Pico Iyer on the Pleasure and Profundity of Silence

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Pico. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

PICO IYER: Hi. I am just so happy to be here, Spencer.

SB: All the way from Kyoto.

PI: Yes. I’ll be back there by the end of this week.

SB: Well, to start, and we’ll definitely spend a lot of time today on your new book, Aflame, this beautiful new book about learning from silence, but I wanted to first start with a quote, an epigraph from the third section of your 2019 book, Autumn Light. It’s a quote by the British poet Philip Larkin from a 1982 interview he did with The Paris Review. He says, “I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time, some people by doing a lot, being in California one year, in Japan the next, or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.” [Laughter]

It’s such an apt quote given your lifelong relationships with both California and Japan—or almost lifelong, I would say, with Japan. Could you speak to how you think about the passing of time in relation to those two places and maybe even just that quote? Kind of uncanny.

PI: Uncanny that you selected it. You were the first person to notice that quote in the six years since that book has come out.

SB: I did write my undergrad thesis on Philip Larkin, so it was slightly connected to that.

PI: Really? Wow. I conned my way into my university by talking about Philip Larkin without really having read him. 

SB: [Laughs]

PI: But you’re right, the California-Japan part was a large reason why I selected that. I can tell you, I’ve always been incredibly stingy about time. Even when I was a young kid, I was terrified by the ticking of the clock. I’m not scared of many things, but I could feel time’s winged chariot always pushing at me. It’s interesting: I’ve never been very concerned with money, and I’m happy to give money wherever it’s needed, but I’m really stingy when it comes to time, maybe because time is a nonrenewable resource. I feel if I give up time, I can never make it back. So oddly, for most of my life, I have been haunted by time and ruled by time. 

In terms of California and Japan, I think the interesting thing is that I see that commuter’s going between the future and the past. California has annulled history, and lives in an eternal summer. Japan is based around the turning of the seasons and the sense that everything comes around, and much changes on the surface and nothing changes deep down.

I feel much more consoled by Japan—which embraces autumn and winter—than by California, which lives in a never, never moment. Somehow, Japan, by acknowledging that time is always moving forward, becomes a friend of time and doesn’t seem opposed by it. Whereas, in California, because it seems like it’s always eternal summer, it’s always getting upended when suddenly winter storms come by or leaves begin to fall.

SB: There’s this other epigraph from the book, too, which is also about time. So, I had to bring it up. It’s a poem by Bashō, and it goes, “How happy to see lightning, and not think, ‘Time is fleeting!”

PI: Yes. Yes. When I first went to Japan, I heard that life is about joyful participation in a world of sorrows. In other words, for the Japanese, coming from Buddhism, all of us, if we’re lucky, get old. Most of us will get sick, and all of us will die, but none of that is incompatible with wonder and beauty and joy. I get a lot of solace from that Bashō wisdom, the fact that everything ends doesn’t mean that we have to despair. 

I thought you were going to cite the Bashō epigraph at the end of that book, which says, I believe, “This road/ no one on it / as autumn ends.” [Editor’s note: The exact lines are “This road! / No one is going my Way / This autumn evening.”] The reason I cite that is that book, Autumn Light, is dedicated to jikan, which means time, but also refers to Leonard Cohen’s monastic name, which was Jikan, meaning “the silence between two thoughts.” Actually, I was corresponding with Leonard Cohen in the last few weeks of his life, and I sent that Bashō poem to him about the autumn road, “no one on it / as autumn ends.” That was the last…. I never heard from him again, and he died two weeks later. I thought that was maybe the best sentence I could share with him as he was going off into his next existence.

SB: I did notice in that book, though, that in the acknowledgments, you first thank “my lifelong adversary and boss, Time, for allowing me over sixteen years to sift through an hourly mounting pile of impressions and experiences and feelings, and for showing me, finally, how many of them were useless or temporary, at least. It’s Father Time himself who sometimes seems the most bracing editor, even as his reward, as with most editors, is to receive curses around the clock.”

PI: Wow. Again, you’re picking something out that nobody has mentioned, and it’s exciting for me to hear those words for the first time in six or seven years—since the last time I wrote them.

SB: I loved that. Not a dedication to time necessarily, although as you alluded, it was basically dedicated to time, but also to first thank time.

PI: Yes.

SB: It brought to mind, when I interviewed Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic, for this podcast, I found the very first thing he ever wrote for The New York Times, in the early eighties, the very first sentence was, “Time has generally been a good editor.” I was just so shook by the connection between that and this and this idea of time as an editor.

PI: That is unbelievable! Of course, in my case, I was starting out at the same time as Michael, working at Time magazine. Time literally was what taught me how to edit myself, and its editors were ruthless in cutting away my excess verbiage. [Laughter]

SB: Well, let’s turn to Aflame, and particularly this Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, that you’ve described in so many different ways. Actually, you’ve written about it quite a bit over your career. Even in an early essay in 1992, you called it your “secret home.” You first went there in the early nineties after this wildfire had burned down your mother’s house, which you were staying at at the time. You and a cat escaped and were basically picked up by this good Samaritan. Your mother and you lost everything. In the aftermath, you heard about this monastery in Big Sur. Tell me about the journey there, your first impressions of this place, and also just what was the initial impact on you of arriving in this monastic quarters?

PI: Yes. You’ve done so much research! Thank you for stitching together. Again, nobody has noticed I’ve been writing about that for thirty years. So, as you say, after our house burnt down, and I had nothing but a toothbrush, and I was sleeping on a friend’s floor for many months, as my mother and I slowly reconstructed our lives, and another friend saw me there. He said, “You should go up the coast three and a half hours. If nothing else, you’ll have a bed to sleep in and a nice desk and a private walled garden overlooking the Pacific Ocean, hot showers, all the food you can eat at thirty dollars a night.” 

So yes, I drove north up Highway One. You probably know that stretch. Halfway there, it gets narrower and emptier, and you’re just in this vast, elemental landscape with the golden meadows running down from the mountains on one side, flat blue plate of the Pacific on the other. Came to an even narrower road that snaked and twisted for two and a half miles up to the top of the hill, where the retreat house Benedictine monastery lay. I stepped out of my car, and I stepped into a silence that was wide awake and positive and thrumming. It wasn’t just the absence of noise. It was like something concrete.

I stepped into my little room, and it was as if all my thoughts and chattery mind, which had been occupying me on the drive up, was left down on the highway, and I was suddenly released to the beauty of the world. In the context of Time Sensitive, it was as if I was released from time into something much larger. I was released from myself, and it’s probably ourselves and our egos that keep us trapped in the moment, and hostage to the clock ticking over. Suddenly, something as spacious as eternity, so it seemed. You know, I think, how the Greeks had two different words for time: kronos, the calendar time, and kairos, which is sacred time.

One of the trailers in this hermitage is actually called Kairos, so you literally can be sleeping in sacred time. Even if you’re in one of the other rooms, it does feel as if you’ve left the clock far behind. I’m sure you’ve been to Big Sur, and you know the whole of that sixty-mile stretch of coastline feels like the outside world is behind you, and the clock has fallen away, and you’re in some timeless, archetypal—

SB: I spent my 35th birthday at the Post Ranch Inn, actually.

PI: Clever you. [Laughter] So the only terrible thing I’ll say is this monastery has even better views than the Post Ranch Inn. Not quite as close to the ocean, but beautiful.

SB: I mean, to arrive—and the clouds were low that day, so we were literally above the clouds. It’s a surreal feeling.

PI: Yes, and above the clouds, as you can tell, that’s pretty much how I feel every time I go on retreat there. Even when it’s not a cloudy day, it’s a sort of heaven. I remember when I was first courting my wife, and we were kind of a fugitive couple. We’d take day trips somewhere on a date, and she would turn to me in her limited English—because she’s Japanese—and she would say, “Time stopped.” Which was the best compliment she could give to the day. In other words, she was suddenly released from her daily self into something different—just for a few hours.

It made me think how time stopping is what all of us crave at some point. That’s what—when they talk about “peak moments” or whatever—you’re suddenly stepping away from time into something vaster.

SB: You’ve been going back to this place for thirty-plus years now.

PI: Yes. Yes.

SB: How do you think about this “monastery time,” if I can call it that? I mean, what do you make of this time across decades spent in thrumming silence, I guess?

PI: Thrumming silence. [Laughter] Thank you. I really like that phrase “monastery time,” because I would say it’s out of time. My book about it feels like it’s out of time. There’s no chronology in it. 

It’s amazing how, at some level, nothing has changed in thirty-three years and a hundred retreats that I’ve made there. I’ve got a lot older. I’ve lost a lot of hair. I’ve lost people. I’ve gone from the age of 34 to, soon, 68, so half a lifetime, but the silence and the beauty and the radiance of that place—as you know from the Post Ranch Inn—never seems to alter. I think it’s that sense of something outside the reach of time that is really part of the solace it gives, especially.… I remember when people have died in my life, and I don’t know what to make of that death. I go up into this place that has this air of permanence and being outside time, and that’s the best medicine I can find. 

But as I say, “monastery time” is the perfect phrase for it, because I realized at some point in my life—because I spent a lot of time traveling—I realized the more of my life I spent in “airport time,” the more I had to spend in what I call “cathedral time”—what you said is monastery time. In other words, when you’re at the airport, destinations clicking over, everyone’s very conscious of time. They’re looking at their watch. You’re waiting. When is the departure time? When is the boarding time? All that. It’s a very frazzled, fractured way of being. “Cathedral time” is when you step into Notre Dame, and it’s a huge space, and you are out of time. Light is coming through the windows, and the candles are flickering, but you’re basically liberated from the clock. The more I’m dominated by the clock, the more I have to make sure I have time away from the clock—in “monastery time.” I like that phrase.

SB: [Laughs] Good. Ultimately, Aflame is this book about silence, about the clarity and the beauty, the result of time in silence. Reading it, I really sensed this book was a lifetime in the making for you. It really felt that way. Even though, as you said, it was in your thirties that you first went there. You’ve really been alone your entire life. I mean, there’s this aloneness factor to your being that I think we have to bring up here. I came across this 1996 interview that you did where you noted how you really enjoy being alone, that you’re an only child, that when you were growing up, your nearest relative was six thousand miles away.

PI: Yes.

SB: When you went to boarding school in England, your parents were in California, and your other relatives were in India. So you were really alone. In preparing for this conversation, one of the essays I came across was called “Silence,” from 1992.

PI: Yes.

SB: I think it must have been published in Time magazine.

PI: It was, yes.

SB: In it, you write, “We have to earn silence, to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands.”

PI: Amazingly, I can still live with those words thirty-three years later. 

SB: [Laughs]

PI: There’s nothing I would change in that sentence. Time magazine, speaking of time, was clever because they ran that piece on silence the week of Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. This week is inauguration week. They knew it’d be the noisiest, most clamorous time of all, and that’s when people needed to be reminded of something out of time and silent. You’ve done such incredible research. I’m embarrassed to realize I said in that 1996 interview the same thing I’ve been saying this week. I haven’t evolved much at all. [Laughter]

SB: Well, I think that was the interesting thing; there’s this meditative nature that is part of your being that precedes the monastery, but then, I think, the monastery opened up even further. What do you make of time in silence and all these hours you’ve spent in that silence with yourself, alone?

PI: Yes. Yes. Gosh, you say and read all these things so intuitively—thank you. 

The first part of that, I will say, because I’m so parsimonious with time, my wish has always been to find a day that lasts a thousand hours. So, I left crowded, exciting New York City for Japan to open out the day, so there would be more hours in the day, and no boundaries to the day. That’s exactly what I find in the hermitage. It’s the only place in my life where I allow myself to live without a plan, without a schedule. 

Sometimes—speaking of time—when I walk into the kitchen where there’s a big clock, and it says 6 p.m., I barely know if it’s 6 p.m. or 6 a.m. That’s a good sign, I think. When I wake up, usually—even today—I’m very hostage to my schedule. I wake up, and I go right to my desk, and I start working. So, that’s the rare place where I give myself a break in every sense. When I wake up, I just let the moment decide, and the intuition decide, “Will I take a walk and see the sun rise over the hills? Will I just sit out in my garden and watch the light on the water? Will I pick out a book at random?” I just follow the moment wherever it will take me.

SB: Well, and some of it is more about ritual than schedule, right? I feel like, almost, these little rituals take over the notion of schedule.

PI: Yes, or habit, too. Yes, yes, exactly. I’m a captive to habit, and a captive to schedule, and a captive to ritual in my normal life. Here, I’m emancipated from it. I don’t know what I’m going to do the next hour. What a great feeling. It’s like looking out on an open meadow instead of a tangle of skyscrapers. 

I think the second part of your question had to do with being alone. So, it was being there that reminded me that, actually, I’m never alone. It was only by being alone I saw I wasn’t alone. It was only by going to that very solitary place that I saw that solitude was a means to an end. Much though I love it, it’s only as useful as what you can bring back from it to the rest of the world.

SB: True. Your wife so beautifully points out, “Oh, you’ve got so many brothers here, basically—family, brothers and sisters—people that came around.” I think if I read it correctly, you went in there expecting, “Oh, the monks are going to teach me a lot.” But it was actually many of the non-monastics who taught you as much—if not more.

PI: Yes, I would say both taught me a huge amount. I went in to learn from the monks, and I learned a great deal, but I went in never expecting to learn from the fellow travelers along the road. The interesting thing is, in that out-of-time space, when I meet somebody for the first time, and we just exchange two sentences, those sentences stay with me for the rest of the day. That person feels like, instantly, one of my closest friends, partly because we don’t know…. We’re not joined by where we went to school or what we’re doing or which part of New York City we’re living in. We’re joined by the fact that we’re seeking out the silence, which is a much deeper connection. So, it’s a beautiful surprise, suddenly to make all these friends I really trust and respect even if I’ve never met them before.

SB: In silence, there’s quiet. You mentioned the humming aspect of being at the hermitage, but I did want to bring up the joy to be found in quiet, which is something you’ve written about, particularly—just to quote a New York Times essay you wrote about this subject a little over ten years ago, in 2011. You wrote, “We barely have enough time to see how little time we have.” That sentence, I had to reread it three or four times, because I was like, it makes so much sense.

I guess I wanted to ask in some ways then, do you think we can counter this time scarcity feeling that’s so omnipresent in our current age—even more so than it was back in 2011? What are some of your slowdown or time-healing tricks, time-finding tricks?

PI: Yes. I like that sentence, too. Again, I couldn’t improve on it all these years later, even though it’s a much more urgent as you question now, thirteen years on. I take a walk. I sit on a terrace for an hour every day reading. I think my definition of happiness is absorption, by which I mean I think most of us feel most happy when we forget the time. When we forget ourselves, we’re completely absorbed in a project or in a concert or in a moment with a person we really love.

SB: Listening to a podcast. [Laughs]

PI: Yeah, maybe because the beauty of podcast is very intimate, and they take us deep inside ourselves.

SB: It’s why I don’t film this. I feel really strongly like, “You should just be listening.”

PI: Yes.

SB: We have enough stimulation in our lives. It should be this intimate moment, Pico and Spencer in the studio, talking.

PI: Yes, yes. That’s why you didn’t want to do it remotely, and it’s important we’re in the same room—and also long-form. I mean, the fact that podcasts like yours are so popular now is interesting, because our time is so cut up, and our attention span is so fragmented. Something in us is longing for the luxury of a one-hour conversation—listening to it or participating in it. I absolutely agree with you. That’s what we’re hungry for.

SB: It connects to that flickering candle in Notre Dame you were talking about.

PI: I like that! Yes, yes. I was going to say something else that’ll probably come to me about just trying to expand our sense of time so that it’s not cut up.

SB: I’d like to mention, actually, one of the reasons I started The Slowdown was this belief that time, in some sense, is the greatest luxury. But in your book, you define luxury in a way that I think, perhaps, takes that idea a step further, which I really loved. You write, “Luxury is defined by all that you don’t need to long for.” I guess this isn’t a question so much, but I wanted to quote that. I saw that as almost an extension of the idea of time as the greatest luxury. But if we’re no longer longing for time, that’s really the greatest luxury.

PI: Yeah, yeah. That’s why being out of time, I think, is the biggest luxury of all. That’s the perfect description of why I left New York City for Japan.

SB: Just to return to this house fire that I mentioned earlier, which you write about in Aflame, you note how, “So many of us are living where humans were never meant to live, disrupting an ageless and essential life cycle.” I was hoping maybe you’d just speak briefly to the role of fire in the book, both in the environmental sense, but also the spiritual sense, because, as you point out, the monk’s duty is to keep the fires within alight. I think fire is presented in this really interesting way as something both deadly but also freeing. There’s this dual thing happening.

PI: Yes, and as you said, how to keep the inner flames of conviction, confidence, and hope alive when the external flames are rewriting and upending our lives every day. I flew back in to Southern California two weeks ago, just as fires were wiping up much of Los Angeles. As you said in that sentence you quoted, we can’t live without fire in that landscape. The question is, how do we live with fire? Of course, the Buddha said, “The whole world is a burning house, so make the most of right now.” Thomas Merton said, “Everything burns.” We’re learning that one way or another. Even if it’s not fire, it’s typhoons or hurricanes or floods.

So, how can we be hopeful in the midst of impermanence? How can we feel calm in the world that seems evermore uncertain? I think, after finishing that book, I found a sentence from Jung in which he said, “The difference between a good life and a bad life is how we walk through the fire.” But yes, and it doesn’t connect so much with time, but it’s certainly true that my monk friends are permanently racing out of their home as the flames descend on them, not knowing if they’ll have a home to go back to. And yet, they can’t afford to give up or despair.

SB: I’m glad I asked that because I just feel like the fire thing we see in headlines, but this is something that’s eternal, right? Yes, the climate crisis is very much real. We are facing some serious environmental degradation right now, but also, nature’s been doing this since before we were here.

PI: Yes, and needs to do it, and we’ll be doing it after we’re gone most likely too, so yes. [Laughter] The actual title of the book comes, in part—as you know from having read it—from a story of the Desert Fathers, two thousand years ago, and a young monk who goes to an older monk, and he says, “I’m reading all the scriptures. I do good deeds. I try to be honest and loyal. What more can I do?” The older monk says, “If you so wish, you can be all aflame,” which is quite a thought. But yes, I like the fact that you stress that fire, air, earth, and water are almost outside the realm of time. They’re certainly our rulers, and we’re very mortal.

You know, having spent your 35th birthday in the Post Ranch Inn, part of the beauty of Big Sur is that a human becomes really tiny in time and in space in that landscape, because it’s an elemental landscape like that of parable. It feels like you’re out of time, and we’re so tiny next to those tall redwoods and that vast ocean and a big sky and the cliffs. That’s a liberation in itself, probably.

SB: Yeah. Awe is the only word I can say. [Laughs]

PI: That’s the perfect word. We don’t need more than that. Exactly, and humbling.

SB: Let’s go to your upbringing. You were born in Oxford, in England, then raised between California and this British boarding school.

PI: Yes.

SB: Looking back now, do you think this peripatetic youth was the ultimate upbringing to becoming a travel writer? Because I can imagine that almost sense of being of no one place—of many places—is an ideal grounding for a travel writer, in some sense.

PI: A hundred percent, exactly. I always felt I was very lucky, as a son of Indian parents in England and moving to California at 7, that I was given three sets of eyes, and I could mix them and match them, and I wasn’t stuck in one sensibility. So yes, so travel became my importable home, my second nature. Then, by the time I was 17, I was spending every season on a different continent. I was a lost cause from the beginning. [Laughter]

SB: Well, tell me about these ten years at an English boarding school. There’s something monastery-like about that. I mean, you’re in a cell. Obviously, there’s distinct differences too, but what stands out to you about your time there? Do you think the boarding school years were also preparation, in some sense, for your time at this hermitage, all those years later?

PI: You got it perfectly, and you’re the first person to notice that, honestly. I mean, so I’ve said, often jokingly to my wife, “Oh, all I’m doing when I go to the hermitage is returning to boarding school”—the place that I know and feel comfortable. You’re exactly right, because it’s a very ordered, hierarchical structure, the tolling of bells marking the hours. It’s basically an all-male situation, very restrained in certain ways, but by virtue of that restraint, quite freeing, too, because we know [where] we’re going to be every hour of the day. So, very, very similar. I always think of those English boarding schools, especially the ancient ones, half monastery and half military training, similar to West Point, too.

SB: Makes sense.

PI: But I think the monastery part is really, really useful. The more discipline you have in your life, the more freedom you can find, I think, within that discipline. So, I’m forever grateful to those years—both, as you say, for training me in being self-sufficient and independent and moving back and forth between places, but also what we were doing in that environment.

SB: Well, and I was struck reading that and several other pieces of writing of yours that all touch on ping-pong. You’ve done a TED Talk about this, but you were playing ping-pong alone in your parents’ Santa Barbara home, and then you’re at boarding school, and then, years and years later, in Kyoto, part of this ping-pong club. To me, the across-time nature, not to mention the temporal aspect of the ball just bouncing around the table, and there being something meditative in that—I just wanted to touch on that. How do you think about this ping-pong time across your life and this sort of, I don’t know, sport really, the engagement with it?

PI: Well, Spencer, I now anoint you my official biographer. [Laughter] You’re stitching together all these patterns in my life nobody has done, and they’re absolutely correct. I think, in the context of our conversation, what I would say is, people who read my books think of me as traveling all the time. If my wife were here—she calls me a stuck record because, in the thirty-seven years we’ve been together, I’m wearing the same clothes. I’m listening to the same musicians. I’m reading the same books, and playing the same ping-pong. In a curious way through all my life, as you have discerned, I’ve been doing the same thing.

Maybe that gives a sense of stability and permanence in a life that’s involved a lot of movement and change. So wherever I am at some level, I’m still reading Graham Greene. I’m still playing ping-pong. I’m still listening to Van Morrison, still thinking of the hermitage/boarding school. It’s nice to have that continuity.

SB: You didn’t mention him, but I did want to bring up Thoreau, who is a writer, very important to you.

PI: Yes.

SB: I believe you first read his words at the age of 21, so, during your college years. What was the impact of Thoreau on you—and Walden? Because I think you’ve really written beautifully about Walden. I think it allowed me to understand Walden in a new way. I think Walden—It’s a very misunderstood book in the culture. The way you write about it that led me to this newer understanding is that Walden wasn’t about totally being separate from. It was actually about integration, about having silence and being away, but then also having time that was a part of.

