I suppose I always ask myself a question
before I go to a place but I’m not
seeking an answer I think the best
places are the ones that give you
permanently unsettled
well Pico it’s an incredible pleasure to
share a stage with you again honor and a
pleasure it’s great to see you so I
thought what I do tonight to begin I’m
serendipitously enough I found that
someone who’s here tonight had had this
book the lady in the monk four seasons
in Kyoto which is in many ways picot
signature book I think it’s a wonderful
wonderful account of moving to Japan and
it was published in 1991 and this is a
very personal book in your most recent
book the man within my head is your
other most personal book I believe that
you’ve written to date in my opinion and
so you have these two very revealing
books and I just thought I’m gonna hand
this book to you and ask you to hold it
in your hand and tell me what you what
you think as you look at that book what
you remember what you feel about it now
what does it bring out in you oh I love
this cover image which is probably too
small for any of you to see but it
catches the Japan that I dreamed of you
know to Japan and I think this applies
to you was my home before I ever went
there when I was a little boy I would
look at Japanese paintings I would read
Japanese poems and something made me
feel as if I recognized that place
better than the town where I was born
Oxford England or the place where I kept
all my stuff Santa Barbara California it
just images from Japan would Pierce me
with the kind of familiarity and I think
all of us have these secret homes often
it might be India or Egypt or China but
the beauty of the modern world is you
can actually go and inhabit them twenty
years ago you would just spend your
whole life dreaming about them and I was
so happy that you said it was my
signature book because it’s still my
favorite among my books because at that
time I was living in midtown Manhattan
working on 24th floor office four blocks
from Times Square writing well the fair
stories for Time magazine pretty much in
the job and the life I might have
dreamed of as a little boy and had a lot
of time to take holidays had not a care
a responsibility in the world and
surrounded by invigorating really rich
and interesting company but some part of
me felt
as if I was only doing justice to one
half of the world and that I was getting
a jolt of stimulation and excitement and
seeing the exterior world but there are
many things connected with silence and
reflection and nothing happening that I
wasn’t seeing so I left that job and
decided to go and live for a year in a
monastery in Kyoto and you’re smiling
because you know already what happened
which is my high-minded year in Kyoto
lost exactly a week I got there and I
found that the monastery in character
was dangerously close to the English
boarding schools where I spent so much
time it wasn’t just sitting on a wooden
platform contemplating the moon and
writing depthless haiku it was scrubbing
and cleaning things and being out at
dawn and cold showers that Hulk had a
military monastic thing that we’ve been
trained in so I bailed out after a week
and my third week there I went to a
temple ceremony in one of the great old
zen temples of kyoto tofukuji and I
found myself next to a young woman and
very quickly we found ourselves closer
and closer and so my year living in a
temple contemplating silence and
solitude as I’d seen it became in fact a
year about seeing her turn her life
around because when I met her and when I
grew close to her she was married with
two children and as fast as her country
transformed itself after World War two
she transformed her life in the next few
months when I met her she’d never been
on a plane she’d never been really
outside her hometown of Kyoto and a few
months later she was an international
tour guide leading even more bewildered
Japanese around the globe and it’s an
interesting example so I think the first
rule of travel is the minute you arrive
somewhere all your plans go out the
window something else to take it over as
something wiser than you and do you see
the limitations or insufficiency of your
plans and this is a perfect example and
yet the sequel and I’m not spoiling it I
think too much is 25 years later now
I’ve never left Kyoto I’ve never left
that woman and we live in a place more
monastic than the monastery I checked
into it’s a two-room place in the middle
of nowhere we don’t have a printer or a
car
bicycle or it’s so tiny you can’t even
open the bathroom door and again
whatever instinct sent me to the
monastery was correct but I maybe I
wasn’t ready for it at that time and I
had to enter the world more marry a
woman become stepfather to two children
and finally a quarter of a century later
be Japanese enough to really understand
what the Japanese monastery is about
because when I went there was only the
fantasy of Japanese quiet I was in love
