I first encountered Pico Iyer some years ago while sitting on the beach in Kuta, surrounded by loud Australians in BIR BINTANG t-shirts, and reading his description of Bali in his collection of travel essays in "Video night in Kathmandu".
"Say Bali, and two things come to mind: tourism and paradise. Both are inalienable features of the island, and also incompatible. For as fast as paradises seduce tourists, tourists reduce paradises. Such are the unerring laws of physics: what goes up must come down; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Hardly has a last paradise been discovered than everyone converges on it so fast that it quickly becomes a paradise lost. Nowhere, however, had this struggle been so protracted or intense as in Bali, most pestered and most paradisiacal of islands."
Being stuck at "Riverbend" and no longer a traveller myself, I followed his travels in "Falling off the Map" as he travelled to the world's lonely places; "The Global Soul" and "Sun after Dark"; and "This could be Home" about Singapore's Raffles Hotel, published as recently as 2019 which makes it unlikely that our paths had ever crossed there.
However, he isn't just about travel. His "The Man within my Head" gave me new insights into one of my favourite authors, Graham Greene, but he finally won me over in "Tropical Classical" when, in his essay "In Praise of the Humble Comma", he agrees that "punctuation has a point".
Many of these books are available on www.archive.org but you know how much I love paper books. The smell of the book, the weight, the paper, the covers; they are things e-book readers are missing out on.
My latest paper book acquisition by Pico Iyer is "The Art of Stillness" because "adventures in going nowhere" is all I'm having these days. Go ahead and read it online. I wait for my paper copy to arrive in the mail.
