Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World (New York: Vintage Departures/Vintage Books, 1993, 1994).
Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (New York: Knopf, 2000) ("The Olympics pose a curious kind of conundrum for people such as me, of course, if only because they affirm affiliation to nation-states in an age that has largely left them behind, mass-producing images of nationalism and universalism without much troubling to distinguish between them. They ask us to applaud the patriotism of others while transcending the patriotism in ourselves, and they draw our attention to the very boundaries that are increasingly beside the point. (I, surrounded by cheering fans waving flags, am often reminded how difficult it is for the rootless to root for anyone, and, reluctant to ally myself with a Britain, an India, or an America that I don't think of as home, generally end up cheering the majestically talented Cubans or the perennial good sportsmen from Japan)." Id. at 110.).
Pico Iyer, The Lady and The Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto (New York: Vintage Departures/Vintage Books, 1991, 1992) ("One reason I had always been interested in Zen was my sense that for people like myself, trained in abstraction, Zen could serve as the ideal tonic. For Zen, as I understood it, was about slicing with a clean sword all the Gordian Knots invented by the mind, plunging through all specious dualities--east and west, here and there, coming and going--to get to some core so urgent that its truth could not be doubted. The best lesson that Zen could teach--though it was, of course, something of a paradox to say or think it--was to go beyond a kind of thinking that was nothing more than agonizing, and simply act. In that sense, Zen reminded me of Johnson's famous refutation of Berkeley by kicking a stone. It was unanswerable as pain." Id. at 65. "Nowadays, of course, he continued, Zen had much more appeal for foreigners than for Japanese (who generally entered monasteries only if they had to take over a family temple): this despite--or maybe because of--the fact that outsiders had a great deal to give up before they could even enter the front portals of Zen, and the surrendering of self and cerebration clearly came less easily to us than to many Japanese. 'I remember this one Zen teacher told me, soon after I arrived, that the appeal of Zen to many foreigners was like a mountain wrapped in mist. Much of what the Westerners saw was just the beautiful mist; but as soon as they began really doing Zen, they found that its essence was the mountain: hard rock." Id. at 15.).
Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports From the Not-So-Far East (New York: Knopf, 1988).
