Pico Iyer: The Beauty of Impermanence

there are certain kinds of writers that come along periodically they give you pause make you think and get you reading articles about things you never expected to find interesting and yet in their hands most subjects do become very interesting journalists memoirist and travel writer Pico Iyer is one such voice his new book is called autumn light season of fire and farewells it's part exploration of Japanese history and culture part meditation on impermanence and grief and Pico Iyer joins us now for more it is a delight to have you back in that chair thank you I'm delighted to be here I'm not your first trip here either which is also great that was number three for you I think you've me in the studio and 23 in Toronto probably fantastic that's great I want to start by going back in time this is you at age 26 you have a long layover flight in Tokyo and reflecting on that time here's what you write it was in autumn that I first got up ended by Japan and realized that not to live here would be to commit myself to a kind of Exile for life what happened on that layover I was flying from Hong Kong back to my home in New York City the last thing I wanted was layover for 20 hours near Tokyo I to kill the time walked around a little airport town knowing that Airport towns are not usually a centre of fascination and beauty I found myself in a garden of a thousand-year old temple it was a late October day brilliantly blue but the first pinch of cold and coming dark little kids kindergartners picking up acorns something went through me and I thought I know this place I know it better than the street on which I grew up in England I know it better than the apartment where I live in New York City this place is my place and if I don't follow this conversation I will end my life thinking I've never lived and there's something will always be unresolved and I think we all have these secret homes but I was lucky to stumble upon one relatively early and by the time I boarded the plane an hour later I decided to leave my comfortable seeming job Time magazine in midtown Manhattan and moved to the back streets of Kyoto I've been there 32 years now and never regretted it did you not find that somewhat bizarre given that you are obviously is a writer a man of words and you didn't understand any of the words that were being said in that place I thought it'd be a liberation and an interesting challenge and a good complement to living four blocks from Times Square or working four blocks from Times Square which is all words all cacophony all stimulation and Kyoto Japan though it's big bustling city as you say because I speak limited Japanese was a place of serenity and contemplation and ancientness so couldn't have been less like Midtown well you did well you fell in love with your now wife yes you wrote about it your book love oh my gosh how many years is like 32 years ago now okay okay the lady in the monk you see any through line between that book and this book autumn light the same through line that exists for anybody between the age of let's say 28 and 60 I knew you and I had contemporaries them if I were talking to you 32 years ago I would recognize the same Steve even though the years may have changed us a little bit but I think that book was about a foreigners excited discovery of a foreign country a new person a new way of living after 30 years in Japan I don't have the excuse of being able to make easy discovery so there the challenge is finding the beauty and excitement in everyday life in a very anonymous suburb it's the difference between a honeymoon and a marriage in its 30th year and how do you find the electricity in a marriage 30 years old that you did on your honeymoon and it's a it's a powerful challenge but I think the rewards are even better because I trust more what I find after 30 years of marriage them in the giddy second day of a honeymoon isn't that fascinating we have I think it was 10 years ago when you were here at TV oh that we talked about the fact that you're a guy who spends a lot of time in airports yeah and considers yourself in some respects you know a citizen of the world as opposed to of any particular country yes you're now in Japan six months a year yes is it truly home for you it's home in the deepest sense I live there by choice on a tourist visa should keep myself honest to remind myself my neighbors who are very kind of polite to me probably wouldn't like me to be calling myself Japanese to remind myself there are lines that are very strictly drawn between outsider and there but I and I speak as you say limited Japanese I don't eat much Japanese food I never wear Japanese clothes but in the way that you will meet somebody a stranger in a party and feel that you connect with her better than with your oldest friends and family I have that relationship with Japan it felt like home before I'd ever seen it really and even more so after 30 years there are you accepted in Japan accepted as a foreigner accepted as somebody who's permanently outside the circle and the kind of amusing apparently harmless figure who plays my part in the National pantomime is aware of the bungling foreigner who can barely speak Japanese and that's enough for you it's enough it's enough because one of the things I like about Japan is everybody has her role so perfectly assigned and that's what allows the whole country to function as you know like a beautiful symphony each person plays her part impeccably and the result is a harmony greater than the sum of its parts so I'm an outsider I don't know how to play a note of music I I don't have a copy of that score I can only disturb this beautiful harmony they've constructed over 1,400 years so they keep me at a distance and they should and by keeping me at the distance they function remarkably and inspiring to me as an observer an outsider I know 30 years is only a blink of time in a 1,400 year long