Pico Iyer

I've always enjoyed a good travel memoir, and I read some of Pico Iyer's books when I was younger, but it's been a while since I've picked one up. This one is intriguing because it's a little more intentional than the typical travel memoir -- Iyer is specifically in search of sites of great spiritual significance. I didn't get the sense that he is exploring his own spirituality here, though I suppose one wouldn't undertake such an enterprise without some consciousness of that. He visits sites in India, Sri Lanka, Japan, Israel, even North Korea, and makes observations about spiritual practices and how they are woven into the general social fabric of those places. He is a good writer and a good traveler, and this is an intellectual approach to these journeys. In the end, he seems to awake spiritually in spite of himself, realizing after visiting Sarnath, one of the holiest sites in India: "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." This struck me as the words of a person who had found peace. Words to live by.… (meer)