The burning house by pico iyer biography
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Messenger from a burning house
IN THE Age of the Image, when some of us sit like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, transfixed by the projections cast on the wall before us (and ignoring the reality at our backs), those who wish to grab our attention -- and hold it -- have to turn themselves into fairy tales, or “human interest stories” at the very least, that fit the simple contours of a child’s parable: the boy from Hope, the peanut farmer from Plains (the names themselves conveying an all-American sound of allegory) or the brilliant performer locked inside his Neverland. If the beginnings of their stories have the feel of fairy tale, so too -- the logic goes -- might the endings they promise to provide.
The 14th Dalai Lama is in the curious position of attempting just the opposite: Born in a cowshed in a remote Tibetan village and chosen by a search-party of monks to be head of his people at the age of 2, he travels the world ceaselessly to tell us, in effect, that he’s not a chara
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Out of the Cell
As a little boy in Oxford, I was encouraged to worship the mind. inom and my friends, often sons of professors, were being drilled in French and Latin and Greek before we turned sju, and not long afterwards were to be funnen wrestling with Occam’s razors and Pythagorean theorems. We learned how to write with spurious fluency on every aspect of Plato or King Lear, and the less we knew, the more commandingly we could write. The mind became an instrument we could deploy as svärd, shield and moat; on its own terms – and they were the only terms we were taught to honour – it was impossible to defeat.
But then – of course – after twenty years of reciting irregular verbs and parsing Aeschylus – inom ventured out into the larger world, and funnen that almost everything that mattered hadn’t been covered in my classroom: that slant of light coming through the chapel window; my senseless terror of the woods; that girl smiling at me from the shadows, all the confounding emotions h
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In , one of the worst man-made fires in California history swept through the hills of Santa Barbara, decimating entire neighborhoods and reducing nearly everything in its path into piles of ash. Hundreds of families were devastated by the destruction of the Painted Cave fire, including a travel writer named Pico Iyer. He narrowly escaped with his life, only to find himself stuck on a mountain road for two hours with his family, watching helplessly as the fire tore through the town.
"I lost every last thing I had in the world," Iyer tells Oprah in the above video. "I saw the fire slowly pick apart my house, systematically reduce everything to ash The only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush, which I'd just bought from an all-night supermarket."
The experience forever changed him, and marked a turning point in Iyer's life.
"I always had that sense that home was not where I lived, but what lived inside of me. When our house burned down in the forest fire, that became li