Sun after DarkFlights into the Foreign

Pico Iyer2004. NY: Vintage, 2005.

Sun after Dark

The Place across the Mountains

• He and the cabbie get lost in La Paz trying to find a Mexican restaurant he’s read about (3)

• (He couldn’t find a restaurant closer to where he was already?)

• Begins to worry they won’t get out of the maze they’ve stumbled into

• “I could have been back in CA (or in the mock-CA suburb where I live now in Japan).” (4)

• What makes this scene so familiar? The sense of being lost? The long lines of streets?

• Realizes he’s been there before—always an unsettling notion.

• He’d gone there to see a church that isn’t even mentioned in the guidebooks anymore. So even the sense of importance of a place can change.

Considerations

• Camus: native of Algeria• Became a ‘traveler for life’• Was a “stranger” no matter where he went• (So what gives us a sure sense of belonging?)• Iyer calls the impulse to travel “the chance to

confront the questions and challenges that [he] would never see at home” (7)

• Travel remains a journey into whatever we can’t explain, or explain away.

• Iyer loves “the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of that I don’t know, may never know.” (8)

• “Confronted by the foreign, we grow newly attentive to the details of the world, even as we make out, sometimes, the larger outline that lies behind them.”

• (In what ways has this happened to you? What details have you become more aware of?)

• “I know in my own case that a trip has really been successful if I come back sounding strange even to myself; if, in some sense, I never come back at all, but remain up at night unsettled by what I’ve see.”

• “We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension.”

• “I fall through the gratings of the conscious mind, and into a place that observes a different kind of logic.” (8)

• “We travel most when we stumble, and we stumble most when we come to a place of poverty and need.” (9)

• Christopher Isherwood: “The ideal travel book should be perhaps a little like a crime story, in which you’re searching of something.”

• Iyer: “And it’s the best kind of something if it’s something you never find.”

• (How so?)• “The beauty of any flight, after all, is that, as

soon as we leave the ground, we leave a sense of who we are behind.”

• Why is that so necessary?

• “The modern, shifting world has brought disorientation home to us, and mystery and strangeness; even in the most familiar places we may come upon something unsettling..

• I go into a church in Florence, everyday as the morning to me, and the friend I’ve brought with me from Japan suddenly stiffens, and runs out, her heart assaulted by the strangeness of a place I would never think twice about.” (10)

• So he decides to collect essays that tell of memorable travels that somehow shook him.

• Goal: Carry the reader into “a sense of strangeness, and into the expanded sense of possibility that strangeness sometimes brings.” (11)

Leonard Cohen: Time in a Zen Monastery• Famous singer, poet, writer• Showed “an almost disquieting readiness to

live out every romantic myth” (22)• Cohen: being human means “gathering

around a perplexity”• Cohen himself is a cross between a “hippie

existentialist” and “Old World scholar”• When asked the difference between

Buddhism and Zen, “he disappears—a good Zen solution—into the bathroom to clean cups” (29)

Making Kindness Stand to Reason

• Dalai Lama– no choice but to “enter right into the confusion and chaos of the Celebrity Age.” (36)

• To get to Dharamsala: 5-hour taxi ride from the nearest airport!

• DL: (after winning Nobel Prize): The only way to make an effect—if that’s even possible: through “constant effort, tireless effort, pursuing clear goals with sincere effort.” (46)

• Exile: has turned him into a student of the world

• Note that earlier Tibetan spiritual leaders were always cut off from the world, looking at it from atop a secluded tower

• This D.L. has been able to talk to scientists, etc., all of which can help him understand his own tradition: just as travel helps any traveler understand his or her own background

• The necessary quality for any traveler: alertness

• This might lead to compassion and a sense of responsibility (only takes one trip to Mexico to understand the desperation behind border crossing)

Happy Hour in the Heart of Darkness

• Tuol Sleng: “notorious memorial to Khmer Rouge killers” in Phnom Penh

• Note that it’s labeled a “Genocide Museum”• The museum seems to be all in the past but--• Duch, who oversaw the death of some 16,000

countrymen, was recently discovered in a western village—and claims to be a born-again Christian (58)

• Iyer: In Cambodia, “every moral certainty was exiled long ago”

• “every prospect of new sunlight in Cambodia brings new shadows”—almost everyone has some connection to the killers

• Young man in Siem Reap: “Even my uncle, he killed many people. That is how my father was safe.”

