Going nowhere
Travel writer Pico Iyer talks about the importance of staying still
It may seem a strange topic for a world-renowned travel writer. But Pico Iyer has become an expert on stillness and “going nowhere.”
Born in England and educated at Eton, Harvard and Oxford, Iyer has built a reputation for travel writing that takes readers to some of the more far-flung and seemingly impenetrable cultures in the world, from North Korea to Ethiopia to Easter Island.
Since the early 1990s, he has lived in rural Japan, from where he called to speak about his latest book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)
The importance of stillness is obviously something you have thought about quite a bit these past few decades. When did you recognize it as something that was important and necessary in your own life?
Every writer spends most of his life sitting still. And it some ways, the writer’s job is to process all the movement and activity and drama in the world by sitting still for hours on end everyday and attempt to make sense of this constant bombardment. So I think every writer knows that their job is mostly about sitting still and I think in my case, that was quickened by two things. One was the fact that I had been a traveller all my life and had plenty of movement in my life but always thought I needed stillness to counter-act that. In my mid-20s, I was working in New York City in the mid1980s, which is the epicentre of information and stimulation and distraction. I was having a wonderful time there but thought that this couldn’t be the whole story, that there must be more to life than racing from one exhilaration to the next. That’s when I decided, consciously, to try and bring some stillness to my life just for the sake of health and happiness.
You are a writer, but also a traveller. So it seems a little counterintuitive that, in some ways, you encourage people to stay put. Was it an idea you struggled with initially?
No, it’s certainly counterintuitive, but in some ways natural. Twenty-five years ago I went to North Korea and I had four interesting days. But really that journey has taken place mostly in the past 25 years as I think back on that trip and try to see how it has changed my thinking or how I can incorporate what I witnessed on it in my day-to-day life. In some ways, even travel is just gathering raw elements at the market place and you turn it into a meal by sitting still. A travel writer spends maybe two weeks travelling and then two months writing about the travel and understands that it’s in those two months that the trip really develops.
You also explore the idea of needing balance because we are constantly bombarded with distractions. Is that something that has increased in the past 20 years?
That’s where the origin of the book came (from). The idea of the book came from TED and their feeling was ‘You’re a travel writer, so why don’t you think about going nowhere?’ I think they cleverly, keenly intuited that this is a longing that more and more people are having now in the past 10 or 20 years. Stillness has always been a useful thing to have in one’s life but I think now it’s ever more a necessity. It’s not a luxury but something we can’t do without, just because we all know, we can feel it in our bones, that humans were never intended to live at a pace dictated by machines and the only way we can possibly do that is by becoming machines ourselves. I’m sure you’ve found, as I have with my friends and my bosses, that the more information comes in to us, the further we fall behind and the more we try to keep up with the moment, the more out of breath and frazzled and behind we get.
In 2000, you wrote an essay for Salon called Why We Travel and said one of the reasons was to experience the unknown or unknowable. Is that something that has been muted a bit because of all this information that we have? Is it harder to find these “unknowable” places to visit?
In that essay, I was writing a lot about the need for those of us in North America to go to North Korea and Iran and Cuba and Yemen and all the places we hear about. I think in the information age, sometimes the more we hear about a place the less we actually know about it. I’ve been amazed when I experience any of those countries in the flesh, I realize how little I’ve known about them just following them through the headlines. To speak to your question, I know people worry that if you go to (visit any city in the world) tomorrow, it’s harder to experience a place because you’ve already watched 100 hours on YouTube and seen so many reports of every hotel you’re visiting online. But that’s never been a concern of mine, because I think every place and every day throws up shocks and surprises no matter how armed you think you are.