with and now I feel japan has entered me
sufficiently that I’m ready to open the
door to what I was looking for them so
those a few of the things that I see
when I when I look at that camera when
you went to Japan first you were a
traveler even though you felt that Japan
was some place you felt instinctual II
at home yeah at what point does Japan
feel like home now mmm
it felt like home then and the reason I
went there was it instantly makes sense
to me and also I thought this is a place
whose values I want to learn I work at
my stepdaughters desk so it’s a tiny
space filled with pictures of Brad Pitt
and indeed the aforementioned Hello
Kitty I don’t have a space of my own I
sleep on a couch in the living room
I have no TV I can dance and no
newspapers no magazines no until
recently high-speed Internet no bicycle
no car no anything so my whole days are
spent within four square block radius
really and it seems like the ultimate
luxury that you know happiness or
affluence is not a matter of what you
have but what you don’t need and it
seems to me as if I have almost anything
that I could have wanted which is why I
moved from midtown Manhattan where there
was more material abundance and plenty
than now but but something else missing
more more invisibly so every day when I
wake up it seems as if the day lasts a
thousand hours so all I sit down and I
write for many hours at this child’s
desk and then I can take walks and then
I can sit out on the Sun we have a
three-foot long Terrace so
it’s the size of the stripe here but I
can sit there eating tangerines burying
myself in long books that I would never
have the chance to read if I was in
California or somewhere nearer to
civilization then I play furious 2 hours
of ping-pong with the local
grandmother’s and some of the
grandfathers also and that’s been my
entree into Japanese society and then I
still have six hours left before I have
to go to sleep so somehow or other it
seems the most spacious kind of
existence I can imagine and there’s it’s
a way of learning about stillness and
concentration which I think are two of
the Japanese gift right right now I
totally understand and I think that for
you especially given your cosmopolitan
background Japan is a really comfortable
place to be in a lot of ways I mean you
grew up homeless which I think made you
find home in a different way yes you
define it differently and you absorb it
differently no I think that’s true and
part of being at home for me as being a
foreigner and I’m comfortable in that
sense of displacing us of being an
outsider because I was a little boy of
indian-origin growing up in England and
then a little boy with Indian skin and
an English voice growing up in
California from the age of seven and
then from the age of nine I was going
back and forth six times a year as I
described in this book by myself between
60s California and a boarding school set
up in 1440 you absolutely right I think
for me you can imagine I quickly felt
that I didn’t fully belong to England
and I couldn’t fully claim to belong to
California but really where I was at
home was in the movement between them
the combinations between the passages in
some ways in all senses and the fact of
commuting and I didn’t think I don’t
think that’s so interesting but when I
was doing that I didn’t meet many people
in that same position and even though
the lights are fairly dim now and I look
across a room like this
I’m guessing 30 or 40 percent of the
people in this room have many many
different cultures inside them and in
some ways my compatriots because they
belong to this realm of the floating
home and they have many many different
places a culture associated with
and another may be with their partners
and another with Washington DC and
another with the place they dream of and
their whole life is going to be spent
bringing all these places together and
trying to make a kind of stained-glass
hole out of them but home will be a work
in progress for them and a home has less
and less to do with a piece of soil and
more and more to do with a piece of soul
exactly as you said that home is
something internal for those of us who
aren’t rooted in geography and if you if
your home is internal you’re so right
you can go to a seemingly foreign place
like Japan it will always be foreign and
yet it’s somehow enriches and deepens
the India and the England and the
California in me and it just can be
another part of the puzzle that throws
light on the other places well one of
the questions or thoughts that kept
coming into my mind reading your new
book the man within my head was just
this image of you as a nine year old
traveling solo California to England to
go to school back to California for
vacations and I just thought how how did
that affect you what do you remember
from those flights what was it like as a
nine-year-old to be doing this all the
time the actual process of travel was
exhilarating because if you’re nine
