Larry's Corner

Thoughts on the World, Pico Iyer, and Iraq

There are so many universes at work on any given day.

The Travelers’ Tales office in San Francisco is in the South of Market neighborhood, a place just a short while ago known as Multimedia Gulch, where much of the world’s wild dot-com action took place. I rollerblade along the Embarcadero to work every day from my home on Telegraph Hill. The Embarcadero is a boulevard that runs along the waterfront, past the old pier fronts, beneath the San Francisco Bay Bridge, past Pacific Bell Park where the San Francisco Giants play baseball. The broad sidewalk along the piers is ideal for skating. It’s smooth, flat, unimpeded by intersections and traffic. In two miles of skating door-to-door I have to cross only four streets.

Yesterday, the day after the U.S. started bombing Iraq, I passed hordes of California Highway Patrol officers, their motorcycles parked in a neat line like a hundred steeds waiting in the starting gate. The officers stood around casually, looking like a bunch of friends meeting for a road rally, or a tailgate party before a ballgame, but dressed in uniforms and jackboots.

On my way home I saw a phalanx of riot control officers in full protective gear, marching like soldiers toward me. As I glided past they all looked relaxed, as if they’d been out for some leisurely training, but their military bearing was intimidating even if they were mostly all smiles.

Helicopters droned overhead, as they had done all day. I joined my family and a friend, Michael Shapiro, at home, had a pleasant dinner, then drove with him to Herbst Theater near City Hall. It was a mild, quiet evening, except for the helicopters circling the city hall dome, a classical gilded structure resplendent against the black sky.

TT friends and contributors Don George and Pico Iyer were about to take the stage in conversation, and I always try to catch Pico when he’s in town. Of course I saw dozens of familiar faces in the crowd, writers and travelers and artists, people for whom the world is a magnificent treasure to be explored and cherished. And that’s what you always get when you listen to Pico Iyer. He has an abiding love for the planet, for those points where cultures intertwine or slip alongside each other, for individuals who represent the human face of a culture or place. Pico was born into this cultural mix, with one foot in India, another in Britain, and later, both feet in California. His Hindu-British-California orientation and his travel among the three from childhood made him a world citizen in ways to which most of us can only aspire.

Don, too, like his audience, loves the world, loves travel, loves discussing the joys of both and the writing life. The conversation flowed freely, as Pico’s always does. "You talk fast," read a question from the audience on a note card, "and you think fast. Do you find it difficult when you’re writing to keep up with all the thoughts in your mind?" Pico does talk fast, coming from India (where, according to Pico, on average English is spoken at a rate of 180 words per minute; in the U.S. it’s 120 wpm). But he also talks flawlessly, rolling images and ideas out in a stream that is always buoyed by logic, emotion, and clear grammar. To hear him speak is to float away on a current of language so fluid it’s like being carried by a musical score, left with your own thoughts and emotional nourishment. Words become music, logic becomes emotion, and you wonder how he does it.

I learned two new things about Pico last night. One, he doesn’t edit, he rewrites. What I mean is, if he wants to change a paragraph in the ten pages of handwritten script he’s done that day, he doesn’t rewrite the paragraph, he writes the entire ten pages all over again, all by hand in fast flowing script. And two, he’s an avid sports fan. In Japan, he reads the baseball news "with Talmudic intensity," an image so clearly etched that I expect all summer I’ll be thinking of him in Japan, perched over his newspaper like a bird of prey, while I listen to the San Francisco Giants on the radio as evening fades to night.

When we left., Michael and I drove to my office to pick up some books, seeing the occasional flashing of police lights in the distance, but seeing no evidence of a disturbance. Michael drove me home, I read a little of Pico’s new novel, Abandon, before checking on my sleeping daughters and going to bed. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I picked up the newspaper, that I realized San Francisco had been through one of its most turbulent days of protests ever. Some 1400 people arrested, passions running high as protesters shut down intersections all over the city, making life miserable for citizens simply trying to fulfill their obligations on an emotional day of tension and anxiety.

There are so many universes at work in any given time and place. Yesterday mine included family and friends, a day of work, the emotional uplift of my friends, Pico and Don, on stage talking about issues that matter most to me. Not so many blocks away, all day and into the night, people were being arrested for protests ill-advised or patriotic, depending on your point of view. In Iraq, children like my own, sleeping soundly in the night, were about to have their homes and lives obliterated by a rain of terror from the sky. So many universes, so many lives, so much money spent on arms and power. So much to think about, assess, embrace, reject.

Sometimes I sleep soundly. Sometimes.

About Larry's Corner:
Larry Habegger, executive editor of Travelers’ Tales, has been writing about travel since 1980. He has visited almost fifty countries and six of the seven continents, traveling from the frozen Arctic to equatorial rain forest, the high Himalayas to the Dead Sea. In the early 1980s he co-authored mystery serials for the San Francisco Examiner with James O’Reilly, and since 1985 their syndicated newspaper column, "World Travel Watch," has appeared in newspapers in five countries, and can also be found on WorldTravelWatch.com and on TravelersTales.com. As series editors of Travelers’ Tales, they have worked on some eighty titles, winning many awards for excellence. Habegger regularly teaches the craft of travel writing at workshops and writers conferences, and he lives with his family in San Francisco. Click here to learn more about Larry Habegger.


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