One on One With Pico Iyer

[Laughter] welcome to the ottawa international writers festival our 2020 virtual season is broadcasting from the unseated and unsurrendered territory of the algonquin anishinaabe [Music] i'm so happy to be joined right now by pico ire and pico was in ottawa 19 years ago this month and at that time he was promoting a book called the global soul earlier this afternoon i was able to find it on my shelves i still have to copy that pico that you kindly inscribed for me and i remember our conversation that day and if we can think back 19 years to the early part of this century there was much happening in the world and much of the talk was around globalization and the promise of the technologies that were coming to fruition the connectedness of people the movement of ideas the movement of people across borders and a greater openness and last year you were also scheduled to be with us in ottawa but owing to i believe to climate change frankly that there was fog on the ground and your plane was not able to land um you're joining us uh this year last year you were discussing your book autumn light and we'll talk about that book but perhaps the most logical way or the nicest way to enter into our conversation today is for me to ask you about 20 years on from the global soul the world that we find ourselves in now and in particular in 2020 the global pandemic coveted 19. pico i trust that you're well and that your family is well and you're joining us from california i am indeed thank you so much for all those memories and those eloquent words peter and i love the fact you mentioned about global connectedness being the anthem of the moment in 2001 because that's what allows me to talk to you at last right now in ways that actually we couldn't have foreseen back in 2001 and you're absolutely right i'm really delighted this is the third time i've been part of this festival and i do feel a little ill-starred because actually the first time when you and i spoke it was the weekend of september 11th and i had to delay my flight to ottawa and then when i arrived in the airport three days after september 11th with my complexion and this tiny carry-on having just written a piece about yemen and with syria and in my passport earlier that year saying i had come to ottawa for 36 hours uh to talk about globalization um i had a very long stay in immigration so i was there for more than an hour i only just got in i never forget that weekend and then as you mentioned last year literally i think the very day a year ago to the day um i was circling circling over ottawa airport coming from toronto dying to come and talk to you and we got robbed of that opportunity so i'm so glad we get to keep up with it now and to me when we were all talking about globalism in 2000 and 2001 i'm not sure that the contours have changed that dramatically i think the speed of change has been unanticipated and the intensity and volume of the movement across borders among the privileged and among the desperate and the undefended has been beyond anything that i and many of us might have imagined but that said i don't see the world as being so different now from the way we imagined it when you and i spoke about the global cell 19 years ago nationalism we all know is on the rise but i think that's only because it's on the run and because many people want to yank us back into the past because they're unsettled by the future they want to bring us back to simplicity because the world is getting too complex and they want us to come back into a single home because so many people especially in canada have global affiliations and many homes and that different parts of themselves in different places so there's this great pushback that we're witnessing everywhere from india hungry states but i think that's only because at the individual level incrementally globalism is moving forwards every time somebody touches and befriends somebody from another culture which is happening a hundred times as you and i speak and the children who grow out of those unions will send another black and white division out the window so i think one way or another globalism is irreversible it's like the internet we have it now and all that can be done with it is that it gets refined and improved but it can't be undone it can be so difficult to witness and to live through the things that are happening around the world in terms of resurgent nationalisms and prejudices and tribalism and at the same time if i'm hearing you correctly this is sort of a last gasp that the the future of humanity is actually much brighter than the moment that we're in right now um as ever peter you put it perfectly yes i love the last gasp or the last you know fighting against the inevitable when we spoke in 2001 i never could have imagined that seven years later the most powerful person on the planet on paper at least would be a half kenyan gentleman partly raised in indonesia with a deeply global vision that no white house resident had seen before and although america's clearly the us has moved in an opposite direction since 2016 i think we're in danger of being victims of a short attention span if we forget all the progress that has been made you know i i often remember how when i was a little kid here in the us 98 percent of people disapproved of mixed race marriages by 2014 the percentage was three percent that's amazing and one person's lifetime from 98 this percent disapproval to three percent disapproval and of course toronto vancouver montreal all the great canadian cities uh exemplifications of this they seemed very global to me in the year 2000 but probably many times more so now to the point where toronto famously the average person you see on the streets is what used to be known as a foreigner somebody born in a foreign country same with london where near where i grew up and so all of that i think is making our lives infinitely more interesting more diverse certainly more imaginative especially in the creative sphere and on the individual front so yes i do see this as a last gasp protesting against what is the future and is happening every hour and certainly every day hearing you just now reminds me of a beautiful micro essay that's published on your website about a moment in 2006 where you and your friend paul theroux were in hawaii and you met the man who would become the president can you tell us a just a in a in a capsule about meeting barack obama in 2006 yes i we i was in a tiny little burger joint in the north shore of hawaii with my friend pull through and next to us was this table of about 16 or 17 people it looked like a table in ottawa probably because some were african-american some were asian-american some were an indefinable mixable of all of those uh all dressed in in shorts and flip-flops very casually and there was one very skinny person at the middle of the table who looked like a teenage boy who was going up and fetching avocado burgers for the rest and because paul follows the news much better than i do he said look who's next to us and i didn't know and he said that's this guy who they say is going to enter the presidential race next week um barack obama uh and yeah i was i was lost typically but paul said we've got to go and speak to him well what's the chance i said paul if he's about to enter the presidential race he's probably cherishing this last moment of