years old and I think it’s still the
case you wanna come unaccompanied minor
so I would remember my parents would
drive me down to Los Angeles Airport
commit me to the care of usually a very
very kind solicitous and quite glamorous
Pan Am or TWA cabin attendant she would
take my papers away so there went my
identity I was already on the way to
being a new person leave me by the hand
into the plane and say coca-cola peanuts
headphones whatever you want we will
look after you and I was between the
rival authorities of my parents who are
actually very kind but probably wouldn’t
have wanted to spoil me too much and a
school where we had to run through
showers cold showers every morning at
6:00 a.m. and there was a lot of
corporal punishment and all the boys
were allowed to beat younger boys in
fact encouraged to do so and in between
you know San Quentin and Alcatraz I was
from its lands where all the cabin
attendants were dancing attention and
trying to make my life as wonderful as
it could be mmm
I remember Raquel Welch who had just
appeared in an animal skin bikini and
10,000 years BC or whatever she’s
standing right in front of me in the
check in line once and I used to go back
to England you in about this time
actually so it was right after the
Academy Awards and they’re always
British technicians waving their gold
Oscars on the wane and all kinds of
excitements that so I suppose for child
it was my Dickensian wonder worlds every
every child finds his own amusement park
really added the world around him and
that was it and then when I arrived at
the other end and this really induced
bad habits in me I had a choice I would
get but get there at noon and kids had
to be back in the boarding school at
8:00 say so I realized if I went back I
would be the only kid there for eight
hours and the target of every form of
abuse from all the the teachers who were
there looking for some small victim so I
would just put my huge suitcase out on
the sculpted chairs and Heathrow and
just go to sleep there and many years
later I remember sometimes when I was a
teenager I would spend day after day
after day sleeping in Miami Airport and
later of course I went to live in Los
Angeles Airport as an adult
ostensibly at altar for two weeks and so
it set all kinds of habits loose in me
but I think one of the main ones was
being very comfortable in the process of
travel and maybe not so good at settling
down in any community but certainly
formed or deformed me for life I think
and the other thing that that instantly
I was doing going back and forth between
the 15th century in the 1960s and
between Grateful Dead concerts on the
one side and the Lord’s Prayer in Latin
on the other was first I suppose I
always became a bit of a hippie when I
was in California and something of a
skeptic when I went to England and then
being a crafty little boy so it was much
better to do it the other way around and
to be a hippie when I went to England
and tell my envious nine-year-old
classmates I just saw the Grateful Dead
on Telegraph Avenue and I larger larger
with until come
the old admiration and then come back
and quote Latin to my startled friends
in California it was a it was a training
I suppose in what’s always been clearly
one of the themes of my writing which is
the way cultures project their longings
or their fantasies or their illusions or
romances upon the other and I really did
have the distinct sense when I was
growing up most of the little English
boys around me had one dream in life and
that was to be a Californian because in
1960s and 1970s it was the place that
represented freedom from the past long
horizons endless summer you could make
yourself up to be what anything you
wanted and so many people I knew in
California seemed to long for the sense
of continuity and groundedness an order
that England still has in spades and so
I saw how each was dreaming of the other
and as you know when I wrote my first
book this one I just transplanted it in
some ways to the east and the West and
saw how the West’s notions of the east
collided with the east notions of the
West and as in any love affair turned
into a confounding dance of genuine
fascination and illusion in which each
didn’t know how much he was in love with
the other and how much with what the
other represented or how much the fancy
he projected upon the other so I suppose
it shaped my thinking in in those ways
and I’ve always seen cultures collide
and seeing them think about one another
or fail to think about one other has
become my home environment and I
sometimes think that so many of the
writers I love let’s say they grew up in
Kansas and that is their backdrop and
the place that they know in their sleep
the place they know better than alarm
lines on their palm they know it’s
rituals its secrets its pauses its its
silences and will write about that for
the rest of their lives and others have
grown up in Bombay and even if they move