People always were saying, “Oh, why wasn’t he almost more secluded or remote than he actually was?” Well, that was because of that integration and balance. One shouldn’t go be a total hermit in the woods, in other words. [Laughs]

PI: Yes. He said, “I’m naturally no hermit. I love society as much as most.” He was going to Walden Pond to gather the resources so that he’d have more to give to his community. Just the way you speak about professional sports, a football team gathers in a huddle only so they can advance down the field. The huddle isn’t the point. It’s the means to the end. 

People forget that the first lecture he gave in the Concord Lyceum was not on solitude, but society. He was an essential member of the Concord community, fixing people’s plumbings, and looking after Emerson’s family for ten months when Emerson was traveling, and holding melon parties every year. When he was in his cabin, he was mostly trying to resurrect the memory of his brother, who had died in his arms. He deliberately built the cabin next to the railroad, down which trains were roaring twenty times a day. So, as you say, he wasn’t trying to get away from the world. In some ways, he was trying to get into it. It goes back to what I was saying about solitude being a means to him, more fruitful engagement with society. 

When you ask me what he means to me, I always remember many of his sentences from when I was 21, most pertinently, “How can we kill time without injuring eternity?” which he said.

I often think—to go back to one of your earlier questions—my aim in life is not to kill time, but to restore it. To give one concrete example, every evening at home, I’m waiting for my wife to come back from work. I don’t know if I’ll wait twenty minutes or seventy minutes, so I used to “kill” the time, scroll around online, watch TV, and I thought, “Wait, let me make the most of this time, embrace it, restore it.” Then I just turned off the lights, listened to some music. I felt so much fresher when I heard her key in the door. I slept better. I was less jangled when I woke up. It was a little practice whereby I was making time my friend, rather than just trying to while it away or indeed kill it.

Then he famously said, I’m talking about marching to the beat of a different drummer, which really has to do with how you’re keeping time and how you’re spending time. I think one thing he was doing in his cabin was ensuring he could make the most of time, because his hours were unobstructed and undistracted. That’s what I do in the hermitage. That’s why, probably, I moved to Japan so that, as it were, all the time could be my own. I wouldn’t be spending hours in traffic jams, or racing from chore to chore because my life is very circumscribed, and therefore, time seems to expand when I’m there.

One reason I left New York City for Japan was Thoreau telling me he didn’t want to die feeling he’d never lived. When I was living in this city, I was having such a good time. I thought, “I could easily wake up and realize I’m 70 years old, and I’ve never explored any other options, so let me consciously try something else while I’m still in my 20s.” I’m glad I did that.

SB: Would you say that the hermitage in some sense is your own Walden?

PI: Yeah, and Japan maybe even more so, partly because of my nature anyway, and partly because Japan’s a very quiet, contemplative place and partly because the hermitage has helped to shape my life in Japan. So I moved between two Waldens. I created a global Walden for myself. [Laughter]

SB: Your father was a philosopher, and he befriended the Dalai Lama, whom you then met in your teens.

PI: Yes.

SB: You’ve now been visiting the Dalai Lama for decades, and traveling across Japan with the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan entourage on their annual visits.

PI: Yes.

SB: In 2008, you even published a book about him titled The Open Road. I wanted to just take a moment to reflect on this because, again, it’s almost a lifelong relationship with one of the most famous, I guess we should say, people in the world. Not that the fame of it matters, it’s more who he is. But, I mean, you have extremely rare access to somebody that…. I mean, it’s like having the Pope on speed dial or something. [Laughter] What’s your time been like with him, for you? What have been some of the greatest teachings or learnings that you’ve learned from him, perhaps even about time?

PI: Yeah, I think yes, I was going to think about the ones in time. When he comes to Japan, as you say, my wife and I spend every minute of his working day from 8:30 in the morning, when he comes out of his hotel room to 4:30 in the afternoon, when he goes back into it next to him by his side. What strikes me is just—he never takes a break in those eight hours. Sometimes his hosts will say, “Your, Holiness, do you want a little time by yourself? Do you want to take lunch and just catch your breath?” “No, no, we must be together.”

I’m exhausted just watching him go through his day, even though I’m twenty-two years younger than he is. That’s partly because I realized that, every morning, while I’m helping myself to a second portion at the buffet breakfast, and enjoying my beauty sleep, he’s waking up—even on the road—at 3:30 in the morning, and spending his first four hours meditating. He has to do that. That’s part of his job description, as it were. 

But sometimes, I think, If the busiest man I know can spend four hours a day meditating, I could probably afford to spend twenty minutes just being quiet. The meditation is like the football huddle I was mentioning. It’s a way of gathering his resources so that as soon as he’s out in the world, he’s absolutely present, and he’s giving himself entirely to everyone he meets in the course of the day, from a 5-year-old child to an 80-year-old grandmother. I think he’s very conscious of time in every sense, both the fact that he’s mortal, and he has to get a lot done—because there’s no Tibetan who can do quite what he has been doing—and conscious of the time, the hours of the day, and not wanting to waste any of them. That’s why the Buddha said, “You’re living in a burning house, so do what you can right now, because we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

The other thing that speaks to me a lot is he’s very conscious about his sleep. I used to like it when, even in his early seventies, if there was a big dinner in his honor, he’d say, “I’m really sorry; I have to leave at 7 o’clock. The most important thing is sleep, otherwise I can’t do justice to it tomorrow.” I am pretty fanatical about sleep. I don’t care what I wear or what I eat or where I am, but I’m really jealous about my sleep, maybe in some relation to time, because I want my time to be fresh and wide awake and not half-time.

SB: Well, he’s also been the leader of his people since age 4, which….

PI: Yes.

SB: I mean, just think about who you were at age 4.

PI: Yes. Yes.

