Travel writer Pico Iyer on importance of stillness
Travel writer Pico Iyer explores the human need for 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”
The author, who has been published regularly in Time magazine, the New York Times and Harper’s, will be part of a residency at the Banff Centre from Sept. 26 to Oct. 8 called The Art of Stillness, which is both the title of his most recent book and the topic of a recent TED Talk. On Sept. 30, he will give a talk on the subject at the centre’s Margaret Greenham Theatre at 7:30 p.m.
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, where he called from to speak to the Calgary Herald:
QThe 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?
AEvery writer spends most of his life sitting still. And in 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 every day 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 counteract 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.
QYou are a writer, but also a traveller. So it seems a little counter-intuitive that, in some ways, you encourage people to stay put. Was it an idea you struggled with initially?
ANo, it’s certainly counter-intuitive, 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.
QYou 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?
AThat’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.
My feeling is that it’s a safe bet our devices are not going to go away and they are not going to get slower or less powerful. They are only going to accelerate in the next 10 years. So if we’re beginning to feel busy right now, we will feel a hundred times busier, literally, 10 years from now.
I think the good news is that it is up to us to take the measures to, if not put a brake on that, at least find some sort of proportion within that life and come to a balance between the excitement of movement and the necessity of stillness.
QYou have talked in the past about your discovery of Kyoto, Japan — where you now live — and how you felt an immediate connection to its “patience, intimacy and attention” coming from what had been a frantic life in New York City. In some ways, the Banff Centre was created based on the idea that certain places can inspire creativ- ity. The idea seems to be that your surroundings, particularly if they are beautiful, can act as a muse.
Precisely. What we really need in life more and more is a sanctuary, and that’s exactly what Banff as a place offers people when they go on holiday — but, even more, the Banff Centre. When I did go before, I think I only went for maybe five days. Unlike most writers, I had never been to a writers’ colony or writers’ retreat before, so I was a little skeptical. How much can I really achieve in five days? But I took a book I was working on to Banff and my first morning there I carried that manuscript to my studio and I was amazed at how I could almost rewrite that entire book, that I had been working on for six years, in my head, thanks to that quiet.
QIn 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?
AIn 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 Calgary tomorrow or Venice 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. I don’t worry that the world is getting eroded by information, only that sometimes it is being obscured by information.
Pico Iyer will give a talk at the Banff Centre’s Margaret Greenham Theatre on Sept. 30 at 7:30 p.m.