to Toronto say like the great writer
Rohinton Mistry
they’re always walking through those
back streets that they know by heart and
MAME and that will be the literary
terrain in some ways so my terrain
probably is the process of movement and
the process of watching culture circle
around one another that’s what what I
grew up in more than any fixed place
when you travel now are you conscious of
seeking something when you go somewhere
or do you go somewhere and land and and
just sort of try to absorb the place
when you’re there I suppose I always ask
myself a question before I go to a place
but I’m not seeking an answer I think if
it’s a good enough question it’ll lead
to a better and better and deeper and
deeper question and I think the best
places are the ones that leave you
permanently unsettled I remember when I
used to go to Cuba many years ago the
reason that Cuban never left me and I
couldn’t get it out of my head like a
song that just keeps on playing and
playing is that I could never get my
head around it I could never make sense
of it it was the saddest place I’d ever
seen the most exuberant the most
disenchanted the most romantic and
idealistic the most dilapidated in some
ways and the most vibrant in others and
so because it was this cluster of
paradoxes it it were fused to settle
into my boxed ideas as it were and
that’s the most wonderful thing of all
because I do think it’s a little fatal
to seek for anything when you go
anywhere because expectation defeats
itself you probably remember when you
walk into a temple in Kyoto there’s an
inscription in Japanese that says look
beneath your feet
meaning that why travel all the way
around the world to count the cats in
Zanzibar whatever you’re looking for you
can find wherever you happen to be I
remember I don’t know if I ever told you
a few years ago I went to Tibet and I
took my wife there because she’d never
had the chance to go and we had a
wonderful place we drove across these
14,000 foot passes and we went to the
jokhang temple which is still really the
holy epicenter of all Tibet where you
see these people who’ve walked for 3-4
months just to get there from the
farthest reaches of Eastern Tibet
sometimes frustrating every step of the
way and that faces a street in grime and
in this place which is just lit by
flickering candles you can barely see
their features but you can see the tears
running down them they’re so so moved
finally to be in the center of the holy
city so we had a lot of remarkable
experiences as anybody does when he or
she goes to Tibet and then I flew back
to California to my mother’s house
and of course I was jet-lagged and
suffering from reverse culture shock and
the little discombobulated little sad to
be outside Tibet and I couldn’t settle
to anything Restless and finally I just
got into my car and I drove ten minutes
up the road from my mother’s house and I
because I hadn’t really settled into my
routine I was seeing it a little as if a
foreigner or as if a sort of jerk
jet-black stupefied altered state kind
of creature and suddenly I noticed it in
front of me on one side was the great
blue expanse of the Pacific and on the
other side was really after Ridge of
completely untouched mountains and there
were caves with ancient aboriginal so to
speak indigenous paintings in them and
there was not a trace of human
habitation for as far as I could see on
either side for forty five minutes as I
was driving across the mountains and I
suddenly thought if I were to Burton or
Burmese or Cuban or somebody from
anywhere else this would see in the most
remarkable place in the world this place
ten minutes for my mother’s home is as
beautiful and transporting and radiant
as maybe more radiant than anything I
saw in Tibet but it needed those new
eyes or unsettle eyes confused eyes to
be able to see it and every time I come
back from a trip I always say well I’m
going to look around my hometown as if I
were foreigner and after about two days
that resolve gets but not really exactly
at last but if you can do it then then
you realize that you don’t have to go
across the world to find whatever
transformation or illumination you’re
searching right right one of the things
who you and I have often said is that
one of the gifts of travel is that you
appreciate your own place better your
your home better your country better
yeah well picot thank you I mean you one
of the great gifts that you give us is
that you you paint that very serum and
the flower in the room you you turn the
world into that for us you make it clear
you make it many layered and rich and I
think you help us appreciate all of the
complexities of the world that we go out
to and encounter every day and we don’t
pay attention to when I read you I
really she ate them and I really really
Vasily as possible with
as much hearten as much mind and you’re
a great exemplar of that thank you very
very much thank you for tonight
you