culture but still is it or not a part of you that's a little bit ticked off that you know after several decades here you know can't they let me inside the tent just a little bit more you don't feel that they allow me inside the health club which is even better and inside the ping-pong club so one curious Ignotus as you said a meditation on time passing children scattering parents getting older but at the heart is a ping-pong club where I am the lone foreigner in a group of thirty and if you can believe it at my towering five foot seven I'm tall enormous the rest everyone else there in my 50s I was the youngest by several decades and when my wife looks in on the ping pong table she realizes her hairless hapless husband is a kind of Justin Bieber if I come a tiny teen idol but to speak to your question my 29 Japanese friends in the ping-pong club I'm very happy to have a sort of token foreigner a mascot and really so loving and kind I feel I know them better than my friends in California well you mentioned California let me pick up on that because you're right I think of my friends in the West and despair of ever being able to convey the bounty of this life to them they have their equivalents but the details of mine would make no sense to them I want to give it a shot yes what a seamless transition so we live in a rented two room apartment for which we pay 800 Canadian dollars a month as if we were 22 year old kids this is my wife myself and formerly our two kids we have no car no bicycle no TV I understand no media and the result is every day lasts a thousand hours and I think what we're all craving as our world accelerates is open space margins on our lifetime to do nothing time to assess everything that's going on in our lives so I wake up every morning I'd spent five hours of my desk I take two walks around the neighborhood it's really when I get my best writing doing done I make a cup of tea I go and read a book out in the Sun for an hour I go and play ping pong I answer my emails from my bosses and friends across the ocean and I still have six hours left to spend time with my wife and I never have that luxury when I'm in Canada or California or surrounded by distraction now that's it why not because I would think a Californian with all of the mishegoss in their life would look at that situation and think boy that sounds very civilized I could get into that they don't they do but I think many of my friends are too addicted for example I've never used all right I shouldn't have dropped a word a unit in there on you Michigan Michigan yeah craziness sorry yeah we go so it's startling to many people eyes a full time writer and journalists have never used a cell phone and I think many of my friends in California would find it hard at this point to function without one so they might say it sounds nice but they would also say I didn't think I could manage living in the middle of nowhere not speaking the language on a tourist visa doesn't sound so seductive or irresistible well that makes sense I got that okay bottom in Japan you find it very moving how come yes you were just talking of singing about autumn in Vermont in the green room earlier yes yes southern Ontario I know has a beautiful autumn tis but there's something about the mix of wistfulness and buoyancy in Japan because the autumns are brilliant cloudless blue skies as that first day and Narita Airport but you can feel the coming of the dark and underneath the blue of the Scarlets and goals and the lemon yellows or turning trees and of course everywhere in the world sees autumn as a season to learn about impermanence but I think there's no society where impermanence sits at the heart of the culture as Japan does if you take its classic work the tale of genji the word impermanence comes up more than a thousand times and they sometimes say in Japan that life is a joyful participation in a world of sorrows and I think in Japan and especially autumn it's all about seeing her joy and sorrow inextricable and of course I would do that in Ontario or New England but at the heart of Japan I think Japan pretends that it's all about the cherry blossom but it's heart is the five-pointed brilliant tiny maple leaf of the Japanese maple and they have this lovely word mano ganache e the sadness of things which is what makes us appreciate the beauty of right now because things don't last and we have to enjoy them while we can well we can appreciate the maple leaf here of course yes a different kind not as delicate yes it's on our flag after all here again from your book autumn poses the question we all have to live with how to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying how to see the world as it is yet find light within that truth that's there's a lot of profundity there you want to elaborate a bit on that please I'm not sure I could say it better than I did that's said very well I happen but some people may have seen some of those old Japanese movies from the 1950s where it seems that nothing's happening the camera is stationary you hear the sound of a festival outside and somebody is sobbing in the room next door and I think we have a more binary way of seeing things how can that something be happy and sad at the same time and in Japan which is a very grown-up culture having been around for 1400 years they think precisely when something's happy does the sadness as well last and precisely when something is sad and that's an invitation to enjoy the Wonder all around us and I went to Japan to learn from that kind of wisdom I think of it as sort of sage it's like a grandfather culture and so I in my late 20s thought I've enjoyed learning from the excited kid that is New York City but now I as I start to try to make a life of my own I want to consult an elder and so Japan is wise seasoned elder for me that is offering these difficult truths but choose to get harder as we face in my case an 88 year old mother and 91 year