freedom to be with his family before the spotlight's on him but um paul has much more resourcefulness and determination than i see a bit more or less picked me up and we went over and just as they were getting ready to leave and mr obama jumped up and pulled through said excuse me sorry to bother you that i'm pulled through oh yeah the great wherewithal you know i used to live in indonesia instantly he was swapping anecdotes with paul and then paul said this is my friend pico sure cuba in the night i read your novel a few weeks ago just before um i was off on my way to havana and we were two pestison people intruding on him during this private moment he sprang to his feet and engaged us in the most sparkling littery conversation either of us could remember having and paul said to me at the end of it i've lived in hawaii 19 years and i've only ever met one person who's read my books before and here this man knows him as well as i do and among other things it was a reminder that um the best travel writer in america as i see it was the man at the next table i mean paul is a distinguished novelist and a tremendous traveler but um when i think back on mr obama's first book dreams from my father he was really charting the century that you and i are talking about now in ways that neither paul nor i had done um so it was lovely to get that little taste of his literary sophistication and excitement just one week before he disappeared into the political realm what i love is the conclusion to that essay on your on your site where you contrast and compare the promise of hawaii and the social promise with merely going to seek your fortune and exploiting natural resources in alaska you know and it's just a lovely grace note that concludes that piece of writing uh and i i think it resonates uh to this day pico thank you i must admit i i've forgotten the essay in question but i'm really flattered to be reminded of it thank you it brings me to the next thing i'd like to ask you about which is perhaps the label of travel writer or the ways in which writers are classified refreshing my memory and enjoying many of the things that you have written recently in this last month and knowing that we'd be speaking again i come to the to the perception that your body of work is is so varied and rich now that travel writer doesn't even begin to capture what you do and what you've brought to the world how do you feel about being described as a travel writer well it's a great convenience because people know where to find my books in the in the shop as they might not if i just belong to that huge amorphous all-embracing category known as non-fiction i've always thought that the definition of a travel writer is somebody who is not so interested in travel in other words um jan morris is principally a historian of empire paul theroux is a wonderful novelist bruce chatwin was a kind of anthropologist of kinds and really many of the books that are in the travel section um are only there because travel is being used as a means to sort out some deep a question via sniper was always trying to balance the colonizer and the colonized within himself richard kapicinski was sending coded messages home by going to other countries of um of oppression or constraint so i've always i've always been interested in the criss-crossing of cultures and i think that's probably been my central theme since the beginning and of course one sees that as a traveler but travel is just a means to investigating this much more fundamental shift in my lifetime for which um canada really sits at the epicenter canada has been transformed as i see it in the last 45 years by being open to the world by being remade by all the the people from every corner of the world flooding into your borders uh the u.s has been a little slower but it's moving in that direction and so as somebody who grew up with an indian face um an english voice and an american green card i thought well this is new terrain that nobody has really chronicled and willy-nilly whenever i go somewhere i'm seeing it through those the lens of three uh intermingling uh cultures and of course in the urban canada i'm that's the norm if i go into a classroom in ottawa probably most of the students i meet are much more international than i am so just by virtue of following my background and the doors it opens um i suppose i've been trying to chart um the world that's coming to light all around us and in a very literal sense as you probably know i wrote a book not so long ago called the art of stillness and my book autumn light is essentially about going nowhere but just being in in in this little neighborhood and and we all know that it's much less important to move around than to be moved and the travel is much less important than transport or transformation or transcendence and those are the things i've always been concerned with the physical travel just being a spur perhaps to getting really shifted within i'm so pleased that you mentioned the art of stillness for those who don't know it it's a very brief book that's based on a ted talk on on a public lecture that you were invited to give it's been produced beautifully into a small hardcover that is still in print and still easily available and i read it earlier this week and for me it was the perfect thing to read in a year where so many people have been locked down and unable to move and there's a meditative quality in this essay in this talk about the value of movement but also the value of finding stillness within the movement i'd love it if you could share with us and revisit the idea for that talk and perhaps how that's informed how you how you've come to view travel at this point in your career yes i i think one can only be moved when one's sitting still and even if you're traveling to iceland or petra in order um to be taken out of your expectations and your notions by something wondrous to process that and fully to be emotionally affected i think once sitting in silence um on the the treeless slopes of iceland or before the pyramids in egypt or wherever it might be and you know every so-called travel writer's dirty secret is that for every 10 day trip you take you're spending 10 weeks or 10 months back at your desk trying to make sense of it and turning it into words and so actually a reader who doesn't know so much about my life might think oh all this guy ever does is jump onto planes and travel across the world and ever since i was a little kid the travel has just been maybe five percent of my life and the 95 percent has been sitting at my desk in extreme stillness uh in our rented two-room apartment in japan where we have no car barely any internet no media and and recreating the those physical trips emotionally imaginatively and in other ways um i should say just small correction to what you said um this was actually a book on which a ted talk was based so interestingly that the people who organized ted talks and hold their annual conference in vancouver went into publishing a few years ago and this was the second book they published and their very clever idea was that as you say they could make these very small beautifully packaged books the literary equivalent of a ted talk that could be read at one sitting maybe one hour and then once the book was complete they could also record a ted talk that would send it out into the world in distilled form the hope there being that a 14-minute talk would induce an innocent viewer to want to spend a whole hour reading the fuller version that's in the book but um i've spent 29 years uh regularly living in a catholic monastery here in in california and as a writer really i feel that i've spent 46 years essentially sitting at my desk reading and writing and so it was a very clever idea of an editor at ted books to say well sometimes people think of you as a traveler but really you're probably spending all your life sitting in one place and why don't you write about that and i think they and intuited wonderfully not the virus moment that you are mentioning but the fact that we're all in a state of overload and we're overwhelmed by so much coming in on us and that there's some almost unarticulated longing in almost everybody i know for slowness for stillness and for space and the more the world accelerates the more some part of us wants to unplug just to collect ourself and to make sense of it and so in terms of movement and stillness i mean i often think that my job is to go out into the world and gather experiences and ex emotions and encounters much the way you might go to a farmers market and gather some spices and ingredients and then i come back to my desk and spend long months there turning those ingredients into a meal which is the book or the essay but that's really the the gathering of the information is the least important part and it's what you do with it and how you convert experience into meaning it's really a writer's job and so i think stillness is how we make sense of the movement in our lives and the more movement we have the greater is the need for sitting still to process it and really to recollect what we love to remember our priorities i feel that the challenge of the modern moment is the cluttered desk and that cluttered calendar where so much is coming in on us that we lose track of what's the most important and then when suddenly we need to put our hands on what we care about most we can't because there's too much distraction or trivia obscuring it so i owe a great deal to my editor who came to me with the idea please write a book about stillness because that's what what the world is longing for and you as a writer probably spend more time in stillness than somebody who has to go to an office every day i just find that it's such a lovely compliment to your longer works and in many ways it's a lovely entry point into the longer memoirs and reportage that you produce um and it's absolutely compelling as a moment of reflection because as is mentioned in the book there's more information being gathered in terms of raw data every day more information in the world that we would encounter in a day than shakespeare would have encountered in his lifetime and these are really powerful concepts and and notions to to appreciate last year thank you yeah yes sorry about it let's continue no i just wanted to say last year you were traveling as you normally do uh a very busy international itinerary and at that point you had two books one was a short book about japan and the other a longer book also with a strong element of japanese culture and your life experience in japan called autumn light and i think autumn light is among my most favorite of your works and i think it's a beautiful mature book and i welcome it if you can tell us about autumn light and about your family in japan as a way into talking about um your your travels and the places where you live thank you such generous words peter um anyone who has been to japan in november knows that the skies are brilliantly blue the temperature is 75 degrees fahrenheit it's one of the sharpest warmest times of the year but of course everywhere under that blue are the golds and the scarlets and reds of the turning leaves it's a very very radiant autumn and so you feel this extraordinary exhilaration and you feel the wistfulness of things falling away at exactly the same moment and they often say in japan a buddhist kind of notion that life is about uh joyful participation in a world of sorrows that from the buddhist way of thinking every life ends in death every birth or every birth ends in the death every meeting ends in a separation that nothing lasts forever but it's the fact that nothing lasts forever that means that everything matters and of course autumns are beautiful in in new england and in canada too but there's something about the intensity of the mingling of these cloudless um exalting skies and the signs of everything falling away and the days shortening and the night coming on and the end of things coming on that's that's very very moving so i always try to be in japan during that season and a few years ago during that season my father-in-law had just passed away and so as with any loss the question was how do we balance the grief that we always feel and ought to feel with the hope that that is the best way of honoring the people that we've lost and my sense is that when people in the u.s and probably in canada hear of japan we hear about everything that zany and foreign and westernized robots performing marriages and people hiring granddaughters because they no longer have real granddaughters who want to look in on them um and and the sort of accelerated techno surfaces of urban japan and having lived in japan for 33 years in autumn light i wanted to remind the reader how at the emotional human level of course it's like anywhere else and people are dealing with with suffering and loss but with a wisdom that's gathered over 1400 years of dealing with warfare and tsunami and wildfire in japan so i think of japan i love the way that you use the word mature because to me japan is a very mature culture when it comes to thinking about impermanence and impermanence is of course a universal human phenomenon but in japan um it's almost the religion of the country then every november all my neighbors will put on their sunday best and they'll flood into the temple um gardens and parks to honor and to witness the autumn i think much as people in canada might go to church in other words to be joined in a congregation to be humbled to be reminded of forces much larger than we are so to write about the seasons in japan and especially especially the season of autumn which so exquisitely blends realism and hope um is really to write about as i see at the secret heart of japan and when i first arrived in japan i was in my i was just 30 years old and of course i was intoxicated by cherry blossoms and and and the excitement of the spring there now um 30 years later for personal reasons uh but also because i feel i understand japan a little bit better i see that the autumn is the real heart of japan um partly because it's a heart that all of us share everybody listening to this conversation knows what it is to lose somebody and knows that when you've lost somebody either through death or through a breakup in some ways they live more inside you than when they were in the same room they possess you they're all around all the time and the way in which absence can be such a powerful kind of presence was something that haunted me and that i wanted to try to do justice to in this book in your writing about the people in your life in japan about friends and neighbors and people you see socially there is such a grace and such a tact and what emerges for the reader is that essential reticence and politeness of japanese society and culture which in persists and endures to this day and one of the most poignant things that you posit in the book and it takes a while to get there is a sense of what it costs people to live behind a gracious mask and the rich interior lives that people are reluctant to give full expression to sometimes is that a fair characterization of some of the it's a wonderfully it's a wonderfully articulate and fair characterization and and i was i'm so touched by what you said at the beginning because of course i was working really really hard in this book not just to describe or evoke japan but to write from a japanese self as you said to embody the qualities i find in that culture which have a lot to do with reticence and tact and if i'd written a book on cuba as i did many years ago of course it would have been exactly the opposite and very exuberant and gregarious and out in the streets um but i'm very touched by the way that um japanese people we often talk about the japanese economy and i think the heart of japanese economy is people are so economical with words and so economical with expressions and all the world witnessed this during or after that terrible tsunami that swept 18 500 japanese to their deaths in 2011 and when you turned on the tv two days later you'd see lots of people standing absolutely silently no word of complaint few signs of grief partly because japan famously is a place where everyone is acutely sensitive to the needs and the fragility of everyone around her and so at that moment of terrible loss somebody who'd lost maybe most of her loved ones knew that everybody around her had been to it equal loss and so she didn't want to impose her suffering on people who were suffering already nor did she want to say you know i've been through such a trauma because everybody there had been through that trauma and um i think many of us are humbled by that sense of thoughtfulness and discretion that are two of the sovereign qualities of japan so um yes i think i think your description is a lovely one in terms of the cost um my book is in part about how when my japanese wife decided to divorce her first husband and later to marry me her brother rather mysteriously cut off the entire family not just her but his parents their parents as well and he had studied um jungian psychology first in the us and then in switzerland for many years and so that part of the book is a little bit about how if you bring a western psychoanalytical mind to a very reticent culture that has traditionally tried to work through its problems without saying anything at all that's a kind of culture clash perhaps and i think in japan if you're going through a great loss traditionally you would turn to a grandmother um a priest or just the gods before whom you pray but you wouldn't um intellectualize it it's a very unanalytical uh culture in my experience and so i said earlier that although i don't think of myself as a travel writer my life is always about crisscrossing of cultures and the gap between cultures and the interplay between them so one aspect of this book is about um whether jung translates to buddhism or not and whether in fact my brother-in-law by getting this wonderful education in a brilliant thinker who's one of my heroes exiled himself from japan he still lives in japan there but maybe um bringing the union way to an ancient culture does things in different ways is a little like trying to eat noodles with a knife and fork very very difficult such a powerful need whenever there is a rupture in a relationship in a family when communication breaks down for the party that feels that they've been abandoned to have resolution to know why or to have to have cloak as we would say uh in you know sort of western speak um closure um and in autumn light there is a sense of some closure and yet a sense that there are sometimes not storybook or happy endings that people are people and have their own their own destinies or their own ways of being in the world thank you again beautifully said and also life keeps going on it's the seasons and of course the seasons create a very cyclical sense of time in japan as to as opposed to the more linear one white one might have here in california or especially in silicon valley so in that sense as you say beautifully there are no endings the end of autumn only means the beginning of winter and you're one step closer to the next autumn and i worked so very hard in this book as you said wonderfully to avoid resolutions when i first arrived in japan um 33 years ago i wrote a book after my first year there called the lady and the monk and that book was almost about exactly the theme you uh pinpointed now whether i believe in the hollywood ending or the japanese ending the japanese ending is usually inconclusive as you said and wistful and the hollywood ending is usually the heroic kiss at the end and i think the longer i've lived in japan the more i'm suspicious of the notion of endings or therefore even of beginnings uh and i see it life much more as as a river um than as an arrow you could say aimed at a target so it was a very conscious thing to try to um avoid avoid um a sense of closure and only recently i was thinking it's interesting that this this book begins with a death explicit explicitly but it ends with the person who's died actually alive and and scanning the world i will also say that in real life because i completed this book two years ago there have been certain happy um semi-resolutions that the missing brother um who's a figure in the book and um appeared in real life after i published the book and uh and there was a small rapprochement with his sister my my wife but i think when i wrote this book one of my models was the great japanese film director of the 1950s in particular yasujiro ozu who made tokyo story in late spring many films that film lovers know and one of the things i love about his work is that on the surface nothing is happening there's um a man a father sitting at his low table saying um is that so and there's um a train racing past and there's a neighbor knocking in the door and saying hello that's it for two and a half hours when i was young i thought well this is the definition of boredom two and a half hours when nothing is really happening and as you perfectly said no closure no resolution but as you get into the rhythm of this film and i would say of japan you notice that the father saying is that so means that he hasn't realized that his daughter is sacrificing her life and her chance to enjoy a marriage of her own by looking after him and the train wishing past is actually taking his son to a city where he'll never see the sun again and the neighbor knocking on the door and saying good morning is trying to wake this father up and say by the way don't you realize that you're squandering your daughter's life so everything is happening but on the surface in that very japanese way the camera never moves and people are not sound as if they're saying things of no import at all and so again i worked very hard in this book to just describe three months in the everyday life of a generic suburb of no particular interest at all with no great drama because i feel behind the skyscrapers of the big events in our life is that river constantly flowing and that's really where our lives take place and you and i and everyone who might