Half Known Life - by Pico Iyer

ISBN: 9780593420256
Date read: 2025-09-14
How strongly I recommend it: 3/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Travels in Iran, Jerusalem, Kashmir, Broome. Talks with tour guides. Writes some insights.

my notes

Mashhad festival: The anniversary of Imam Reza.
Five million people had gathered from every corner of the Shia world - from Yemen and Pakistan and Beirut and Iraq, from all the provinces of Iran - to mark the auspicious occasion, at the shrine of the imam.

The Iranian film, “A Separation”:
Every scene (in a straightforward-seeming story of a young couple in Tehran filing for divorce) disclosed a new detail or point of view that overturned the assumptions of the previous minute.
There were so many sides to every question that one could not be sure of a thing or see how any issue could be resolved.
That seemed to be the Iranian way: to undermine every certainty and recognize how every presumption was provisional.
The beauty of films like A Separation, I realized, is that they hold you for two hours with supple and constant swerves, and at the end you’re farther from a clear conclusion than ever.

I moved to Japan in part because it was the most inward and subtle culture I’d met.
The relation of surface to depth remains beguilingly uncertain there and I can never begin to imagine I can get to the bottom of things.

The devout driver who had taken me to the central shrine my first evening here had, when we arrived back at my hotel, refused to take payment for his four hours of showing me around.
“Please,” I said.
“No!” he protested. “This is friendship.”
“I know. But this is your job as well.”
“No. It is my honor. How can I charge a guest?”
At last I pushed some of the money into his hand, knowing full well that he would feel cheated—and suffer—if I didn’t.
My research had reminded me of the custom of ta’arof, or never saying exactly what you mean, and three-part refusals.
But I’d barely guessed, when reading of Iran, how hard it might be in life to tell where custom ends and conviction begins.

Like many a mystic, Hafez professed to have no interest in names or distinctions: he was neither Christian nor Hindu nor Muslim nor Buddhist nor Jew, this teacher of Koranic studies wrote in one celebrated poem.
Heaven was the place where such divisions fell away.

In Japan my neighbors are generally quite content to play their parts in the orchestrated pantomime that is public life, if it will help sustain a safe, clean, smoothly running harmony from which almost everyone can benefit.
But my friends in Japan remain as brightly colored, as passionate, often, within their homes as they are self-effacing in the street.

Much of India has this feeling of a fictional, dressed-up England created by displaced Brits glad to be far from the land they knew.

Kashmir: “I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of hell.”

In Kashmir, hope and history are in hourly collision.

Jerusalem is like the family home in which everyone is squabbling with his siblings over a late father’s will.
How could one ever solve the problem of a country in which two opposing groups both have fair claim to the land beneath their feet?

Peacemakers are irresistible targets for the violent.

Jerusalem was a parable that had turned into a cautionary tale, a warning about what we do when we’re convinced we know it all.

The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness lie in Jerusalem’s reeking alleys.

Jerusalem: “Anything done to desecrate and defile the sacred has been done. It’s impossible to imagine so much falsehood and blasphemy.”

Israel t-shirt: “Guns ’N’ Moses”

Jerusalem:
The lines were so clearly drawn that almost everything constituted a trespass.
A riot of merchants and pilgrims, each one advancing his own vision of salvation.

Jerusalem is the center of a thousand clashing pasts, and all of them made up the nightmare from which it is longing to awaken.

Israel: “It’s not a problem. It’s an issue. A problem you can solve. An issue you have to live with.”
“We’ve been coexisting, not always peacefully, for thousands of years. So long as no one tries to solve their problems, they’ll be okay.”
“If I’ve left you feeling frustrated and confused, I’ve succeeded! Now you know what it’s like to be an Israeli.”

In Jerusalem, go to the rooftop of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Dalai Lama never suggested that one belief system was truer than any other.
Whenever someone asked him what to do after you’ve been disappointed in some dream (to bring peace to the Middle East, to reverse climate change, to protect some seeming idyll), the Dalai Lama looked over at the questioner with great warmth and said, “Wrong dream!”
You have to analyze, research real causes and conditions and take the long view, he always stressed, before coming up with any plan.
Pursuing an unrealistic dream was an insult to reality, as well as to dreamer and to dream.

To have all the answers might be proof that you weren’t asking the right questions.

Real faith might have less to do with a conviction that everything will turn out all right than with the simple confidence that something makes sense, even when everything goes wrong.

Joy, for a monk, is never the same as pleasure, because it has nothing to do with changing circumstance.

The Dalai Lama for more than thirty years is constantly in the thick of things, on the streets of India, where so many are in crying need, visiting Belfast and Jerusalem, going to the places where life and death seem overpowering.
It was relatively easy to find paradise on top of a mountain or in a monastery, but he was never set away from us, never distant from our sorrow or confusion.
“I want to serve where I am needed.”

Dalai Lama:
Hardly anyone has suffered more: nine of the sixteen children his mother would bear died young, the government of the largest nation on earth called him a demon and he’d had to try to protect six million people from across a distant border for half a century.
Yet no one I knew was better able to project confidence, or readier to smile and laugh.
In all our time together, I always saw him avoid the otherworldly.
The meaning of life, he said, lies in what we can do right now.
When people came to him in search of blessings, he stressed that he was no miracle worker. “You bless yourself with your actions. For example, give money to a school.”

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.

Death is not the opposite of life; it is, rather, the opposite of birth.