before I go to a place but I’m not
seeking an answer I think the best
places are the ones that give you
permanently unsettled
well Pico it’s an incredible pleasure to
share a stage with you again honor and a
pleasure it’s great to see you so I
thought what I do tonight to begin I’m
serendipitously enough I found that
someone who’s here tonight had had this
book the lady in the monk four seasons
in Kyoto which is in many ways picot
signature book I think it’s a wonderful
wonderful account of moving to Japan and
it was published in 1991 and this is a
very personal book in your most recent
book the man within my head is your
other most personal book I believe that
you’ve written to date in my opinion and
so you have these two very revealing
books and I just thought I’m gonna hand
this book to you and ask you to hold it
in your hand and tell me what you what
you think as you look at that book what
you remember what you feel about it now
what does it bring out in you oh I love
this cover image which is probably too
small for any of you to see but it
catches the Japan that I dreamed of you
know to Japan and I think this applies
to you was my home before I ever went
there when I was a little boy I would
look at Japanese paintings I would read
Japanese poems and something made me
feel as if I recognized that place
better than the town where I was born
Oxford England or the place where I kept
all my stuff Santa Barbara California it
just images from Japan would Pierce me
with the kind of familiarity and I think
all of us have these secret homes often
it might be India or Egypt or China but
the beauty of the modern world is you
can actually go and inhabit them twenty
years ago you would just spend your
whole life dreaming about them and I was
so happy that you said it was my
signature book because it’s still my
favorite among my books because at that
time I was living in midtown Manhattan
working on 24th floor office four blocks
from Times Square writing well the fair
stories for Time magazine pretty much in
the job and the life I might have
dreamed of as a little boy and had a lot
of time to take holidays had not a care
a responsibility in the world and
surrounded by invigorating really rich
and interesting company but some part of
me felt
as if I was only doing justice to one
half of the world and that I was getting
a jolt of stimulation and excitement and
seeing the exterior world but there are
many things connected with silence and
reflection and nothing happening that I
wasn’t seeing so I left that job and
decided to go and live for a year in a
monastery in Kyoto and you’re smiling
because you know already what happened
which is my high-minded year in Kyoto
lost exactly a week I got there and I
found that the monastery in character
was dangerously close to the English
boarding schools where I spent so much
time it wasn’t just sitting on a wooden
platform contemplating the moon and
writing depthless haiku it was scrubbing
and cleaning things and being out at
dawn and cold showers that Hulk had a
military monastic thing that we’ve been
trained in so I bailed out after a week
and my third week there I went to a
temple ceremony in one of the great old
zen temples of kyoto tofukuji and I
found myself next to a young woman and
very quickly we found ourselves closer
and closer and so my year living in a
temple contemplating silence and
solitude as I’d seen it became in fact a
year about seeing her turn her life
around because when I met her and when I
grew close to her she was married with
two children and as fast as her country
transformed itself after World War two
she transformed her life in the next few
months when I met her she’d never been
on a plane she’d never been really
outside her hometown of Kyoto and a few
months later she was an international
tour guide leading even more bewildered
Japanese around the globe and it’s an
interesting example so I think the first
rule of travel is the minute you arrive
somewhere all your plans go out the
window something else to take it over as
something wiser than you and do you see
the limitations or insufficiency of your
plans and this is a perfect example and
yet the sequel and I’m not spoiling it I
think too much is 25 years later now
I’ve never left Kyoto I’ve never left
that woman and we live in a place more
monastic than the monastery I checked
into it’s a two-room place in the middle
of nowhere we don’t have a printer or a
car
bicycle or it’s so tiny you can’t even
open the bathroom door and again
whatever instinct sent me to the
monastery was correct but I maybe I
wasn’t ready for it at that time and I
had to enter the world more marry a
woman become stepfather to two children
and finally a quarter of a century later
be Japanese enough to really understand
what the Japanese monastery is about
because when I went there was only the
fantasy of Japanese quiet I was in love
with and now I feel japan has entered me