hear this conversation remembers certain dramatic moments but the vast majority of our time is spent going to the post office and waiting for our kids to come back from school and going to the bus stop and i wanted to catch that as the real texture in which we swim there's a passage in the book where you describe the suburb where you live in japan and daily routines and something that would be instantly recognizable to anyone in canada or the united states anyone who lives in what we would say would be a first world economy the site of many many elderly people at mcdonald's uh utterly um without anywhere else to be and yet this is a place where they they go to congregate and to be in the world and and out of the house it's such a haunting passage of the book and it's so universal even in japan it would seem that the these these structures the societal traditions which revere the elderly or which revere tradition are if we would like to say imperiled or challenged by modernity yes again wonderfully said and it it is so universal i think after i published the book i found that many people in new york city know that in ottawa too um older men just go to mcdonald's buy a single cup of coffee and and spend all day there so that they won't be alone at home and you're exactly right japan is a culture that has traditionally revered the elders in japan it's a polite thing to ask somebody how old she is as soon as you meet her because the older she is the better for her and the more deeply you bow before her and the more care you take of her one of the problems famously in japan is that they have such a huge percentage of the population over 65 and such a small birth rate and that's the kind of thing that we're always reading every time we pick up the newspaper the statistics but i wanted to put a human face to it and as you say just look around mcdonald's at 10 o'clock in the morning and see that at almost every table there's an elderly man alone reading the newspaper doing something he could probably be easily doing elsewhere is very haunting and brings home the condition that otherwise just sounds like a sociological situation in a rending emotional way and again when i go to the post office in japan and i eavesdrop on the women around me it's exactly the same conversation i would be hearing in london or california or um ontario one woman is saying you know that the waiting lists at the elderly facilities uh uh go on for six years and i don't know if my mother is going to last six years and if i do send my mother to that facility i'll feel really guilty but if i don't i'll feel really frazzled and i may not last six years um and everything we're doing with the kind of human equivalent of climate change whereby by which i mean the peop humans are living longer than we've ever lived before but that means living many many years perhaps after our minds and our memories have begun to give out and as you say absolutely universal phenomenon and one of those things that um again it's not about japan in this book but it's about all of us um and that those of us that say i'm in my 60s probably having to spend much of our lives tending to our elders and then thinking well what happens to us if i keep living year after year after my expiration date as it were and what sort of limbo will that be and it's something that humans haven't really had to address before but it's clearly one of the urgent issues before us exceeded only an urgency by literal climate change probably with the with the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 of the the covet 19 phenomenon and borders closing and mobility being restricted um many people i think for the first time came to a reckoning with mortality and with the the very you know vulnerability and fragility of being alive and for you as someone who spends half of the year at home in japan and then half of the year on the road how has it affected you and your family have you i've been locked down and unable to see loved ones have you been um you know directly impacted by what's happened this year yes thank you and i know you've actually raised the issue of 2020 a couple of times and i haven't addressed it yet um and i will say that it's interesting i published this book about uncertainty and mortality a year before it became such a powerful reality for as you say everybody across the planet partly because i think the coronavirus has only highlighted what is always the case which is a year ago none of us could say what's going to happen tomorrow or even tonight we're always actually living in that state but it's really as it were come home to us this time and as you say um six years ago i published a book about living in stillness and the subtitle of the art of stillness is adventures and going nowhere and that's probably a description of the life almost all of us have been leading the last eight months uh i would say i and those around me have been very fortunate so far i spent the first couple of months of the virus season in japan a radiant autumn cherry blossoms flowering everywhere nightingales teaching their young to sing and also it goes back to what i was saying before japanese are very seasoned veterans when it comes to suffering so the as i walked around the streets no panic everybody very calm saying actually life going on surprisingly similar to normal well into the middle of april and my life too i had to fly from japan to california one month after the pandemic broke out just for a day and um i did and flew back and it was a very easy flight and then in the middle of april i had to fly again from japan to california taking three flights across the pacific because my mother who's 89 had just been in the hospital not for the virus but because she was losing blood and i needed to be with her so the last five months i've been here in california with my mother and with my wife now and in our fortunate so far little bubble um it's it's been a time for appreciating everything we take for granted i my parents have lived in the same house for 53 years and i had never in those 53 years walked up to the end of the road now i do it every day and my parents my parents now just my mother live two-thirds of the way up the mountain so it's a beautiful road and every now and then i'll turn around and look at the pacific ocean below my mother's house and the uh the islands shining in the distance and think this is the kind of view i would travel halfway across the world to rio de janeiro or capri to see it's right in my backyard and all these years i'd never thought to take the time to look at it i've also appreciated the fact with an 89 year old mother i'm so glad i've been with her 150 straight days and that's the first time that's happened since i was eight years old so it's certainly been a delight for me and i'm hoping it's been slightly reviving for my mother i'm her only child and probably having her usually fugitive son by her side is an unanticipated blessing the other thing i would stress and it goes back to what i was saying before this is the first time in 34 years where really for seven straight months i've been able to write all day every day i have sent three manuscripts to my poor unsuspecting editor all of them i'm sure unpublishable but i mean for me it's been a wonderful time of creativity and also i think most of all of just reconsidering my priorities as you say um