• Punishing people for what happened 20 years ago seems as wrong as ignoring what happened

• “To embrace the future, it seems, is to evade the past.”

• Politics: “like a Swiss bank account under a false name”

• Anniversary of Pol Pot’s pronouncement was once called the ‘Day of Hate.’ Now it’s the ‘Day of Memory.’

Questions to Ask Ourselves

• Why do we need to visit the Genocide Museum? (Or do we?)

• What are other places that are terrible to visit?

• What does visiting such places do to us?

Dead Man Walking(Suggestions for Further Reading?)

• W.G. Sebald: unable to escape the past• German, but taught literature in England until

a premature death (heart attack)• His flight isn’t liberation, but compulsion• Note his book Vertigo, which is labeled

Fiction/Travel/History: it’s travel through the workings of memory (Publisher’s Weekly calls it a novel)

• (Note similarities to Chatwin)

• All of Sebald’s work: a narrator, who is strangely like the author, “takes off on long, unsettled wanderings, in pursuit of some riddle that will not leave him alone” (67).

• Sebald doesn’t travel to find something, as we might, but to try to forget something—his self—but that doesn’t work either.

• His long, sunless paragraphs might seem like “Nabakov lost inside a haunted house.”

• Theme of his books: restlessness, panic, a “lightless labyrinth” (there’s a hint of Kafka)

• Only the coincidences fit together• “Irrational fear and a sense of being hunted

are the only home Sebald knows” (71)• It’s as if he’s fallen through a trapdoor and

landed in a parallel world, losing sight of reality at the same time

• In his stories—it’s usually twilight—that in between time of day

• He’s a “dead man walking” because he can’t escape his past, which always reminds him of death

• (Why read this guy?)• “great melancholy beauty of his prose”• The Emigrants: introduced a new style of

travel writing• The protagonists are forced out of their world

but never quite make it to another (like someone who doesn’t speak his or her own language well– but doesn’t master a second language either)

• Rings of Saturn: ever larger desolation: the narrator is by himself in all of England’s loneliest spaces

Flights

Yemen

The Khareef(Iyer’s Personal Storm)

• Aden: largest port of southern Yemen• Used to be a British colony, and a place British

ships stopped for refueling• Iyer remembers being there as a child on a

trip with his mother• By 2001, it’s a “biblical wasteland” surviving

off the memory of happier days as a colony• Soon Iyer tries to make travel arrangements—

he’s desperate to leave

• Woman at the office clicks away slowly on her keyboard—no one really trusts technological advances here

• “Time slips away in a place like Aden” (90)• The townspeople all chew a narcotic qat• The Crescent Hotel clock is frozen in time• The woman claims he can’t make it to the

airport, which is 6 hours away in Sana’a, but he buys a ticket anyway–“no price was too high.”

• Rushes out to find a taxi, but the taxi stand is dark and silent

• The only driver he can find is “a very old man in a dirty turban”

• “As he took his place behind the wheel, eyes closed, and visibly shaking, friends came up and patted him on the back, wished him luck, said prayers for his safe return.”

• (How often have we as travelers been asking ourselves: what have we gotten ourselves into?(

• “The night that followed never happened, I tell myself now; it belongs to some place in the imagination” (91)

• In other words, it’s that bad.

• There are mountains with sheer drops• Men with guns who examine their passports an

expect small bribes• Rain, creaking windshield wipers, a skidding car• Driver with a stash of qat• “The driver turned left onto an empty road, then

right onto an empty road, and I realized that he had no idea where he was going.”

• He makes the plane and reaches Dubai, with its seven-star hotel and fully modern airport

• (The question remains: what’s the price we’re willing to pay for travel? What are some of the problems that occur once we get too far off the good old beaten path?)

• 9-11 happens six weeks later• Aden, near Osama bin Laden’s home village,

“was taken to be the center of all evil.”• Suddenly this forgotten city is pulled back into

present tense in the worst possible way

A Journey into Light

• Signs of modernity in La Paz, Bolivia: the MacDonald’s is more expensive than the French café next door

• Skyscrapers, Internet cafés, cell phones• Irony: the traveler is both a newcomer walking

down the street the wrong way and someone who has traveled far to look at him or herself through the eyes of a local, who sees him or her as very strange (97)

• Difficulty of being 2 miles above sea level• Iyer feels different here: “I had strange

dreams in La Paz every night, and awoke at three in the morning, convinced that I knew everything that was wrong with my life and my work (I would scribble down excited notes in the heat of inspiration, and, a little later, looking back on them, see nothing but hallucination).” (99)

• He’s come to La Paz at the end of 2001 “to get away from a world that was preoccupied with the war between the future and the past.”

