broome in Australia, Jerusalem and Nazareth in Israel, parts of Ladakh, Colombo in Sri Lanka, Koyasan a mountainside monastery near Osaka, and finally Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.

In actual fact, these are contemplations of trips the writer took sometime in the past, and he takes off on his own, leaving the reader to either follow him or forge a fresh path of their own, partly  based on where Iyer is going and coming from, partly from their own takeaways from the places he shines a spotlight on.

It is the writer`s job, says Iyer, to dismantle the very notion of the Other, by showing how your hurts belong to me, as my hopes do to you. That breaking down of a barrier seems  absent from this work, though.

This letting go, to my mind, is where The Half-known Life differs from Iyer`s other journeys of the mind. In those other books, he holds the reader firmly by the hand, never once letting go, getting the latter to peer into all the chasms, to stand before the abyss, to juxtapose their own reality alongside Iyer`s, to take whatever the writer offers up.

The Dalai Lama is frequently referenced, there is a nod to old friend the late great Len Cohen, Iyer talks of his marriage with aching vulnerability. Elsewhere,  he lets drop, in a very enigmatic chapter, that he was confronted  by a group of hostile Aboriginals but doesn’t tell us why he thought that happened.

More questions than answers

This travel memoir is mystical in that it asks more questions of the author as well as the reader than it provides easy answers.

But such is the power of Iyer`s language that the reader gets their own epiphany of sorts, finds their own version of paradise by the time the last page of the book is turned.

This then is a brief compilation of the many kinds of paradise Pico Iyer offers to the reader:

• The Sufi poet Rumi: If heaven is within, then one leaf is worth more than all of paradise.
• From a Zen master, Eido-roshi: The struggle of your life is your paradise.
• Khayyam: Take care to create your own paradise, here and now on earth.
• Agha Shahid Ali: I am being rowed through paradise on a river of hell.
• The current Dalai Lama: Paradise can only be found in the middle of what`s around us.
• The author: The notion of an external paradise is one of the main illusions and projections we have to sweep aside, as we might a sand mandala.
• The author, again: Paradise is regained by finding the wonder within the moment. All the light and beauty we could find, we had to find right now.
• From the Book of Heaven: The two gateways to paradise hinge on vision and death.

Related Links:

Book review: A Beginner`s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer

Book review: The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer