The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise - Hardcover

Iyer, Pico

 
9780593420256: The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059342025X ISBN 13: 9780593420256
Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2023 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, TIME MAGAZINE & MORE

“Masterful . . . A book of inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors . . . One of his very best.” —Washington Post
 
“Dazzling.” —Time Magazine, Best Books of 2023

From “one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time” (Brain Pickings): a journey through competing ideas of paradise to see how we can live more peacefully in an ever more divided and distracted world.

Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it.
 
Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?
 
For almost fifty years Iyer has been roaming the world, mixing a global soul’s delight in observing cultures with a pilgrim’s readiness to be transformed. In this culminating work, he brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Pico Iyer is the acclaimed and bestselling author of more than a dozen books, translated into twenty-three languages. His journalism has appeared in Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His TED talks have been viewed over eleven million times. He divides his time between Japan and a Benedictine hermitage in California.
 

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The Walled Garden

Four hours in Iran, and already I was having to rethink almost everything. The local guide who'd greeted me as I stumbled out of Customs at three in the morning, elegant in black slacks and jacket, had begun to speak about his days at a boarding school near London in the 1970s. We'd pulled up at a luxury hotel, and I'd heard the strains of "Yesterday" being plaintively piped through the lobby. In one corner of the palatial space, a small sign in English pointed to a tiny room: "Mosque." Very close to it, a Swarovski shop was dripping in crystals and an Yves Rocher boutique promised this season's offerings from Paris.

Now, as I strolled back from an early morning walk in the late summer sunlight, past a series of blue-glass towers lining the spotless, near-empty street, I saw Ali, my official Virgil, striding towards me with a smile. The lobby behind him was full, when we re-entered, of women tapping away on smartphones with rose-colored fingernails, strands of silky hair slipping out from under many a hijab.

"Shall we make our first stop this morning" - Ali's English would not have sounded out of place in Windsor Castle - "Tus?"

"Actually, I was hoping we could go to the Imam Reza Shrine." Over eighteen months of correspondence with the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, I'd taken pains to ensure my trip would begin in the holy city. I was less interested in a shadowy government that seemed to shift policies with every passing season than in a culture that had dazzled me from afar since boyhood with its jeweled verses and the flat visions of paradise magicked into being on its carpets. The central mosque in Mashhad, with its fourteen minarets, four seminaries, seven interlocking marble courtyards and cemetery, was said to be the largest such compound on the planet.

"There are," said Ali, with what sounded like sculpted vagueness, "a few complications today. Perhaps we should drive out into the country?"

Captive for now, I followed my companion out to a car, where a burly older man, sporting a baseball cap - "Australia" - above his white shirt and chinos, was waiting to guide us through wide, tree-lined streets under large freeway signs in English. We passed a commanding statue, and Ali reminded me that Omar Khayyam, cradling an astronomical instrument above the modern boulevard, had invented a calendar more accurate than the Gregorian. Khayyam might be famous in England for his romantic quatrains - "Take care to create your own paradise, here and now on earth" - but in Iran he was best known for his transformative calculations.

We continued along quiet country roads that my guide could have likened to Oxfordshire, though these ones were lined with orchards of peaches and cherries. Ali spun beautifully brocaded sentences about double meanings and starlit nights, about how the same Farsi word was used for both "garden" and "paradise." All Iran was a garden in the poetry of its local hero Ferdowsi, he explained; the same man had laid down both the outlines of a legal system and a code of courtly love. No, of course, our hotel wasn't quite the London Hilton on Park Lane - he stayed there often while taking Iranians on tours of Britain - but he hoped it might prove comfortable enough.

We were traveling out to the small town of Tus, Ali went on, because it was there that Ferdowsi was buried. Jalaludin Rumi might be famous across the West; his verses about giving himself up to the "Beloved" and flinging away holy books lent themselves perfectly to secular distortion. But it was Ferdowsi who had, in the eleventh century, given the entire culture an identity and a voice. His sixty-thousand-couplet epic, the Shahnameh, which those in the West called The Book of Kings, had hymned a new Farsi into being, over the thirty years it took to complete, much as Shakespeare had sent more than fifteen hundred words and phrases into modern English.

We drew up at last at a marble edifice, at the far end of a quiet, formal garden in which couples dressed as for a restaurant in Paris were strolling around and posing for photos. We stepped into the chamber where the poet was buried, and Ali pointed out scenes from the epic poem rendered along the walls in friezes, while two romancing lovers pored over verses that warned of the capricious ways of Fate.

Then our driver slipped into the space behind us. He walked up to the sepulcher in which Ferdowsi's body was said to rest, and placed his hand on the cold stone. He took off his baseball cap and set it against his heart. Without preamble, in a rich and sonorous baritone, he proceeded to deliver a long sequence of verses from the poem that turns history into myth and vice versa.

Everything stopped. For what seemed like minutes we stood rapt.

I have made the world through a paradise of words.

No one has done that but me.

Huge palaces and monuments will fall into disrepair,

But I have made a palace out of words that shall never fade.

Through this I have immortalized Iran.

As Ali concluded his translation, the driver put on his cap once more and offered me a reassuring smile. "I didn't know if I could sing again," he explained, in perfect English. "Seven months ago I was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. My doctor advised me not to sing. But when I come here, I have to try. For Ferdowsi. For Iran."
 

~ 



A paradise of words: the driver’s incantation might have been expressing the single most urgent impulse that had drawn me here. After years of travel, I’d begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict - and whether the very search for it might not simply aggravate our differences. And the natural place to embark upon such an inquiry - should we discard the notion of heaven entirely? - seemed to be the culture that had given us both our word for paradise and some of our most soulful images of it. The old Iranian term “Paradaijah” had been brought into Greek by Xenophon, when he’d served as a mercenary in Persia; and for centuries Persians, as most residents of Iran were then known, had cultivated detailed and ravishing visions of paradise in their walled gardens, as emblems of - enticements towards - the higher garden that awaits the fortunate.

The Magi who had traveled to Bethlehem to pay their respects to the infant Jesus were often said to have come from Iran. So, too, the very word "magic" and the notion of a star shining above an auspicious birth. The water-softened courtyards that had bewitched me one candlelit evening in the Alhambra, the landscaped gardens depicting paradise around a marble tomb that had transfixed Hiroko and me on our honeymoon, at the Taj Mahal: all, I'd read, had been inspired by Persia.

But what gave particular power to the world's largest theocracy right now was that so many competing visions of paradise seemed to be crisscrossing every hour here, with furious intensity. After overthrowing the Shah and his Westward-facing regime in 1979, the ayatollahs who took over maintained that paradise awaits only those who give themselves to sacrifice and self-denial. The vast space in southern Tehran known as "Zahra's Paradise" was one of the largest cemeteries on earth-home to one and a half million dead bodies-and fast-track entry to heaven was said to be the privilege of martyrs.

Yet many of Iran's citizens were still known for the remarkably refined and sensuous versions of an earthly paradise they fashioned behind closed doors. The turbaned clerics, as they saw it, were ruthless politicians pursuing worldly ends under the guise of religion; the only pleasures that could be enjoyed in such a system lay in romance and intoxicants, the latest luxuries from abroad.

And both secular and religious souls, confoundingly, continued...

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Verlag
Riverhead Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059342025X
ISBN 13 
9780593420256
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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