Welcome to the new season of How We Live Now

Hello,

I like to imagine that there was a golden era of the literary world, in which writers gathered for sparkling conversation in elegant cafes, passing around ideas like glorious canapés, and making profound intellectual connections that sustained them through the solitude of their craft. Maybe those gatherings never happened in the first place; or maybe they did and are still happening now, but I’m not invited. Either way, I crave that contact with other wordsmiths. I think that’s why I run a podcast.

By which I mean: welcome to the new season of How We Live Now! We are back with a new question: How can we re-enchant this world? 

You’d think I’d be a bit tired of talking about the idea of enchantment by now - after all, I’ve spent the last three months being interviewed about my own book. But for me, writing isn’t a solo pursuit. I’m always so conscious that my work forms part of a web woven by many creators, and I’m curious to meet those people, to ask them what they know and to explore the shady corners of our thinking. 

This season, I’ll be seeking a range of perspectives on the question of our relationship to the magic, myth and meaning of the world around us. Have we really lost our sense of enchantment, and can we regain it? Do we need to make it anew, or should we look back to traditional ways of making sense of our experience on this earth? And does enchantment reside in us, or is it held elsewhere, in systems that are more intelligent that we fully understand? The fascinating minds and creative spirits ruminating on these questions include Morgan Harper Nichols, Bayo Akomolafe, Amy Jeffs and Kerri ni Dochartaigh. But first up, we have Pico Iyer, whose work has so often delved into the world’s quiet luminosity.

Pico’s latest book, The Half Known Life, looks at the ways in which we seek paradise on earth, sometimes in places that are fraught with risk. In this episode, we talk about the similarities in both our work, particularly the ways in which we explore secular understandings of big spiritual questions, and we touch on the differences, too. Where I’m drawn to the local and the known, Pico quests after the insights that come to travellers and strangers. They are two different ways of looking at the same question: that of how to live a good and peaceful life.

Pico can truly be called a veteran travel writer, having published his first book in 1984, and gone on to publish fifteen books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road and The Art of Stillness. His writing regularly features Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times among many others, and his four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far. I’m so grateful that he was willing to join me in this free-roaming introduction to the very idea of an enchanted existence.

You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, or use the link below. Paid subscribers to this newsletter get all their episodes ad-free, and some bonus recordings too - if that’s you, you’ll receive a separate email with your version and bonus episode.

By the way, we experimented with releasing all the episodes in one go last season, but - to be frank - that was exhausting and so we’re back to a more gentle pace this time. We also tried asking for your comments and questions by email, but that didn’t prove very popular (except for people who wanted to pitch their books or grumble at my interviewing technique). So I’m still keen to hear your further thoughts after listening - your responses, personal experiences, further questions, future enquiries - but I’ll be inviting them on here from now on. As you know from last week’s letter, personal sustainability is my watchword! But I do love to hear from you.

Take care,

Katherine

Links from the episode:

• Pico and Katherine in conversation about The Half Known Life

• Katherine and Pico in conversation about Enchantment

• Pico's book, The Half Known Life

• Pico's website

How We Live Now is recorded using RiversideFM and hosted by Acast.

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From the transcript

Pico Iyer:

You took the words out of my mouth. And before you continue, I was thinking both of us are open to transcendence and wonder and enchantments probably.

Katherine May:

Yeah, love it. But I see it as, for me, a quality of attention that doesn't require belief. I don't need belief to access that, what seems to me like a very fundamental human experience. And so, again, it's another thing that I can let go of quite easily, the idea that I need a big explanation, I think.

Pico Iyer:

Yes, I completely agree. And I've been thinking since I last talked to you. Another way of saying this is that And I think maybe when we spoke before, I might have spoken in the context of my book about going to Jerusalem and this sense that some longing, some intimation of something vast and transforming is very real. And every human feels it, whether on a mountaintop or when in love or watching a sunset or moved to tears by a book. We all have that. But the ideas and ideologies we build around that just cut us up. And it's like we take something from the heavens and we humans mess it up by bringing it down to earth.

So organized religion, I think, is how we deface the heavens in some ways. But organized religion, for all its flaws, can't remove the fact that the heavens are still there and that one well wonder is still there. Every other sentence in your new book is really a reminder of, I think you call it the luminous ordinary or the wonder all around us.

Katherine May:

Luminous, mundane. Yeah.

Pico Iyer:

Yeah.

Katherine May:

And it seems very evident to me that is there, and it's an external reality that's there to be experienced. And it doesn't seem remotely esoteric to me, I guess. Whereas, I think, maybe for some other people it's more difficult to find. And therefore it seems for those people there's a need for a spiritual toolkit that's given to you that almost hands you that faith that it's allowed, that you're allowed to seek, that it's there to be witnessed. And I think for some people, they would struggle to believe in it if they didn't have an external framework. I just don't happen to need that. Because I like to do my own thing, I guess.

Pico Iyer:

That's interesting. As I hear you say that I think for many people, community is a large part of their sense of wonder.

Katherine May:

Yes, absolutely.

Pico Iyer:

And community often needs to wear the name of a religion, which is quite understandable. And ritual too. Since we last spoke, I've been thinking how right in the middle of the word enchantment is chant. And the power of chant, both as something collective and something that doesn't necessarily have a logical meaning, but does tap something very deep inside us. That spirit is very powerful to me. But when you use the word esoteric, I was thinking books and our ideas are esoteric, but reality isn't, it's right around us. And when I was thinking about paradise, I came to feel, this is a variation on what you just said, that the only paradise I could trust is one that's open to everybody, completely democratic.

Katherine May:

Yes.

Pico Iyer:

I don't think it can be a province of a few people who partake of a certain belief or who've read a certain book. I think it has to be a universal for me to have faith in it.

Katherine May:

I can't reconcile the idea of a just God with someone who insists that people follow one very specific man-made set of rules. I can't reconcile those two things. I think that's one of my fundamental problems with religion, really.

Pico Iyer:

Yes. And I think what I've found is that the wisest spirits in the world who are the most grounded in a certain faith are often the most open to every other. By which, I mean I remember for example, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said something akin to what you just said, and he said, "How could I possibly believe in a God who would exclude the Dalai Lama or Gandhi from heaven because they're not Christians?" He said, "That's not a God who could possibly exist in my sphere."

Katherine May:

And I wouldn't follow a God that didn't think that.

Pico Iyer:

Yes.

Katherine May:

There's the rebellious teenager in me, but I don't care if you're God, I don't agree with you.

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