Zitat des Tages von Pico Iyer:
Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.
We all know how we can be turned around by a magic place; that's why we travel, often. And yet we all know, too, that the change cannot be guaranteed. Travel is a fool's paradise, Emerson reminded us, if we think that we can find anything far off that we could not find at home.
It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that's necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.
People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.
A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.
The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go?
I couldn't follow the events of September 11 because I was proofreading a novel I'd just completed - on Islam and its quarrel with the West - that I'd promised, six months earlier, to deliver to my editor on September 12, 2001.
I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.
A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.
If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.
It's no coincidence that the word 'holiday' suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.
In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.
'Globalization' has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it's nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology - either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll.
I think of myself as living so much outside borders or old categories that I choose as my leaders U2, the Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel, Sigur Ros, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, and the girl next door. By definition, in short, my leaders are the ones who think in terms larger, and more intimate, than any country.
My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.
I think it's in human nature to want to have more, to compete with the other and, at some level, to be dissatisfied if someone else has more than you.
Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.
I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads - in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation - that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind.
Movement is a fantastic privilege... but it ultimately only has meaning if you have a home to go back to.
You can only make sense of the online world by going offline and by getting the wisdom and emotional clarity to know how to make the best use of the Internet.
Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.
Like any traveler, I'm always looking for those experiences that are almost unique to any place, and watching films around Alaska of the skies in winter made me want to taste those unworldly showers of light in person.
Hello Kitty will never speak.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.
A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.
In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether 'The Age of Innocence' or the latest by Colm Toibin.
In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.
A single Dallas Cowboys football game uses up as much electricity as the entire nation of Liberia in those same three hours - one reason the globe, if looked at from a certain height, is a cluster of lights surrounded by enormous patches of dark.
The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means.
More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
We readily go to the health club when our doctor suggests we need more exercise, but we regularly neglect the 'mental health club' that our well-being more truly requires.
It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day.
Certainly, I think Canada is many years ahead of the curve and still the great global pioneer.