• La Paz on the other hand has few radical Moslems and no investment in the future.

• Like other South American countries, it seems caught between a colonial past and a future that hasn’t arrived

• Visits the San Pedro Prison but feels a prisoner himself

• “The whole expedition began to feel like a very bad idea.” (109)

• Graham Greene: “What gives value to travel is fear”

• Kafka’s regular theme: Which of us has an entirely clear conscience with absolutely nothing to hide?

Bali

In the Dark• Bali: “magical world for those who can see its

invisible forces and read all the unseen currents in the air (that woman is a leyak witch, and that shade of green portends death).” (116)

• For everyone else it’s a paradise where you fall in love with the first Other you meet

• 30,000 temples!

• “Foreigners often awaken in the night in Bali to see ghosts standing by their beds; when a brother needs to communicate with a brother, a Balinese dancer once told me, with no drama in his voice, he finds telepathy easier than the telephone.” (117)

• An ideal souvenir: something a little strange and spooky. Bali, however, is too much for him

• The woman he met on the previous trip is waiting for him at his guest house even though he’s never mentioned he’s coming

• Buys a souvenir, an owl, but it seems to be talking to him and he can’t stand it

• “You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you’ll never really make it back into the light.” (119)

• (Have you ever traveled ‘too far’?)• Where do you draw the line between a good

trip, preferably from which you learn something, and too much discomfort?

Tibet

On the Ropebridge• The thin air makes you feel like someone else • Tibet is heavily romanticized, but today’s

monasteries serve Beijing• “What exactly you believe, and how much,

and why, is a question Tibet asks you more searchingly than any place I know.”

• “It’s a part of what travel involves everywhere—the stepping out of the bounds of what you know, and into the realm of wishfulness and illusion and real marvel—but in Tibet it comes with centuries of legends, and a self-consciousness, on both sides, you don’t find in other cultures” (124)

• Iyer: How can you reconcile the terrible conditions (the need of schools and hospitals, for ex.) with the sunlight and sharp clean air? How can you be so close to Heaven and yet…

• It’s like the kind of tightwalk that spans the gorges of the Himalayas

• China’s “answer”: Tibet is poor because it spends too much time and money on gods..

• When Iyer comes here, he has reverse déja` vu: can’t believe he’s ever been there

• At the foot of the Potala Palace is a theme park with swan boats

• China has modernized the city: “The result is that it looks like an Eastern Las Vegas, one unnaturally fat strip of huge discos and modern hotels set in the middle of what would otherwise be lunar emptiness.” (125)

• When Iyer was in Tibet in 1985, when the country had just opened up, he found it a place of hope as Tibetans celebrated their foreignness and interaction with other cultures

• By 1990 it had transformed again: martial law had been imposed once the monks started speaking out about independence.

• Only tourists could visit the Potala Palace, but they were given the tour in reverse and shown a dark palace with closed doors

• (Note: What happens when our whole notion of a place changes? It’s like learning a language: you think you know it, but new words keep getting added—nothing is ever stable, which is disconcerting.)

• Now he finds the ropebridge even shakier. The Tibetans don’t seem bothered by modernization; some monks act strangely entitled

• Because of its high spot on the world’s highest mountains coupled with its isolation, “Tibet has always attracted visitors of a certain kind”—who claim to find what they are looking for

• Yet-- the friend he’s brought to Tibet with him turns pale upon arrival since she’s dreamed the place, and suffers mysterious ailments the whole time she’s there

• The image many have of Tibet is from James Hilton’s 1933 Lost Horizon or Frank Capra’s 1937 movie version

• The Tibetan sanctuary was a place of “peace and security” that Conway reaches after his crash landing

• Ten years later, Harrer has a similar experience reaching Lhasa (Life imitates art)

• At the end of the film, Lord Gainsford tells us: “I believe it because I want to believe it.” (140)

The Foreign

Nightwalking

• In his “regular” life, he goes to sleep at 8:30 and wakes with the light; doesn’t have to look at his watch to know the exact time

