Hauntingly beautiful: The Half Known Life | In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer
Dear friends,
When in awe, you have much to say, yet you are tongue tied.
.
.
.
Then, you haltingly find words to talk about it…
…in reverence for the author, who bares his soul in an attempt to capture the uncapturable—the meaning of life itself, while traveling to war zones and the holiest of sites, witnessing suffering and death, to discover that the essence of life lies in the unknown or “the half known life”, the book’s title.
…in reverence for the poeticity and elegance of his writing, seeped in ancient wisdom and reminiscent of Rumi, Ferdowsi, and other Persian poets quoted in the book.
…in reverence for his daredevil crisscrossing of continents—from the aboriginal land in Broome, Australia, and the ghostly Bridge of Heaven in Japan to the foothills of Ladakh—to find paradise, only to discover what he already knew, perhaps, in his heart: there is no paradise on earth.
Where’s paradise then?
Whatever paradisical lands Iyer visits over the course of the book—the valley of Kashmir, the island nation of Sri Lanka, the holy sites of Jerusalem, and the wondrous ancient relics of Iran—are stained with the blood of conflicts, war, and death, leaving him wondering whether, “…the longing for an ideal world might not be a kind of curse, even a heresy. Yes, there are only perfect moments in life.”
Truly, life is imperfectly perfect. We know that here.
“…paradise inheres in no place, but only in the mind one brings to it.” Iyer quotes here, the monk Thomas Merton, who he grew up reading in Oxford, England.
“Paradise, in short, is regained by finding the wonder within the moment”. Iyer realizes this in the small and remote temple town of Koyasan, Japan.
Let’s perfect moments in life, rather than life itself.
Does paradise exist only in words, perhaps?
After all, paradises exist in the mind’s eye only because someone has painstakingly immortalized it with words, like the Iranian poets whose words inspired Iyer to visit to the country. As if in testimony, the driver of Iyer’s tourist car in Iran, afflicted with throat cancer, sings these words in a trance-like state in front of Ferdowsi’s burial chamber:
I have made the world through a paradise of words
No one has done that but me.
Huge palaces and monuments will fall into despair,
But I have made a palace out of words that shall never fade.
Through this I have immortalized Iran.
Iyer says, “A paradise of words: the driver’s incantation might have been expressing the single most urgent impulse that had drawn me here. After years of travel, I’d begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of increasing conflict.”
Ironically, the word “paradise” comes from Iran, “a world of increasing conflict”. “Paradaijan” is the Persian word for paradise. Iyer captures the deathly pallor of the same Iran he thought was a treasure trove of beauty, in these words: “The vast space in southern Tehran, known as “Zahara’s Paradise” was one of the largest cemeteries on earth—home to one and a half million dead bodies—and fast-track entry to heaven was said to be the privilege of martyrs.”
Poets, creators of paradise with words, are more fit to run a country than so called leaders, Iyer implies in his book: “Poets really could be the unacknowledged legislators of the world in a culture where taxi drivers recite mystical verses and ayatollahs speak in double-edged stanzas.” Poets are elevated to the level of the philosopher kings in Plato’s dialogue, the Republic. Plato believed that the best form of government was one where the wise philosopher kings ruled.
True paradise is internal.
Since paradise does not lie in the external world, Iyer punctuates the book ever so often with epiphanies on finding true peace within our Self, reminiscent of the Vedanta philosophy and other Eastern thought traditions. The book reveres the Self as a supreme source of wisdom, but curiously—more so because Iyer, born to Hindu parents and a connoisseur of world religions—does not cite the Bhagavad Geeta or any other Vedantic texts in his most epiphanic moments.
He quotes Rumi’s pre-occupation with the Self: “Find a heaven within…and you enter a garden in which “one leaf is worth more than all of the paradise.”
He quotes Buddha on the Self: “Which,” Buddha is believed to have asked picnickers who had been robbed, “is more important? To find the robbers or to find yourself?” Accepting the present reality fosters far more internal peace than chasing a pipe dream—in this case, catching robbers literally in the thick of Sri Lanka, a country where “the jungle comes into the house…”.
Iyer quotes an anonymous 14th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing: “By our love, the divine may be reached and held, by our thinking, never.” The belief is remarkably close to the call of the Vedanta philosophy to suspend thoughts produced by our mind, in order to encounter the divine in us (the mind is “M” in the BMI chart). Instead, the trek into our Self or the Divine within us starts precisely when we stop thinking, become a witness or sakshi to life, and start tuning into our Divine Consciousness.
