Arriving there, then, felt to Iyer like a total liberation from the past.
It was the 1960s and young people were remaking the world. The presence of nature the absence of history. “Suddenly moving from a very intimate little drawing into this huge, wide-screen canvas out of a John Ford movie.” The scale, the emptiness, awed him. “Nothing I had experienced in England prepared me for that,” he says. And found himself in what he calls “the wilderness”, reeling at the vastness of the landscape: the dirt road, the mountain beyond, the fields, the rattlesnakes. At seven, Iyer left behind a red brick neighbourhood in grey, rainy Oxford, where he’d lived his entire life within two square blocks. As an adult, Iyer has written much about these transitions, and how they shaped his psyche, but today what he’s thinking about most is his arrival in America. He later began commuting, alone, to an English boarding school. When he was about seven years old, his family relocated to a yellow house on a hill in sunny Santa Barbara, California. He was born of Indian descent in England, the only child of two academics. It was a move, one might argue, that his life had primed him to make. “I didn’t feel there was a scope for carving out a different kind of life within that quiet tyranny.” And so, he walked out of bustling Manhattan and into a temple in Kyoto, where the stranger standing next to him turned out to be his wife. “Cities, generally, the more assertive they are, the more they ask you to live on their terms,” Iyer explains as he revisits the turning point where he traded security for freedom, and career for time. And about the delight of discovering it in a Japanese suburb with a woman named Hiroko Takeuchi.
Iyer’s latest book, the dazzling Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, is about that life. One that was more spacious, more solitary, somehow more streamlined. But, as he began to take on longer assignments abroad and venture farther and farther afield, he became aware of a stirring within-a longing for a different sort of existence. When the Art of Stillness author was in his 20s, living in Manhattan and working at Time magazine, he enjoyed both success and intellectual stimulation. And it’s the story that comes to mind when thinking about the acclaimed writer Pico Iyer. This is the story of so many of us who’ve wandered out into the wider world and been surprised by what we’ve found there. The American author and professor Joseph Campbell once wrote that we must let go of the life we’ve planned so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.
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