sufficiently that I’m ready to open the
door to what I was looking for them so
those a few of the things that I see
when I when I look at that camera when
you went to Japan first you were a
traveler even though you felt that Japan
was some place you felt instinctual II
at home yeah at what point does Japan
feel like home now mmm
it felt like home then and the reason I
went there was it instantly makes sense
to me and also I thought this is a place
whose values I want to learn I work at
my stepdaughters desk so it’s a tiny
space filled with pictures of Brad Pitt
and indeed the aforementioned Hello
Kitty I don’t have a space of my own I
sleep on a couch in the living room
I have no TV I can dance and no
newspapers no magazines no until
recently high-speed Internet no bicycle
no car no anything so my whole days are
spent within four square block radius
really and it seems like the ultimate
luxury that you know happiness or
affluence is not a matter of what you
have but what you don’t need and it
seems to me as if I have almost anything
that I could have wanted which is why I
moved from midtown Manhattan where there
was more material abundance and plenty
than now but but something else missing
more more invisibly so every day when I
wake up it seems as if the day lasts a
thousand hours so all I sit down and I
write for many hours at this child’s
desk and then I can take walks and then
I can sit out on the Sun we have a
three-foot long Terrace so
it’s the size of the stripe here but I
can sit there eating tangerines burying
myself in long books that I would never
have the chance to read if I was in
California or somewhere nearer to
civilization then I play furious 2 hours
of ping-pong with the local
grandmother’s and some of the
grandfathers also and that’s been my
entree into Japanese society and then I
still have six hours left before I have
to go to sleep so somehow or other it
seems the most spacious kind of
existence I can imagine and there’s it’s
a way of learning about stillness and
concentration which I think are two of
the Japanese gift right right now I
totally understand and I think that for
you especially given your cosmopolitan
background Japan is a really comfortable
place to be in a lot of ways I mean you
grew up homeless which I think made you
find home in a different way yes you
define it differently and you absorb it
differently no I think that’s true and
part of being at home for me as being a
foreigner and I’m comfortable in that
sense of displacing us of being an
outsider because I was a little boy of
indian-origin growing up in England and
then a little boy with Indian skin and
an English voice growing up in
California from the age of seven and
then from the age of nine I was going
back and forth six times a year as I
described in this book by myself between
60s California and a boarding school set
up in 1440 you absolutely right I think
for me you can imagine I quickly felt
that I didn’t fully belong to England
and I couldn’t fully claim to belong to
California but really where I was at
home was in the movement between them
the combinations between the passages in
some ways in all senses and the fact of
commuting and I didn’t think I don’t
think that’s so interesting but when I
was doing that I didn’t meet many people
in that same position and even though
the lights are fairly dim now and I look
across a room like this
I’m guessing 30 or 40 percent of the
people in this room have many many
different cultures inside them and in
some ways my compatriots because they
belong to this realm of the floating
home and they have many many different
places a culture associated with
and another may be with their partners
and another with Washington DC and
another with the place they dream of and
their whole life is going to be spent
bringing all these places together and
trying to make a kind of stained-glass
hole out of them but home will be a work
in progress for them and a home has less
and less to do with a piece of soil and
more and more to do with a piece of soul
exactly as you said that home is
something internal for those of us who
aren’t rooted in geography and if you if
your home is internal you’re so right
you can go to a seemingly foreign place
like Japan it will always be foreign and
yet it’s somehow enriches and deepens
the India and the England and the
California in me and it just can be
another part of the puzzle that throws
light on the other places well one of
the questions or thoughts that kept
coming into my mind reading your new
book the man within my head was just
this image of you as a nine year old
traveling solo California to England to
go to school back to California for
vacations and I just thought how how did
that affect you what do you remember
from those flights what was it like as a
nine-year-old to be doing this all the
time the actual process of travel was
exhilarating because if you’re nine
years old and I think it’s still the