Towards the end of the book, just before his final epiphany on what the half known life is, Iyer, rather overwhelmed at experiencing the mysticism of the ancient city of Varanasi in India, decides to sit and just be an observer to life roll out in front of him, in the holy city. It’s not a coincidence that he transitions from a doer to an observer or a sakshi to life at the end, to attain his final epiphany on the half known life. And, it all settles:
“I decided that I would no longer seek out holy places in this city of temples; I would just let life come to me in all its happy confusion and find the holiness in that. I sat where I was….and watched the carnival play out.”
All I know is that I know nothing.
By turning the notion of a paradise on its head, Iyer also exposes what it means to really know in life, in a tribute to his book’s title, The Half Known Life. Just as paradise is a paradox, we are well served by realizing that knowledge too, is somewhat of a paradox, because we don’t know way more than we know. It has a Socratic ring for sure, echoing the Greek philosopher’s famous words, “All I know is that I know nothing” for which he was put to death eventually, having refused to defend himself against the accusation of corrupting the Athenian youth of the time.
It's only once you acknowledge you don’t know, does the path of knowing emerge. Iyer says, “We are wiser than we know, if only we can awaken to a case of all that lies beyond our knowledge.”
“We are surrounded by extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, but entirely in a form we cannot decipher. All we can do is give ourselves over to what we cannot know.”
Wisdom comes from accepting the unknown, and facing uncertainty bravely.
Like the aborigines of Inner Australia who live in some of the toughest terrains on the planet and “had learned to read about signs of brush fire and flash flood, yet their wisdom, seemed to come in the form of honoring how little they could do to control them.”
Wisdom in life is about conquering the fear of uncertainty. True, isn’t it? For we don’t know what awaits us in life—a second later or in this lifetime. It’s the half known life at play. The Bhagavad Geeta’s famous verse 47 is helpful here as a call to not dwell in the regrets of the past and the anxieties of the future, but stay in the present and do our karma or work in an informed manner. Iyer seemed to admire the Dalai Lama, who he knew personally since his boyhood, precisely because his focus was on the present and action: “In almost half a century of talking to the Dalai Lama, I’d never really heard him speak about Paradise (or Nirvana); such ideas could only be a distraction from the possibilities of real life.”
Iyer’s young tour guide in Jerusalem, Amir, who, sensing the confusion and frustration of his tourists who could not seem to reconcile with how one the holiest sites on earth also witnesses continued bloodshed between two groups who both claim ownership of the holy land beneath their feet, said, “If I’ve left you feeling frustrated and confused, I’ve succeeded! Now you know what it’s like to be an Israeli! I’ve lived here for thirty-one years and still I don’t know what’s going on. In fact I know less and less. The more I learn, the more I can see how little I know.”
Have faith in the face of uncertainty; your paradise may well lie in there.
If wisdom lies in acknowledging that we don’t know a lot, it also comes from having faith that good will happen. Like the poignant story of a young French girl who Iyer spots sobbing, at the sight of a miniscule candle, ready to burn out, one among many others in the darkened space inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. When the girl finally leaves the room after being consoled in her grief by a friend, she turns back, tears in her eyes, and looks at the tiny candle once more. “The thin candle flicked and wavered, and somehow continued to burn.”
Faith and hope intermingled to give rise to this perfect moment in the face of uncertainty.
Iyer’s final epiphany in the last lines of the book references a candle again, taking us back to this moment of faith, urging us perhaps, not to despair. It was a brilliant moment of internal reflection, of practical optimism. “It was easy, in fact, to imagine that we were all caught up now in this half known realm, and a candlelit back alleyway would be the only true home—the deepest paradise—we could ever hope to find.”
Paradise is internal, at the intersection of hope and belief that the candle won’t burn out, come what may. We won’t know that for sure, but it’s precisely that unknown or half known life that keeps the flame of life alive and makes life worth living.
Thank you for the brilliant read, Mr. Iyer, and capturing so perfectly, our imperfectly perfect life. I highly recommend you pick up a copy, yesterday!
Happy new year!
Meaningfully yours,
Anu Prabhala
PS: Minor, interesting detail. It looks like Iyer’s dad and mine attended the same school, Antonio da Silva High School, in crowded central Mumbai, in a place called Dadar BB, a 20-minute walk from my birth home in Mumbai. The school is mentioned in a conversation between Iyer and Professor Chandra, a friend of Iyer’s father, who he visited in Varanasi:
“Did your father ever tell you we were classmates?”
”At university in England?”
”No, no,” he said. “At Antonio da Silva,” the less-than-famous school in the dusty suburbs of Bombay that had not seemed the most obvious place to be sending students off to Harvard and Oxford.”