Therefore Iyer's idea of paradise, in embracing both engagement and conscious solitude, affirms yet also modifies Pascal's isolationist sentiment. In his view, it's precisely our imperfect grasp of reality that both invites us to commune with other worlds and teaches us to be humble when we find ourselves untethered from the familiar.

The notion of home/truth versus exile/illusion is fluid one - Iyer is less interested in binary thinking than in embracing contradictions. 'The places we avoid often closer to us than the ones we eagerly seek out,' Iyer insightfully observes. Accordingly, there is usually a gap between our preconceived notion of happiness and a deeper, realer truth that we may intuit but tend to overlook in our pursuit of happiness. While acknowledging that a flawed understanding of other cultures can create tragic consequences, Iyer believes 'it's everything half known, from love to faith to wonder and terror,' that actually guides the trajectory of one's life. Why do so many seeming paradises rupture in suffering and chaos? Is the serpent an inherent feature of paradise? In the process he also questions our idea of knowledge by positing that 'the half known life is where so many of our possibilities lie.' Voyaging from shadowy mosques and gardens of Iran (where the same Farsi word is used for both 'garden' and 'paradise') to the sterile skyline of North Korea the deceptively peaceful lakes of Kashmir to the unyielding terrains of Ladakh and the tense sunlit lawns of Sri Lanka the wrathful Old Testament landscape of Broome, Australia to the fog-shrouded, Bardo-like embankments of Varanasi the clamorous streets of Jerusalem to the hushed temples of Koyasan, Japan, Iyer poetically depicts the otherworldly beauty of these places while trenchantly examining the paradox of utopia. Since travel is often tied to escape/refuge as well as conquest/acquisition, the notion of paradise in today's context inevitably brings up attendant issues of loss, instability, violence and oppression. Iyer's deeply reflective explorations at once affirm and challenge the French philosopher Blaise Pascal's statement that 'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'Īfter years of traversing the globe as the Dalai Lama's biographer and observing first-hand how people struggle with the search for a meaningful existence, Iyer, a noted British-American essayist of Tamil ancestry, has often wondered what kind of paradise can be found in our increasingly fractious world. A mesmerizing collection of essays that vividly recalls sojourns to mostly contentious yet fabled realms, Pico Iyer's The Half Known Life upends the conventional travel genre by offering a paradoxical investigation of paradise.

Abandon by Pico Iyer