case you wanna come unaccompanied minor
so I would remember my parents would
drive me down to Los Angeles Airport
commit me to the care of usually a very
very kind solicitous and quite glamorous
Pan Am or TWA cabin attendant she would
take my papers away so there went my
identity I was already on the way to
being a new person leave me by the hand
into the plane and say coca-cola peanuts
headphones whatever you want we will
look after you and I was between the
rival authorities of my parents who are
actually very kind but probably wouldn’t
have wanted to spoil me too much and a
school where we had to run through
showers cold showers every morning at
6:00 a.m. and there was a lot of
corporal punishment and all the boys
were allowed to beat younger boys in
fact encouraged to do so and in between
you know San Quentin and Alcatraz I was
from its lands where all the cabin
attendants were dancing attention and
trying to make my life as wonderful as
it could be mmm
I remember Raquel Welch who had just
appeared in an animal skin bikini and
10,000 years BC or whatever she’s
standing right in front of me in the
check in line once and I used to go back
to England you in about this time
actually so it was right after the
Academy Awards and they’re always
British technicians waving their gold
Oscars on the wane and all kinds of
excitements that so I suppose for child
it was my Dickensian wonder worlds every
every child finds his own amusement park
really added the world around him and
that was it and then when I arrived at
the other end and this really induced
bad habits in me I had a choice I would
get but get there at noon and kids had
to be back in the boarding school at
8:00 say so I realized if I went back I
would be the only kid there for eight
hours and the target of every form of
abuse from all the the teachers who were
there looking for some small victim so I
would just put my huge suitcase out on
the sculpted chairs and Heathrow and
just go to sleep there and many years
later I remember sometimes when I was a
teenager I would spend day after day
after day sleeping in Miami Airport and
later of course I went to live in Los
Angeles Airport as an adult
ostensibly at altar for two weeks and so
it set all kinds of habits loose in me
but I think one of the main ones was
being very comfortable in the process of
travel and maybe not so good at settling
down in any community but certainly
formed or deformed me for life I think
and the other thing that that instantly
I was doing going back and forth between
the 15th century in the 1960s and
between Grateful Dead concerts on the
one side and the Lord’s Prayer in Latin
on the other was first I suppose I
always became a bit of a hippie when I
was in California and something of a
skeptic when I went to England and then
being a crafty little boy so it was much
better to do it the other way around and
to be a hippie when I went to England
and tell my envious nine-year-old
classmates I just saw the Grateful Dead
on Telegraph Avenue and I larger larger
with until come
the old admiration and then come back
and quote Latin to my startled friends
in California it was a it was a training
I suppose in what’s always been clearly
one of the themes of my writing which is
the way cultures project their longings
or their fantasies or their illusions or
romances upon the other and I really did
have the distinct sense when I was
growing up most of the little English
boys around me had one dream in life and
that was to be a Californian because in
1960s and 1970s it was the place that
represented freedom from the past long
horizons endless summer you could make
yourself up to be what anything you
wanted and so many people I knew in
California seemed to long for the sense
of continuity and groundedness an order
that England still has in spades and so
I saw how each was dreaming of the other
and as you know when I wrote my first
book this one I just transplanted it in
some ways to the east and the West and
saw how the West’s notions of the east
collided with the east notions of the
West and as in any love affair turned
into a confounding dance of genuine
fascination and illusion in which each
didn’t know how much he was in love with
the other and how much with what the
other represented or how much the fancy
he projected upon the other so I suppose
it shaped my thinking in in those ways
and I’ve always seen cultures collide
and seeing them think about one another
or fail to think about one other has
become my home environment and I
sometimes think that so many of the
writers I love let’s say they grew up in
Kansas and that is their backdrop and
the place that they know in their sleep
the place they know better than alarm
lines on their palm they know it’s
rituals its secrets its pauses its its
silences and will write about that for
the rest of their lives and others have
grown up in Bombay and even if they move
to Toronto say like the great writer