last year i was traveling for seven months with three new books that i brought out um this year these same seven months have been spent in in two places but sitting very still and like most people probably listening to this i've lost most of my revenue for the year as soon as the lockdown came came into being 23 public events i was meant to be doing got cancelled but instead of that revenue i felt calm and sanity and just the kind of luxury of stillness that i too had been craving these last 12 or 15 years finally brought into my lap and that's not to begin to underestimate or ignore the terrible suffering that so many are going through across the planet but in my little sphere there's been a time for remembering what's most important and thinking about how i can reorient my priorities and change my habits so as to incorporate into my life the things that i've been missing the last 12 or 15 years take more walks every day spend more time with my family less time on a plane be kinder to the environment in the process and and just to remember what really sustains us when we're in moments of uncertainty and i remember when i flew back across the pacific to be with my mother in mid-april i quickly saw my checkbook wasn't going to help her my resume was no use to her all the books i've written help hopeless wouldn't begin to sustain her at all the only thing that i would be able to give her in that moment or to give myself is whatever i've gathered inwardly my inner inner savings account and that would probably come only from being very quiet to learn so i've always felt that sitting in one place is an investment towards moments like this and for me at least it's reminded me that we have much less control over the external world than we imagine always not just during a period like this but much more control over the internal world than we suspect uh and therefore that's one reason really all my life i've brought a lot of emphasis to the internal world because i think that's the only thing that sustains us at moments of difficulty i think that's so characteristic of your writings is a sense of appreciation and a sense of perception of valuing things and recognizing perhaps if we would want to call them patterns or resonances that are easily obscured in the hubbub or the busyness of life and that you have an ability to pull back and to reflect um and perhaps to find um a synthesis or or an appreciation for things that are fleeting to value them while you can value them um thank you so much i think that's the writer's prerogative that the writer's job every day is to take a walk into a clearing in the wilderness into this little cabin that is his desk who is writing and makes sense of the things that most people don't always get the opportunity to because they're living in much more crowded or pressured or noisy worlds the writer is lucky to to have the chance to step out of the world the better to to make sense of it so yes i feel grateful that my job forces me to spend most of my time just sitting still trying to sift through experience and it's interesting i think you know you will have noticed in in autumn light and sorry for interrupting you that um i return i return to the same scene with which i began the global soul that we you and i were discussing 19 years ago which is when my house here in california burned to the ground and i lost everything i had in the world including my next eight years of writing my next three books because all of that was in handwritten notes in those days and i think that fire really underlined to me what i was just describing about how much of life much more than we imagined though not all of it is a matter of um choice that we're defined not by circumstances but by what we make of circumstances so that particular fire um wiped out 450 households in this neighborhood where i'm sitting now and i think many people were traumatized for life and really saw it as a terrible loss others after a period of adjustment saw that in some ways it was an opportunity to remake their lives just the way that they were redrafting the architectural plans for the new houses they were going to build to replace the ones they'd lost and to remake those lives in the light of um what they'd always wanted to be in other words that a catastrophe like that could free us from certain habits that we hadn't wanted to get into in the first place and allow us to live the way we wanted to all along um so for example when it came time for me to replace my possessions i saw i didn't need 90 of my possessions i could live much more likely and when i wanted to write i didn't have any notes so i thought i'm going to have to try fiction which i'm sure i would have been too shy or scared to attempt otherwise and then i thought well i don't have a physical home in california i should spend more time perhaps in my heart's home which is japan and i began what has been really a move to japan instead of of california so in so many ways that terrible seeming event opened doors and windows for me that otherwise might have been closed for life and so this virus here i've been thinking what doors and windows has it opened for each one of us individually and how going forwards can we bring some of the things we've enjoyed or gained from during this virus season into our future lives we've quickly adopted new habits of wearing a mask and washing our hands and carrying sanitizers around with us what deeper habits can we take into our lives so that they're more in balance because i think the art of stillness arose from that sense that many of our lives in the privileged world have been intensely out of balance the last few years with the intensification and acceleration of information and we've lost ourselves and we've lost our sense of direction and maybe for the fortunate who still have livelihoods and and relatives and moves over their heads once the virus cloud passes maybe we can live um with greater clarity than previously thank you pico i apologize because i've stepped on a couple of your answers to me and i it occurs to me that in your in your book the art of stillness one of the things you mention is that modern media cannot abide silence that there cannot be any dead air or any pause and yet a pause is is so integral to human interaction and conversation so please excuse me if i've jumped on on your answers and i hope we can uh fix it a bit in the editing i didn't even notice that but but i love your invoking the pause you know i think of um when you see a game of football the only way they can proceed down the field is by huddling and by deciding what to do and i think that's an example of how any piece of music doesn't have meaning without the rest between the notes and that's one reason in in the autumn light book as you said it's a relatively short book but i had a lot of space in it because i feel it's the space between the words that often communicates more than the words themselves just as you say um with indeed the polls and i think one reason that i first moved to japan in particular is that people are unusually good at listening there they're not concerned with speaking so much as attending to every everyone around them and what they're listening for often is everything that's not being said so i would say that japan is the sort of spiritual home of the pause and of the silence and that's one of the things that makes