SB: It’s remarkable, from a time perspective. What an incredible weight to have to carry with you through your entire— I mean, basically every waking minute other than the first four years of his life.

PI: Yes. Yes. Eighty-five years. He was leader of his people before World War II. Isn’t that a thought? Before Pearl Harbor, which seems ancient, ancient history to us. I think you probably know it, because you’ve done so much research that when my father first visited him, I was 3 years old. The Dalai Lama sent a picture to me, through my father, of him when he was 4 years old on the Lion Throne in Lhasa. So, as a little boy as I was growing up, if I felt sorry for myself, “Oh, I’m going to boarding school. I’m so far from my parents,” I looked at this picture of a 4-year-old already ruling six million people. I’m trying to put things in perspective. I couldn’t feel sorry at all. [Laughter]

SB: Moving ahead to your book-publishing life, which now goes back almost four decades.

PI: Yes, it does.

SB: In 1988, you published your first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, and this began this journey, which now has included everything from The Lady and the Monk, from 1991; Lonely Places, from ’93; and The Global Soul, from 2000. I wanted to bring up Lonely Places, in particular, because time does play an interesting role in that book. In it, you travel to places such as North Korea, Argentina, Cuba, and Iceland. You write, “More than space, it is in time that Lonely Places are often exiles, and it is their very remoted-ness from the present tense that gives them their air of haunted glamour.”

PI: Mmm!

SB: Elsewhere, you add, “You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a lonely place.” So, more than thirty years later now and now well into this age of technology and smartphones and social media and people sharing images from some of the remotest places on earth, I was wondering, do you think there’s still such a thing as a lonely place—other than maybe North Korea, which I think probably would still be very similar today to what you wrote back then? What would it look like for you to write a Lonely Places book now?

PI: Thank you—such a thoughtful question. I have been back to North Korea, and it hasn’t changed. It’s changed a huge amount on the surface, a hundred new skyscrapers, but basically, it’s the same place I visited. Sadly, Cuba, which is at the center of that book, is still out of time. They’re still driving 56 Chevies, and have pictures of Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson. It’s completely been left behind by the speeding social media century. Burma, too, which is not in that book, is another place that’s musty and cobwebbed. At some level, I think that out-of-time-ness still remains.

Bhutan is a place I wrote about then—when they didn’t even have television in—1999. Now they do, and of course they have the internet, but people go to Bhutan because it feels so slow, and because it gives them a chance to take a deep breath and be closer to the rhythms of nature rather than that of technology. I suppose a lot of my recent writing is premised upon my sense that we’re living at a post-human speed, and that humans were never designed to live at a pace determined by machines. I think that’s what we’re chafing against and longing for liberation from. That’s why I go to the monastery, and that’s why people go to places like Bhutan still, because it feels like a human pace or the pace of a donkey cart, whatever.

I think a lot of travel is determined by that. So, I think there are still Lonely Places, always will be. The faster our lives are, the more we will hunger for those slower places.

SB: Broad question here, but how do you think about your time? You touched on this earlier when you were talking about airports and the jittery feeling of being in an airport, making sure you make it to your flight on time.

PI: Yes. Yes.

SB: But I wanted to ask, in airports, in liminal spaces, on airplanes, on buses, there’s a portal nature to it, the before and after. You, more than probably most people on earth, have spent a lot of time in these spaces. In your writing, you’ve often noted how the minute you step off a cable car, a plane, whatever the vessel is, you’re in another world. I guess a multipronged question, but: How do you think about your time in the vessel and then emerging from it? And what do you make of the compression and expansion of time in that? The way I’m describing it now, it almost does sound like a form of time travel, which it is, but it’s just become so everyday and accessible that we forget that.

PI: That’s a rich question. I’ll start with the second half. I think you know—because you’ve read me so closely and fully—I made a big study of jet lag, using myself as a specimen, and I realized I don’t trust myself. Anything I say or do for a week after crossing an ocean, the Atlantic or Pacific, I’m in a displaced alternative reality. It’s like being on drugs or drunk or whatever it is. I try to use that to my advantage, and do things I wouldn’t otherwise, such as walking through the night for days after I fly back to Asia, and seeing the hours of the day that I never see, usually.

It’s easy to think about exploring foreign countries, but for me, because I go to sleep quite early, it’s an excitement to travel around 2 a.m. and then 4 a.m., and a whole different world manifests. It’s like the world of the subconscious. You never see [it] during the official daylight hours. I try to work with jet lag in that way, and the jolt of crossing seventeen time zones in an afternoon, which I did two weeks ago and I’ll do it again next week. 

At the other part of it, though, in the vessel itself, for example, this evening, I’ll be flying from here in New York City to California and then from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. I’ll basically be spending ten hours in an airport or an airplane, mostly in an airplane. I will use that time to do nothing at all, consciously. I won’t try to sleep. I may sleep some of the time, but I won’t turn on the video monitor. I won’t read. I’m just going to sit, sit, sit, and use it as a kind of meditation space. Sometimes ideas will come to me, and I’ll scribble them down. Sometimes nothing comes, but I find by doing nothing, it’s amazing how much I wake up refreshed tomorrow. So tomorrow, I will wake up— Well, I’ll go to sleep today at midnight in California, which is 3 a.m. in New York time, and I’ll wake up four hours later. I won’t have slept much in my bed, but I’m guessing I’ll be pretty fresh, thanks to the six hours on a cross-country flight where I’m just resting. 

I don’t know how much that has to do with time, but I like what you say about portals and these opportunities. Nowadays, I find the only time I get long letters from friends is when they’re on planes, and they say, “Suddenly, I’m freed from the clock. I’m in this six-hour, in-between no man’s land. That’s when I can read a book or see a movie or even write a letter to a friend.” It speaks to how cut up our lives are down on earth that we suddenly feel expanded as soon as we’re freed of that.