old mother-in-law what do I do with that what do I do with the fact that my beloved wife is now in her 60s also and who knows how long I'll have to hold on to her you don't think you're in the autumn of your years though do you well empirically I probably am but I take delight in it and I think one of the things I love in the ping pong class most of my friends were in their 70s and 80s occasionally a teenager will show up and my eight year old friend will thrash the teenager which shows the decline doesn't move in a straight line and that we're gaining things as we get older even athletically as well as mentally and spiritually so to go back to your earlier question my first book 32 years ago was about a springtime romance discovering Japan in the spring of one's lifetime and this book is about what are the blessings and graces autumn have has that spring could not even guess at and there are plenty and of course spring has beauties that autumn envies too there's a scary moment in the book when you have to rush your wife to the hospital can you tell us that story I can I collected it I collected her once from a yoga class and the yoga teacher said you better come and get your wife she's not making any sense neither well she's Japanese it's California something's getting lost in translation so I went and collected her she waved happily at me I took her to the car she said what happened and I said they were worried about you they thought there was a problem we began driving what happened I said oh you didn't hear me well they were concerned about you what happened and then I said well remember last week we're in Toronto and you went to Niagara Falls John what happened suddenly I freaked out it has if her whole mind got stuck so I called my doctor's office he was away the assistant said get it to a emergency room right away this could be a stroke you have one hour to act on this so I did he took her to the room we waited waited she finally got to an emergency room doctor he looked at her and he asked her some questions what day of the week it is what is what is the yeah he turned to me and he said she's speaking gibberish which is very good news because she has global transient amnesia it comes out for no reason it lasts for 24 hours she'll never remember this day for the rest of her life just be with her till tomorrow morning and then she will just resume life as normal which is exactly what happened had you ever heard of that before never for a global soul as you were saying global amnesia seemed the ideal thing to get I've been much to appropriate and she hasn't shown no signs of it and he said has she done anything strange today and I said he went she went to a new yoga studio and he looked very relieved he said that would do it maybe they put her in a position that sent the blood circulating to her brain and there was a brief short circuit of kinds but for me it was almost a dress rehearsal was a terrifying moment because I suddenly thought she looks the same she's healthy she's right here she can talk but as if she doesn't know who I am and all our history has been erased and I realized the terror of losing somebody you care about and it was like a dress rehearsal and a prompt for me to think well what about if my wife of 32 years is no longer here or she's here but I can't communicate with her that's a frightening moment very fairy this book of course is an exploration of Japan but the themes are all Universal everyone you know you love will die yeah and that is a fact is there something though about the Japanese approach to that fact that is different from how North Americans approach that fact that you find appealing very in some sense the dead Neverland then the dirt is still alive that constantly with us in Japan it's as if they've moved to another country but as soon as my father-in-law died at 91 which is how I begin this book my wife had to buy a very expensive Buddhist name to protect him in the after world and an even more expensive gravestone but every year that gravestone is lined at certain points with lanterns said that her father can come back and look in on his much missed loved ones here on earth for three days before returning to his new haunt in the heavens and sometimes my friends will say to me you live in Japan it sounds like a very crowded country 127 people million people living in a small space and as you probably know it's not crowded in that sense because people are very quiet and self-contained even when you're on the Tokyo subway Russia doesn't feel crowded but what does make it cracked is that the dead are never gone and as far as my wife is concerned every morning she wakes up she keeps some water for her father's favorite cup of tea she sets it out for him six years after his death he's right there and she's still putting snacks out for him seventy two months after he moved to the heavens and the other thing that's unusual in Japan is that this has a soul this book has a soul this table has a soul and my wife tells me that it's in a moment of frustration she punches the table her father would have said you have to apologize that table has a spirit as much as your brother as your best friend what did the table do to harm you so what does make Japan very crowded is that everything is saturated with spirit and and the dead have never disappeared now I understand why she who is of that culture and country believes that mmm do you I don't know if I believe it but I feel those are the rules of Japan and when I arrived in Toronto I convert my u.s. dollars into Canadian dollars when I arrived in Japan I think this is the governing doctrine this is what has guided this wise country for 1400 years I don't know if I believe it or don't believe it but that's immaterial I'm a guest in this country I take off my shoes when I enter the room in Japan I eat with chopsticks when I'm in Japan and I honor the fact that everyone around me assumes that the