it a rather refining and liberating place in which to spend time at least for me a moment ago we were speaking about the fires in california and of course this year there's unprecedented fire but you lost your home and your possessions years ago to a fire a few nights ago i was reading your book the open road and it has one of the most beautiful openings of any of the books i've read in recent years where you evoke the memory of being a boy and your father telling you stories and a photograph that you received from far away that was of the the dalai lama and that's a photograph that was lost in the fire and yet the photograph lives on in your book i mean it will be something that people encounter and experience in their minds without ever having to see it and you acknowledge in that book having had it in your hands and having cherished it and having taken it with you around the world and then having lost it i i think the open road is of all of your books um incredibly special and i think incredibly skillful and if you would indulge me can we have a moment to talk about that book well i'm really so honored that you would take the time to read it and just spend so much time reading my work in preparation for this talk so so thank you for singling that that book out um and and and uh you know one of the uh to talk about the photo that the interesting thing in retrospect was that was a photo that the dalai lama had sent to me when i was three years old when he met my father the year after the dalai lama came into exile so that was 1960 and as you say it was a photo that i'd kept on my desk for 30 years in england and then when we moved to california and i was of course burnt along with everything else in the fire but at that very moment was a wonderful illustration of really the dalai lama's philosophy which is impermanence you can't hold on to physical things but if you hold on to the values they speak for and the meanings of them those last as long as i lost and that so the photo at some level isn't important it's a symbol of something much deeper and that one hopes didn't get lost in the fire so just in that little episode i got an illustration of the philosophy that the dalai lama has so powerfully carried across the globe do you continue to receive responses from readers to that book in particular occasionally i'm really touched when somebody mentions it as as you do and as and i would agree that um it's one of those books it's one of the only books i've written to which i wouldn't change change your word 12 years on that i made it just about the way i hope to make it interestingly i've spent much more time with the dalai lama since i wrote the book than before so i certainly could update it and i've written a lot about him subsequently but um because he's such a lucid and dialectical character by which i mean he likes to be challenging he likes to see two sides of every question or six sides of every question i tried very hard in that book to to offer challenges to to ask all the difficult questions that i think he would most appreciate being asked and not to try to simplify or reduce his vision as it's so easy to do with a person of such charisma and presence and of course you will know having read autumn light the dalai lama makes a fairly significant brief appearance there in a way that very much moves me traveling up to a tsunami-stricken village in 2011 to offer what he can and i would say what he can offer is a mixture of extraordinary wisdom and clear-sightedness and great humanity whereby he can offer very good advice to people who are suffering as a doctor would but also really feel their suffering to the point where tears come to his eyes when he meets that suffering and that seems to be a very special mix that he offers and then the other thing that he offers to the world and this goes exactly back to one of your first questions is that of course he's the first dalai lama in history to travel the globe he's the 14th dalai lama the first 12 lived their whole lives in tibet the thirteenth made a couple of brief forays outside tibet but couldn't travel and this dalai lama has realized in a much richer way than i realized that he had the chance to visit everywhere and learn from everywhere so it's an extraordinary thing to have the most powerful or the most visible buddhist in the world consult rabbis for how do you construct a culture in exile he's delivered lectures on the gospels to groups of christians he's lived most of his life in a predominantly hindu country he's called himself a defender of islam and his great joy is talking with scientists who often will tell him proudly they have no religion at all and he's seen the opportunity for when culture's cross each gets to learn from the other and it's also fascinating that on the basis of what he's seen through his front seat view on world affairs for 80 years now he produces a book called beyond religion and i'm always interested in the way that when the dalai lama comes to canada he tells people please don't become buddhist stay within your own traditions where your roots are deepest and don't just grab onto a foreign religion which is very hard to understand you can learn from talking to buddhists and buddhists can surely learn from talking to you but but honor your own tradition so he's very wise about the limits of crossing cultures and how easily we will seize upon exactly the wrong or the most easily misunderstood aspects of another culture so uh you'll remember that the subtitle of that book is the global journey of the 14th dalai lama and in some ways it was a sequel to the global soul and my way of thinking how does one individual of unusual clarity and and dignity deal with the global situation and turn it into possibility rather than just the chaos that it sometimes is when you're at a crowded airport in in the current context here in the united states i'm in canada we're watching things happen in the u.s that we would not have anticipated a few years ago and one of the most uh troubling things that i think we're experiencing is a collapse in discourse and a collab a collapse in the ability for everyone to agree on what is real and what is true uh objective reality seems to be dissolving and the factions are becoming more entrenched how do you feel about the months ahead and about where we are we are going really once again you've taken the words um out of my mouth when you say collapse of discourse just last night i was talking to a friend an english friend who's lived in the us for 50 years and i said did you ever think that discourse would deteriorate to the extent it has uh here in the u.s i mean the last chapter of my first book video night in kathmandu which came out 32 years ago so that was 1988 i said well the american century's over and the pacific century has already begun and asia is really the center of of the future tense which used to two generations prior to that belonged to the us so we're we're witnessing i suppose the culmination of something that's been happening for a long long time last year as you mentioned earlier i was traveling constantly with my new books and so i was in europe three times i was in canada three times i was in asia probably six times and i was crisscrossing the united states and i remember saying to my wife towards the end of that year my goodness the us is probably 15 years behind europe in