Rohinton Mistry
they’re always walking through those
back streets that they know by heart and
MAME and that will be the literary
terrain in some ways so my terrain
probably is the process of movement and
the process of watching culture circle
around one another that’s what what I
grew up in more than any fixed place
when you travel now are you conscious of
seeking something when you go somewhere
or do you go somewhere and land and and
just sort of try to absorb the place
when you’re there I suppose I always ask
myself a question before I go to a place
but I’m not seeking an answer I think if
it’s a good enough question it’ll lead
to a better and better and deeper and
deeper question and I think the best
places are the ones that leave you
permanently unsettled I remember when I
used to go to Cuba many years ago the
reason that Cuban never left me and I
couldn’t get it out of my head like a
song that just keeps on playing and
playing is that I could never get my
head around it I could never make sense
of it it was the saddest place I’d ever
seen the most exuberant the most
disenchanted the most romantic and
idealistic the most dilapidated in some
ways and the most vibrant in others and
so because it was this cluster of
paradoxes it it were fused to settle
into my boxed ideas as it were and
that’s the most wonderful thing of all
because I do think it’s a little fatal
to seek for anything when you go
anywhere because expectation defeats
itself you probably remember when you
walk into a temple in Kyoto there’s an
inscription in Japanese that says look
beneath your feet
meaning that why travel all the way
around the world to count the cats in
Zanzibar whatever you’re looking for you
can find wherever you happen to be I
remember I don’t know if I ever told you
a few years ago I went to Tibet and I
took my wife there because she’d never
had the chance to go and we had a
wonderful place we drove across these
14,000 foot passes and we went to the
jokhang temple which is still really the
holy epicenter of all Tibet where you
see these people who’ve walked for 3-4
months just to get there from the
farthest reaches of Eastern Tibet
sometimes frustrating every step of the
way and that faces a street in grime and
in this place which is just lit by
flickering candles you can barely see
their features but you can see the tears
running down them they’re so so moved
finally to be in the center of the holy
city so we had a lot of remarkable
experiences as anybody does when he or
she goes to Tibet and then I flew back
to California to my mother’s house
and of course I was jet-lagged and
suffering from reverse culture shock and
the little discombobulated little sad to
be outside Tibet and I couldn’t settle
to anything Restless and finally I just
got into my car and I drove ten minutes
up the road from my mother’s house and I
because I hadn’t really settled into my
routine I was seeing it a little as if a
foreigner or as if a sort of jerk
jet-black stupefied altered state kind
of creature and suddenly I noticed it in
front of me on one side was the great
blue expanse of the Pacific and on the
other side was really after Ridge of
completely untouched mountains and there
were caves with ancient aboriginal so to
speak indigenous paintings in them and
there was not a trace of human
habitation for as far as I could see on
either side for forty five minutes as I
was driving across the mountains and I
suddenly thought if I were to Burton or
Burmese or Cuban or somebody from
anywhere else this would see in the most
remarkable place in the world this place
ten minutes for my mother’s home is as
beautiful and transporting and radiant
as maybe more radiant than anything I
saw in Tibet but it needed those new
eyes or unsettle eyes confused eyes to
be able to see it and every time I come
back from a trip I always say well I’m
going to look around my hometown as if I
were foreigner and after about two days
that resolve gets but not really exactly
at last but if you can do it then then
you realize that you don’t have to go
across the world to find whatever
transformation or illumination you’re
searching right right one of the things
who you and I have often said is that
one of the gifts of travel is that you
appreciate your own place better your
your home better your country better
yeah well picot thank you I mean you one
of the great gifts that you give us is
that you you paint that very serum and
the flower in the room you you turn the
world into that for us you make it clear
you make it many layered and rich and I
think you help us appreciate all of the
complexities of the world that we go out
to and encounter every day and we don’t
pay attention to when I read you I
really she ate them and I really really
Vasily as possible with
as much hearten as much mind and you’re
a great exemplar of that thank you very
very much thank you for tonight
you
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