“The thoughts is its personal place, and in it self could make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Milton wrote in his immortal Paradise Lost. With these human minds, arising from these materials our bodies, we hold looking for heaven — to make heaven — in our myths and our mundanities, proper right here within the place the place we’re: on this stunning and troubled world. We give it totally different names — eden, paradise, nirvana, poetry — but it surely springs from the selfsame longing: to dwell in magnificence and freedom from struggling.
With soulful curiosity channeled in his ever-lyrical prose, Pico Iyer chronicles a lifetime of pilgrimages to a few of Earth’s best shrines to that longing in The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise (public library).
He begins in Iran, replete with monuments to Omar Khayyām, who constructed “a paradise of phrases” along with his poems whereas revolutionizing astronomy — a spot of unusual magnificence and unusual terror, with roots as deep because the historical past of the written phrase, and dwelling branches as tangled as essentially the most contradictory impulses of human nature:
After years of journey, I’d begun to marvel what sort of paradise can ever be present in a world of unceasing battle — and whether or not the very seek for it won’t merely worsen our variations. And the pure place to embark upon such an inquiry — ought to we discard the notion of heaven completely? — appeared to be the tradition that had given us each our phrase for paradise and a few of our most soulful photographs of it.
In Jerusalem, he walks by way of the Damascus Gate to seek out himself in “one thing as irreducible as life.” He visits the Himalayas and North Korea. As he travels, he’s reminded of the seventeen years he spent at a Benedictine monastery within the mountains of California — an expertise that endlessly imprinted him with the voice of internal stillness and the attention that presence is the basic portal to the sacred:
Days, typically weeks, within the silence had given me a style of what lies on the far facet of our ideas. Who we develop into — stop to develop into — after we put all concepts and theories behind us. I went usually by way of pages of Thomas Merton there, however they appeared to belong to the cacophony beneath the stillness; the golden pampas grass in entrance of me, the dry hills past, the fleecy clouds stealing up the hillside — not what I considered them — had been the reality.
He arrives on the oceanic idyll of Sri Lanka within the lull of ceasefire after twenty years of violent preventing between the separatists and the federal government, not lengthy after a lethal tsunami devastated the island. Time and again, he finds himself considering the interaction of magnificence and brutality, in nature and human nature, studying the answer to the riddle within the nonetheless stone countenances of the statues in a neighborhood temple:
The Buddhas… stared at me impassively. Onto the quiet faces within the solar I might undertaking something I wanted. Our one process is to make pals with actuality, I might think about them whispering — which is to say, with impermanence and struggling and loss of life; the unrest you’re feeling will at all times have extra to do with you than with what’s round you. In a single celebrated story, the Buddha had come across a bunch of picnickers who had been enraged as a result of they’d simply been robbed. “Which,” he’d famously requested, “is extra essential? To seek out the robbers or to seek out your self?”
Strolling by way of a cemetery in conflicted Kashmir, he thinks in regards to the bygone individuals buried underneath the stone inscriptions, and in regards to the mercy of being blind to our personal fates:
I’d lengthy been drawn to graveyards within the locations the place cultures cross if solely as a result of headstones put each sort of division instead.
[…]
Few of them had in all probability seen what was coming: our lives can solely be half recognized insofar as their ultimate act, which appears to place all that has come earlier than in place, is at all times hidden, and we seldom want to consider it. We step out of the play with no probability to suppose again on it — and whilst we’re making an attempt to make sense of life, issues are shifting, falling away from us on each facet. The older I obtained, the extra I started to really feel that just about all the pieces that had occurred to me, good or dangerous, appeared to have come out of nowhere. As Leonard Cohen, trustworthy for all times to the Previous Testomony, put it in one in every of his ultimate songs, we’re “none of us deserving the cruelty or the grace.”
He visits one other cemetery atop the sacred mountain three hours from his house in Japan, accompanied by the poems of Emily Dickinson — that supreme patron saint of death, who believed that “marvel is just not exactly understanding and never exactly understanding not.” In consonance with poet Mark Doty’s Whitman-fomented insistence that “even in the imagined paradise of limitless eros, there must be room for death,” Iyer arrives on the deepest craving of our paradisal pursuits whereas strolling the ghostly cemetery, conscious that within the Japanese imaginative and prescient of an afterlife, the transience of issues — the transience of us — is “not a trigger for grief a lot as a summons to consideration.” He displays:
The thought that we should die, I might need heard the 2 hundred thousand graves saying, is the explanation we should reside effectively.
Complement The Half Known Life with Tolstoy’s vision of the afterlife and Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence and luminosity in loss, then savor this poetic meditation on how to live and how to die.