terms of infrastructure and even technology and just day-to-day life 15 or 20 years behind canada and 25 years behind asia as i saw it saw it then and it's really been tragic to see how the virus has really underlined that and the distance between the us and the rest of the world um and and the fact that the us seems much less curious about the rest of the world and the rest of the world is curious about the us so um it's a sad moment to see in some ways the end of an empire and my life has has been about the end of empires because i was born and grew up in england 1957 so i saw the british empire coming apart all around me countries getting their independence in 1959 and 1960 then my parents moved to california and suddenly i was seeing the american empire come apart and then i moved to japan in 1987 when their economy is doing rather well and looked as if it was going to become the dominant empire and of course they've gone into recession for 30 years so probably no country wants to see me enter its borders because that means the end of their global power uh but i'm glad that there are if there are other places that um can take over the the leadership of the us and as you know i'm quite notorious especially in canada for being a great booster of canada and that's partly what the global soul was about and what brought me to ottawa in 2001 just the fact that canada with somewhat similar circumstances so of course um much smaller population much less pressure on it but has seized the global moment ever since i think pier trudeau in the early 1970s and realized we're entering a global neighborhood so let's let's learn about the rest of the world let's embrace the rest of the world and let's think about a new way of constructing a society which i think canada has done with extraordinary success and um here in the u.s 70 of my neighbors don't have a passport which is a way of saying we don't want to learn about the rest of the world and we have plenty here and whenever they say we've got plenty of natural wonders here why would we want to leave the us who say well canada's got the same plenty of natural wonders but most of the canadians i know are bilingual and are very excited to to travel elsewhere so i think canada has put us to shame in many ways and now like other places is reaping the fruits of that far-sightedness whenever i'm in somewhere very interesting let's say i'm in yemen or um laos and i hear an american accent my first question is always excuse me are you from toronto ottawa montreal or vancouver i just assume that the canadians because uh i think that appetite for the larger world is still so much stronger than canada and not to go you know all everyone most of the people listening to our conversation probably canadians and know acutely some of the things that are imperfect in your society and not going well but i visited canada before this year every year for the last 25 years and i would say though japan is the country i love most canada is the society i admire most and it's sometimes perhaps more visible to somebody from outside canada who travels a lot to hong kong and dubai and singapore and britain and the us and france and looks at these other multi cultures and thinks that maybe canada in its uh modest self-deprecating ways doing a better job of bringing cultures together than anywhere i can think of i was always so moved when you spoke and wrote about what it was like to be with your publisher in toronto and how cosmopolitan and open toronto was 20 years ago how welcoming are you still with the same publishing house with the same the same publisher in canada i am and that's one of the things that brings me to canada on a regular basis and i will confess that um yesterday in fact my wife and i were taking a walk along the beach and saying that toronto which i so loved especially 20 years ago is getting seems to be getting harder and brasher and more accelerated than it was and i were wondering if it will lose a little of the charm that it once exerted on me um and of course most canadians have cities that they love much more than toronto uh you know i think toronto is a big bad wolf for some some canadians and they prefer um much smaller cities but um certainly i i've noticed a lot of changes in toronto and vancouver and a certain human scale that i deeply appreciated in the 1990s is a little less apparent now than it was then but i do feel in spite of whatever happens that canada very self-consciously and thoughtfully laid foundations for this global culture and for global literature canada has really addressed that since 1970s probably that put it far ahead of for example australia or even new zealand which on the surface have certain things in common with it so as a writer i'm i of course i love coming to canada partly because your government's always been very kind to writers um but also um because it's such great place for writers festivals for readers and for bookshops and i must say that i just cut you off again for about the sixth time you were so gracious to apologize for stepping on my answers but i think it's been much more a case of me babbling on and stepping on your um very delicate questions no i it's it's absolutely a joy and it's such a privilege to spend time with you even by video link i i so wish that you could be with us in ottawa in person and that at this time in in our history we could have live events but it's uh a pleasure that we can continue and carry on in this way and still connect and i so hope that when your next books are published and when they appear that the world is in a place where it is safe and possible to travel again and that you will make your way back to canada and see the people in ottawa who enjoy your work and have i am sure many questions many better than mine uh for you that await you down the road thank you so much peter i'm really counting on it i actually did a piece for the globe and mail a few months ago saying i'm pretty i'm optimistic about travel soon bringing us all together again the way it always has done and i don't want us to write premature obituaries to it the final thing i'll say and this sounds horrible or obscure so it's shameless or something but the reason i first fell in love with canada in the 1990s was i was bringing out a lot of books and i would go and book tour across north america and this speaks exactly to what you said because as soon as i would arrive in canada whoever i was talking to whether it's a reader or a librarian or a professional journalist or an on-stage interviewer like yourself i would find the questions much deeper level than i was encountering anywhere else and in fact the discourse at a much higher level than i encounter elsewhere so just from my little experience as touring writer i've got great confidence in the questions that canada asks and great memories of the conversations in which it is engaged with me at least so i can't wait to be back in ottawa again and having really been frustrated to be in that circling plane unable to land uh not many miles away from ottawa's airport last year i'm so glad thanks to technology we can have this meeting thank you peter thank you pico [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Writers Festival

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Id: BCyhyqhiJ8k

Length: 64min 37sec (3877 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020