• Under jet lag, his sense of time goes haywire• It’s not just that his routines are interrupted—he

does strange things (158)• “I get off a plane, 17 hours out of joint, and tell

naked secrets to a person I know I don’t trust.” • Jet lag seems more mysterious than India or

Morocco

• When he goes to CA to see his mom, it takes him a week to adjust. “I look like myself, perhaps, but I’m wearing my sweater inside-out and coming out from the unremarkable movie Bounce very close to tears.” (159)

• When he travels back to Japan, it takes a week for him to be able to read or write anything

• “Under jet lag, you lose all sense of where or who you are. You get up and walk towards the bathroom, and step into a chair. You reach towards the figure in the other bed, and then realize that she’s 7,000 miles away, at work” (159).

• (If you haven’t, see Lost in Translation)• Since he is in a state of jet lag so much of the

time, he’s resolved to “attend to it, enjoy its disruptions, as I would those of a geographically foreign place.” (161)

• When he first arrives somewhere, he “prowls the dark,” using “the sleeplessness to try to see a word, a self I would never see otherwise.”

• Equates it to squinting, or watching a foreign film with the benefit of subtitles

• It’s a release from “normal boundaries,” a strange double life

A Haunted House of Treasures• Angkor Wat (12th-century Hindu, then Buddhist,

temple complex: there were eyes and demons everywhere

• Children waved postcards at every stop• New Year’s Day morning at Preah Khan:• He’d seen other old monuments, but this

complex struck him differently. “It was alive, for one thing, electric with the unburied presences of the jungle all around, the soil, the long-ago workers who had built temples across an area twice the size of Manhattan, and the blood-soaked fields on every side.” (175)

• Quandary: “I think of myself as a relative veteran of all the moral and political conundrums of visiting difficult and wounded countries—in Tibet and Burma and Cuba, I had wandered through every corner of the debate about whether to go to a land in which almost every penny you spend will go towards a government that is oppressing its people and destroying their culture.” (177)

• He feel this especially at the Grand Hotel, where a cup of tea costs what a normal worker earns in a month

• Should he give money to the girl whose deformations were probably caused by the Khmer Rouge still in the country, or withhold money “that might hasten her decline?”

• “Cambodia is a kind of emotional puzzle with spikes, and anyone who puts his hand into it emerges with bloodied fingers.” (178)

• The locals say tourism helps them, but Iyer questions it. “Tourism was turning the children into parasites, yet the absence of tourism might turn them into skeletons.” (179)

• UN money that went to Cambodia… didn’t go to its people.

• “Goodwill is powerless against sheer need, especially in a country as broken as Cambodia.”

• A foreign company can easily come in and build a hotel that violates local rules—it just takes a few coins.

• The Angkor temples are vulnerable—especially now that the government has realized they are valuable.

• There are also physical problems: The government wants to cut down the trees to protect the Hall of Dancers, but “to protect the temple is to damage the environment, and yet to do honor to Nature is to imperil Art.”

• “..And to worry about either can seem almost obscene when 40,000 people in the area are limbless because of land mines,” and the children hawk amulets rather than go to school. (182)

• What’s the best thing a foreign visitor can do?• “We are as rich as our sense of what lies

beyond our comprehension.” (190)

A Foreigner at Home(More Future Reading)

• Kazuo Ishiguro: an outsider in England, where he’s lived for 40 years

• When We Were Orphans examines self-delusion as Banks, the protagonist is, like Ishiguro’s usual characters “a foreigner wherever he happens to find himself, homeless even among those snug armchairs: in the Shanghai of his boyhood he is taken to be an Englishman, and in England he is taken to be an odd man out from China.” (195)

A Far-Off Affair(Fun with Language)

• “The assault began, really, as soon as I set foot in my parents’ India last year.” (204)

• Government sign: “Please ensure that your drawers are locked properly.”

• India has 200 languages, not to mention some 1652 dialects!

• Strangest of all: signs that “are just familiar enough to seem completely strange.”

• On his way into town, he passes a Textorium and a Toilet Complex!

• Another useful sign: “Dark glasses make you attractive to the police.”

• Zee TV: broadcasts in “Hindlish”• Note: More Indians speak English than English

people do!• In India today, you see one culture intruding on

another, especially since “the cultures of South Asia seem never to throw anything away, but simply take it all in and stir it up into the mix” (210)

• Most common sign: “Inconvenience Is Regretted