data right here I can't see them when we check into an old wooden hotel in Japan my wife is very likely to sense ghosts and I'm not so I know the ghosts aren't speaking Japanese and I'm happily immune but I trust her when she says there are spirits all around us and I think one reason that I write at length about that is that so often in this country when we think about Japan we think about the high-technology the anime the manga the super zany very contemporary often westernized aspects and they're all there on the surface but essentially I see Japan is a very old man in a Planet Hollywood t-shirt his clothes may look the same as in California or Ontario but in inside all kinds of things are going on then as you suggest estranged to us but therefore interesting to us the fact I think it's the things that we expect to be familiar in Japan that are most foreign for example you go to a baseball game in Japan they have two and three counts where we have three and two cans and if the score is level after 12 innings the game is declared a tax re tied not mean you say level we say tied the games can end in a tie yes which they can't in they do not American League or the National League or in SkyDome so they take a North American pastime and make it something entirely Japanese and I think what's interesting to every visitor in Japan is that it's still the most foreign country on earth it's most like another planet and the spirits are more interesting aspect of that than just the robots to officiate on weddings and the others that mad things we hear about I love it that you still call it the sky dome I do too it hasn't technically been called that in a very long time but that was the best name for a stadium yes they call it the Rogers Center now oh that's a big loss with you yeah with you on that here we go once again from the book why I wonder must I so often be running against time when I know that the only way to be happy is to make peace with the autumn and see it as a friend did you ever come up with a satisfactory answer to that question you've posed to yourself I went to Japan to try to address that question and most of all to think we are as a friend loss as a friend grief is a friend there's no point punching against time or trying to keep the door closed to them much more useful to see them as the lifelong companions that I have to make my peace with and I think I was coming to my mother lives in California so I go back and forth between California and Japan and California of course is the ultimate home of possibility everyone's living in the future tense all the things they dream of doing and it's wonderful when you're a kid and you want to come up with fresh possibilities and long horizons but then life makes the house call as you and I have been talking about and all those building dreams don't help you the only thing that helps you when suddenly the wife loses her mind through global transient amnesia or your father in or dicey only thing that can help you is realizing this is reality and this is what I have to work with forget about the possibilities reality is the given that every one of us is dealing with and Japan is a lot of has a lot of wisdom about living with reality instead of living with endless summer and possibility you quote Henry David Thoreau in the book the leaves he says teaches us how to die do you think truly accepting the fact that you are going to die can allow you to lead a better life I think you and I prepare a lot when we're taking a driving test or when we're going on a first date when we're going for job interview but the big test of all is death so it probably makes sense any human to prepare for it'll-it'll and I think that as I say makes us appreciate right now much more we can't take things for granted today is a radiant day in Toronto I want to make the most of it because it may be cloudy tomorrow I don't know what next time I'll be in Toronto it may be raining when I return so enjoy this moment because you don't know how many moments you have to go to the Thoreau quote when I was a kid I thought well a lot of life is about learning how to die now as you can tell I'm thinking it's more about learning how to live with the death of everyone you care about but actually scarier them the fact of my dying is the fact of my wife dying perhaps before me and then what do I do because I'm still alive but my arm has been amputated or some deep part of me is gone and that's a critical lesson and I don't claim to have come up with answers but I do think these are good questions to address so that life doesn't catch you short-handed and suddenly you're bereft and speaks to what you were asking about the Japanese response to death I think many of us say in California or probably Ontario we lose somebody and we don't know how to get out our grief what to do with our anger a sense of loss in Japan they have very specific rights as soon as the person is dead within 24 hours the Buddhist priest comes he chants you put out the favorite beer for the person who's still in the coffin you celebrate her and within 24 hours she's just ash and I think in that moment of confusion it's very handy to have a clear set of things to do and to realize people have been doing that for 1,500 years you're walking step by step with them and at least in those initial moments of discombobulation you have a flashlight leading you through the tunnel which may make the light at the end of the tunnel that much closer then if you're just caught by surprise those sentiments echo what I hear a lot from people who are in their 90's which is that that the process of having to bury so many friends so often that's hard they should read this there's a lot of wisdom in this the Dalai Lama is a friend of yours can I say that you know one yeah I don't want to presume to call myself a friend but I've known him for 44 years and I travel across Japan with him every year okay by the by the