SB: Well, and just the integration of time that the body has to go through when you go through this travel. In your book Autumn Light, there’s this great moment: You’re in conversation with a woman at a health club near your home in Kyoto. You tell her, “I’m just off a plane. It’s one in the morning in my stomach. Even later in my brain.”

PI: Of course, I don’t know who I am or where I am or when I am in those places. One thing I do that surprises all my friends now, is that while I’m living in Japan, I sometimes have to do events in California. I fly over for the day, and I just stay on Japan time. I go to bed at four in the morning. I wake up at noon. I do the event, and next day, I’m in the plane—and it’s as if I’ve never left Japan. I’m trying to work with time instead of pushing against it. It’s a little different from what we’re talking about right now, but for me, the biggest luxury in my life, which I experienced in the hermitage and in Japan, is I take off my watch as soon as I arrive, because it doesn’t matter what time it is.

The other problem—my personal problem—is I’m so attuned to time. I can usually tell you the time to the minute without looking at my watch. And writing—I’ve been writing by myself at my desk for thirty-eight years. I can tell exactly when ninety minutes are up, exactly when three hundred minutes are up. I know precisely how many minutes my shower is going to take. I’m very time-bound in that way.

SB: Where do you think that time attunement comes from?

PI: I suppose what you said wonderfully earlier on about habit and ritual, doing the same thing every day. Thirty-eight years, that’s probably, what, ten thousand days or more of doing it. I know my body rhythms, and I know exactly when I’m going to get tired and exactly when I’m going to wake up again. In that way, I’m always captive to time. But just the sense of taking off my watch, which means I’m out of the calendar, and I’m not thinking about appointments and the like really feels like the ultimate luxury for me.

SB: I like the sun as the clock.

PI: Yes. Yes.

SB: I grew up in Colorado near the foothills of the Rockies, and the sun would always go down over the Rockies, in the west. That experience actually has been a compass for me. I actually always know which direction I’m pointing and generally roughly what time of day it is—

PI: Wow.

SB: —just because of that understanding of the sun’s rotation and which way is west, and which season it is, roughly, what time it is.

PI: Yes. Even though sunrise and sunset are very different in New York from Colorado.

SB: Yes, even though.

PI: Wow. I’m envious of that sense of direction, which I don’t have at all. I couldn’t tell you which is west or east. [Laughter]

SB: On the subject of travel—and in hindsight—I wanted to ask, after decades of doing this gig, what do you think is the main reason you or anyone should travel? What’s the point of it?

PI: I don’t like “should” so much, but in my case, what I do is I want to come back from any trip a different person from the one who’s left home. I want to be upended, startled, and confronted with something I don’t meet in my day-to-day life. Because I live in fairly comfortable and easy places, mostly Japan, a bit California, I seek out uncomfortable, uneasy places like the North Korea we were just mentioning. So many of my friends are spending fifty weeks a year tethered to the desk. When they get their two weeks of vacation, of course they want to stretch out and go somewhere comfortable. But I’m in a lucky position, because I’m sort of my own boss, and I’m living by my own schedule, so I don’t have that pressure. I want to go somewhere that’s going to shock me.

SB: Well, here, I have to bring up hotels then.

PI: All right, good. Good.

SB: This is a self-serving question, I admit, because you wrote this beautiful foreword to the forthcoming book Culture: The Leading Hotels of the World, which I edited, and The Slowdown’s overseeing the editorial direction of this multivolume book series. But what to you makes a great hotel? Connected to that, why should someone travel? Why should someone stay at a particular hotel?

PI: I’m happy you’re asking me about planes and hotels, because I’ve lived most of my life with them. I am the strange human who, left to my own devices, would be glad to live my whole life in a hotel. The hermitage, of course, is one example. Whenever I’ve had an apartment, I’ve made it antiseptic and as impersonal as a hotel room. Even our two-room apartment we share in Japan, my wife makes it as human as possible, but left to my own devices, I’d make it inhuman just like a Motel 6 room.

What makes a hotel wonderful? I suppose the obvious things would be warmth. The amenity—I want everything to work, but beyond that, the amenities are not so important. But when I think of the hotels I’ve really cherished, I suppose it’s got to do with a warmth of welcome and a sense that you’re in a kind of home. I mean, I will tell you I’m staying…. Somebody is putting me up right now in New York in, I think, the most expensive hotel in the city. It’s almost two thousand dollars a night. Yesterday, I needed just a little milk for my tea, and it took me more than an hour to get it. Then I was thinking…. I mean, I’m lucky I’m not paying for it, but if I were paying for it, I would be a little unsettled. 

SB: [Laughs]

PI: As you know, from Japan, in the most modest hotel, you ask for a little milk, and six people will be at your door in three minutes saying, “Would you like this milk? Can we give you this in addition?” Japanese hotels are wonderful because the service is so excellent. They’re less wonderful, because as you know, they’re by the book. They’re not full of imagination. I used to think Thailand had the best hotels in the world. Now, I think India does, because they’re so romantic and glamorous, especially certain of the high-end brands there. Also, they have lots of people around. The service can be very, very good. They’re offering you this mix of exoticism and comfort, which is maybe what we’re always looking for. 

I feel in a relationship, in a location, in a job, we’re looking for a blend of what’s foreign and what’s familiar, because what’s foreign stimulates us and keeps us interested, and what’s familiar comforts us and keeps our heart at peace. Maybe that’s what I’m looking for in a hotel.

SB: Maybe this is a cheat question, but I’m just curious what your answer would be. Whether we’re talking about a hotel or a destination—of everywhere you’ve been, everything you’ve ever done, what’s the most ecstatic or extraordinary or ethereal or otherworldly moment, experience you’ve had in your travels? What would be the thing? Is it the hermitage? [Laughs] Is there a moment that you can think of from all your time traveling that stands out as something that forever changed you?

