What is Paradise?
As a travel writer, my idea of paradise comes from glossy travel brochures filled with photos of far-away places: white sandy beaches with long-necked palm trees, snowy Shangri-La mountain escapes, or sun-baked destinations like Santorini in the Greek Islands.
Iyer has upended my notion of paradise in the travel sense. I no longer desire to travel as a tourist with a must-see checklist from the pages of a guidebook. Indeed, Iyer pays short shrift to tourist sites, preferring to write with unvarnished prose about the people he meets and the colorful, if not seedier, realities around the corner from our hotels and tour bus stops.
“A true paradise has meaning only after one has outgrown all notions of perfection and taken the measure of the fallen world,” he writes. In other words, we should remove our blinders, engage with the world as it is, and accept what we cannot know.
To Iyer, “The beauty of travel is that a visitor can see graces in a place that locals may take for granted.” He conveys this point comically when he describes meeting a local official atop the sacred Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka who “seemed most eager to speak about the year he spent in that Paradise known as Providence, in Rhode Island.” It was an irony made more ironical because Adam’s Peak is a pilgrimage of religious devotion for Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus alike. For Iyer, Adam’s Peak “was a lesson about our eagerness to project our hopes on what we do not know.”
During his travels, Iyer encounters many religious beliefs about paradise in the afterlife that leave him with the opinion that “a Buddhist paradise has to be different from a Christian one,” and by inference, from all the others. When Iyer visited Iran, “the culture that had officially invented Paradise,” he was taken aback by the many visions of paradise “crisscrossing every hour here with furious intensity.” He concludes that the “arguments of theology are beside the point” and notes that even the Dalai Lama (whom he has traveled with ten times) prefers to speak of “common experience and common sense and scientific findings.” Iyer would like to think there’s a paradise for everyone, though he hopes it is not only realized in the grave.
Visiting The World’s Paradises
The author takes us on a dizzying tour of the world’s celebrated travel paradises and holy sites in this book. As he travels in the footsteps of pilgrims, he is moved by the sacred, though he calls no religion his own. Over 50-plus years, he has visited Tibet, Maldives, Seychelles, and Bali, as well as storied but fallen, war-torn religious paradises such as Iran (once Persia, where the likes of Ferdowski, Omar Khayyam, and Rumi waxed poetically), Kashmir, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and the self-proclaimed Paradise on Earth, the hermit kingdom of North Korea. He takes us to Uluru (formerly “Ayers Rock),” which he describes as having “an almost unnerving magnetism.” We accompany him to the secluded Koyasan Temple in Japan, the eerie “City of Death” in Varasan, India, and walk through the hardscrabble streets of Belfast, where we are surprised to learn he is searching for the old neighborhood of “the snarling Transcendental singer,” Van Morrison.
The Dark Truths
Poetic writing with rich dialogues, literary references, and vivid descriptions of Iyer’s experiences make this outstanding travel writing. But there is another dimension to Iyer’s travel memoir. He is a philosopher (with journalist chops) who reveals contradictions and dark truths about the paradises we dream about.
- “In Sri Lanka, I was ever more haunted by its shadow side: perhaps my very presence here enabled the island to fix a sticker of paradise, on top of more thorny truths.”
- “Thus, notoriously, Jerusalem: “a riot of views of paradise overlapping at crooked angles till one was left with the sorrow of six different Christian orders, sharing the same space, and lashing out at one another with brooms.”
Our Lives Can Only Be Half Known
I found Iyer’s travels fascinating. He is a former journalist who embeds himself in the places he visits. The book is short on dates, but that is because The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise is not merely a travelogue. It’s a philosophical undertaking that draws on a lifetime of curiosity and wonder.
Iyer reflects on his travels to Earth’s paradises and believes that “our lives can only be half known in so far as their final act.” Since that would be death, he surmises, “paradise has to be found not just in the middle of life, but in the midst of death.”
To the unflinching Iyer, “reality is neither an insult nor an aberration, but the partner with whom we have to make our lives.” He says (and this is a quote I have taken to heart) that it is about “finding the wonder within the moment.”
My Final Thoughts
The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise is a masterwork of travel writing. Iyer’s observations and insights are a compelling call to rip off our blinders to see the world in all its unfiltered and raw glory. If we’re truly serious about finding a slice of paradise during our travels, it’s time to stop worrying about the cruise and resort color wristbands that give us access to lobster or tequila when the dinner bell rings. There are much larger questions to seek out and ponder as we explore our mysterious world. To truly experience and better understand other cultures, we must choose a feet-on-the-ground experience that the choreographed travel tours, all-inclusive resorts, and themed cruises can’t deliver.
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