Facebook definition of what a friend is today you guys are really great friends then yes what does he talk to you about accepting autumn I think if the Dalai Lama as a must a master realist who is also the great incarnation and spokesman for hope so as you can tell this book is really about how to bring the reality of death and Oblivion and limitation together with the hope without which it's very hard to live and one of the moments I describe in the book and one of the beautiful times I've shared with the Dalai Lama was when right after the tsunami that laid waste so much of Japan and took 18,500 lives he felt he had to go up there on a pilgrimage what he could so I and my wife went up with him and the thing that so moved me is that hundreds of people were gathered along the side of the road and he went up to them and he held them and he looked deep into their eyes and He blessed them and he gave them some inspiring words but when he turned around I saw he took off his glasses he wiped away a tear himself and I thought well that's wisdom he knows how to say constructive positive inspiring things to people in a great state of bereavement but he's also human enough to feel the sorrow of them himself and in fact later he went into a temple and he said I can't imagine what you're going through but one day when I was 24 years old living in my hometown of Lhasa I was suddenly told you have to leave your homeland tonight and you probably will never come back and you have no time to say goodbye to anyone you can't take your little dog you have to head over the highest monsters on the planet to try to get the safety this evening within six hours and he did and he hasn't been back to Tibet in sixty years so I think one of the things he was saying to them was all of us deal with loss that doesn't make me feel any less for you but it does make me think what you have to do to honor the people who are gone is continue their projects construct your community as your nations are heroically rebuilt itself after World War two think about what you can erect now that will most offer delight to the people you're Mourning so don't look to the Past which you can't begin to change but do look to right now which you can fashion as strongly as you need let's finish up on this Japan I well okay I'm gonna put this out there and then you knock it away if I'm wrong yes Japan is you could argue is in the autumn of its life right now Japan economic growth has been stagnant for decades they sell I gather more diapers to the elderly than they do to babies yes the population is shrinking it is aging do you think Japan is in some kind of autumn of its lifecycle right now it's a beautiful way to put it and one reason I wrote this book was because we hear so much about the of demographic problem of Japan such an aging population the oldest population on earth and I didn't want I didn't want to cover that in just a journalistic way but more a human way how does it feel in a Japanese neighborhood seeing this play out around you economically they've been stagnant for 25 years as you say but their answer to that is to offer their different nests to the world I was saying earlier how it's the most foreign country of all the countries I've been in 45 years and so even as so much of its industries are stuck Japan has realized we can invite the whole world to Japan and the whole world will be amazed at the fact that our culture is stuck in the 8th century and hasn't really changed and is therefore endlessly exotic and mysterious and itself and so the number of international visitors has gone up from 5 million in a year to 31 million in the space of just 15 years in the course of this century and probably it'll hit 40 million next year so the whole world is coming to Japan and happily the tourist industry is flourishing even as all the other industries are suffering and I think Japan's great problem which would make it or terminal is it's out of sync with the global economy it's not on the same wavelength as Canada the u.s. anywhere among among 30 countries in Asia Japan ranked 29th in terms of English proficiency it's lower than North Korea lower than Cambodia and Nepal and Indonesia and they're not crazy about immigrants either they're not crazy about immigrants I was just hearing yesterday Toronto check-in 40,000 Syrian refugees Japan in a year 27 a huge country 27 in the whole year so yes on in the geopolitical sphere they're failing on every front by being so different and by not speaking the world's language but not speaking the world's language makes them culturally endlessly fascinating to Canadians were foreign Chinese Americans the world so that's the way they're trying to keep up and it's worked very well for a few years and it will keep on working through the Tokyo Olympics next year the question is after the Olympics are gone will they still be able to keep appealing to people and culturally sustained what in every other way is fading so fast well I sure hope this is the spring of our relationship because I still want you to come back to the studio many many more times I'd hate to think this is the autumn of your appearances here on TV oh the book is called autumn light season of fire and farewells and it has brought Pico Iyer to our studio one more time thank you so much thank you Steve it's always a real tool I appreciate that the agenda with Steve Paikin is brought to you by the chartered professional accountants of Ontario helping businesses stay on the right side of change with strategic thinking insightful decisions and business leadership are you on the right side of change ask an Ontario CPA

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 5,852

Rating: 4.9047618 out of 5

Keywords: The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, Pico Iyer, Japanese culture, death and grieving

Id: fVqo1Q6HTSY

Length: 29min 32sec (1772 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2019