A mesmerizing collection of essays that vividly recalls sojourns to mostly contentious yet fabled realms, Pico Iyer'supends the conventional travel genre by offering a paradoxical investigation of paradise.
After 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.
The notion of home/truth versus exile/illusion is fluid one — Iyer is less interested in binary thinking than in embracing contradictions. 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. Therefore Iyer's idea of paradise, in embracing both engagement and conscious solitude, affirms yet also modifies Pascal's isolationist sentiment.