Pico Iyer, who has read Christopher Isherwood’s writings for half a century and introduced a book of Isherwood’s travels, takes off from his elder’s example to explain why travel, always a great luxury, is ever more a moral necessity.
Among his many lives, Christopher Isherwood was a born traveler, leaving his native England for the Berlin that he rendered indelibly, journeying to China, and then, from his new home in Los Angeles, crisscrossing South America. Pico Iyer, who knew Isherwood a little, has read his works for half a century and introduced a book of Isherwood’s travels. In this lecture, Iyer takes off from his elder’s example to explain why travel, always a great luxury, is ever more a moral necessity. Whisking us from North Korea to Iran and from Yemen to Japan, he shows how, in a global neighborhood, it’s urgent (and warming and surprising) to meet our neighbors in the flesh. All the images in the world can never add up to real life.
This is the Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture.
Map of the World, with the latest Discoveries, by Samuel Dunn, mathematician. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
About the Speaker:
Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, in 1957. He won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College and then a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded a congratulatory double first with the highest marks of any English literature student in the university. In 1980, he became a teaching fellow at Harvard University, where he received a second master’s degree, and in subsequent years, he received an honorary doctorate in humane letters.
Since 1982, he has been a full-time writer, publishing 15 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road, and The Art of Stillness. He has also written the introductions to more than 70 other books, as well as liner and program notes, a screenplay for Miramax, and a libretto. At the same time, he has been writing up to 100 articles a year for Time, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide.
His four TED talks have received more than 10 million views to date.
Since 1992, Iyer has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan.