An argument with reality

With most of humanity forced to live under innumerable restrictions, refrains about a wasted year echo regularly as the pandemic continues. We regret opportunities lost and unfulfilled. Should this be a year of surrendered hopes, scattered designs and unexpanded horizons? Not necessarily, says the writer Pico Iyer as he reflects on “lights” that can make autumn bearable, acceptable, and even magical.  Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells , which he wrote last year in another context, can help us during this unique crisis “make our peace with it and see it as a friend”. Mr Iyer’s conclusion, “I see it’s in the spaces where nothing is happening one has to make a life”, is relevant in today’s unusual circumstances.

The present lockdown is similar to autumn, which symbolises the time when “everything falls away”.  Much removed from the sweetness of spring, the bustle of summer or chilly winter approaching, autumn is a reminder of what could have been and has not been. Yet the faded luminosity of autumn need not necessarily be depressing; it can be as exhilarating and romantic as the preceding seasons. It need not be a period of restriction and constraint but one in which the mind flows freely, encouraging us to savour life.

Autumn Light  was written against the background of Mr Iyer’s return to Japan, where he lived for many years. He weaves the experiences of his family with everyday philosophy to identify a mode of satisfying and viable existence. “What do we have to hold on to? Only certainty that nothing will go according to design,” he wrote, and suggests a philosophy of acceptance — an “argument with reality is one you will never win” — and an immersion in the ordinary.  Freedom, he posited, lies in daily rituals — “take the path you took yesterday”! By establishing a routine of certainty Mr Iyer rises beyond this daily uncertainty to a languid existence, rich with stillness and contemplation: “To see the world as it is, yet find light within this truth”. 

Autumn Light marks Mr Iyer’s returns to Kyoto after his father-in-law dies suddenly to grapple with changes that envelope his immediate family. His mother-in-law is struggling between realisation of and disbelief at her loss. His wife is grieving her father’s death and longing for the emotional support of a brother, an only sibling, who divorced himself from the family a long time ago. And Mr Iyer himself, the eternal traveller, is weary, attempting to create a psychological refuge for himself in Kyoto. 

As each family member finds solace, his reflections become a poignant ode to the fleeting nature of time and a humbling acceptance that nothing lasts (which could apply to the pandemic too). Such times need not be a season of perceived loss, longing and loneliness. Mr Iyer demonstrates that it is possible to settle comfortably and forge a life of cherished attainment by carving out a mundane routine.

Autumn Light  represented a climax of sorts to Mr Iyer’s life and travels. After the excitement of Video Nights in Kathmandu , he explored world’s less travelled place in Falling Off the Map . The unattached youth roaming the world soon went on to explore a delicate romance that would last a lifetime, in  The Lady and the Monk,  perhaps his best work. That book also begins his fascination with Japan, a culture that would suffuse his thought and writings. 

Mr Iyer moved from the external world to the internal, philosophical world, describing the “haunted kinship” he feels with the writer Graham Greene in The Man Within My Head . The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere  recognises that travel and adventure can lie within us too. 

The physical landscapes in Mr Iyer’s travels also reflected his transition as a writer. In early travels to Kathmandu he appreciated the impact of the West on eastern societies, and thereafter, his attempts revolved around the cultural ramifications of globalisation in The Global Soul . In China, he discovered  The Door Swings Both Ways  and “neither Easterner nor Westerner knows where to turn”. Gradually recognising that southeast Asia is home, he fancied Singapore (in This Could be Home), to finally explore the lights of existence in his autumn heydays in Kyoto. 

Not without reason, The Guardian has described Mr Iyer as “our most elegant poet of dislocation”. And perhaps also of relocation.  Autumn Light reflects Mr Iyer’s maturity as a writer. It is a quiet celebration of an inner contemplative world, an “ability to sustain as everything seems to fall away”. As The New York Times  recognises, “there is much wisdom in what he says”. Taking delight in the mundane can certainly sustain us through the wrenching uncertainty of the pandemic.

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Pandemic Perusing is an occasional column on books and reading