PI: Yes. I mean, I have too many answers to that.

SB: Yeah, I assumed. [Laughs]

PI: Yes. The most extraordinary place I’ve been is Antarctica. I’m not very sensitive to nature, but it was beyond anything I had seen or imagined—partly because of the sense of silence you feel, and the thousand shades of white. You can feel your remoteness from everywhere else. I’d never forget a moment when I was in my twenties working in New York City, and I stepped out onto a terrace in Lhasa outside the Potala Palace. I felt lifted above myself, not just on the rooftop of the world, but the rooftop of my consciousness.

The art islands around Naoshima and Teshima in Japan I make pilgrimages to every year, because they, as reliably as the Big Sur, New Camaldoli Hermitage, take me back to somewhere deep that otherwise would be forgotten. Then I think you already know—because you researched me so intensively—that my first day in Japan was really the one that changed my life forever. Walking around the town of Narita, near the airport outside Tokyo.

SB: Walk me through this experience, because it’s amazing. You’re not actually on a trip to Japan. You’re connecting through Japan, and you have a few extra hours before your flight.

PI: Yes, yes, and being a feckless kid at 26, I am killing that time. In other words, I’m just whiling away the hours, waiting twenty hours until I can get my flight back to J.F.K. I sleep, and I have breakfast. I still have four hours to kill. I figure I’m never going to be in Japan again, but I see this little sign offering a free shuttle bus to the town of Narita. Airport towns, whether it’s Queens or Inglewood, are not places of great refinement and civilization. But, what have I got to lose? [Laughs] 

I get into this little minivan, and it takes me through this built-up concrete world of convenience stores and skyscrapers. It drops me off on a bridge, and I go across the bridge and suddenly I’m in this world of narrow lanes and old wooden houses with slippers laid out perfectly at the entrance, and tatami mats and flashes of red and gold through the back windows from the autumn. I follow this riddle of lanes to a thousand-year-old temple, big white gravel courtyard. I’d never seen a Buddhist temple before. I sit there a little bit, and then I come out, and I follow some graves to where the temple garden is. There’s little kids, 5 years old, in pink and blue caps scattering across the lawn, collecting autumn leaves.

It’s a late October day, which means blazing blue skies and the first touch of cold and wistfulness in the air. Somehow, I recognize that moment, that place, that feeling, and I feel it recognizes me. There’s this totally inexplicable sense of familiarity. I realize, unless I come back here, I will be exiled for life. Something will be unresolved inside me. By the time I board my plane, two hours later, I’ve decided—on the basis of that one unwanted layover morning—to move to Japan. It took me three years to extricate myself from my job in Midtown Manhattan, but I did. Then I moved to Japan, and I’ve never regretted that. I’ve been there thirty-seven years.

That intuition was the right one. I do feel that everybody has these secret places where you feel a connection you can’t explain away. If you’re really lucky, as I was, you can actually try to spend as much time as possible in them. It’s like going into a crowded party, meeting a stranger, and feeling you’ve known her forever. That was the moment that literally changed my life. When that day began, I had this exciting life in New York City. As far as I was concerned, it would continue indefinitely. Five hours later, I decided I was going to throw over the life I knew and had worked hard to get and was going to plunge into the unknown.

SB: Have you gone back to this town of Narita since?

PI: Yes, yes. Thank you for asking. In 2008, I was flying from California to Varanasi, in India. I was flying through Beijing—Tokyo, and Beijing. So that month, I was in Varanasi and Jaipur and Mauritius and Gaul and Colombo in Sri Lanka—all places I’d almost never seen before, very exciting places. The single highlight was, again, the layover at Narita Airport. It happened to be I think January 2nd. I went to that same temple—it was thronged, in this case, with families celebrating the new year. My morning at Narita Temple was better than Beijing and Varanasi and Mauritius and Jaipur and Gaul and Colombo combined. I guess that intuition that sent me to Japan was certainly the right one.

SB: Not to end our conversation today on a melancholy note, but I wanted to bring up death. You’ve written so much about death.

PI: Yes. I have. Yes.

SB: I’m sure we could probably do a deep reading of all your books, and find death notes in them, basically. In Aflame, you write, “How to prepare for death? It becomes a central question in any monastery, and one without an answer. I spend time with monks and nuns, I realize, because they’re giving themselves full-time to the essential practices: learning how to love in the midst of loss. And how to hope in the face of death.” In your 2023 book, The Half Known Life, you write, “The thought that we must die… is the reason we must live well.” And in Autumn Light, you write, “Dying is the art we have to master.” What do these three quotes bring to mind for you from a temporal or philosophy-of-time perspective? I guess what’s your— Maybe give us some death notes here. [Laughter]

PI: Again, I’m really humbled and stunned—you’re like a literary critic. You’re seeing these subliminal strands in these books that I don’t think most readers would notice, and I would barely notice. Now, it must be said, all those last three books from which you quote come from my sixties. I think most— I’m much older than you. Most people at their sixties realize they’re in the autumn of their lives, Act Four, and realize their job is getting less and less important, and their parents are no longer around perhaps, and they have to face what’s coming next, the last act that’s inevitable.

I think almost every writer is turning in that direction in their sixties. If you read my books from my twenties or thirties, there’s nothing about death. [Laughter] It’s all youth and excitement and possibilities. As it should be. I do think it’s archetypal. I mean, I think most of us have the same concerns when in our twenties, in our thirties, and forties and sixties. I’m writing a book about Shakespeare now, kind of to suggest that—that the seven ages of man and what you see in his place are what all of us go through. 

What I learned from the monks, I think, in the Aflame book, was that, when I first began spending time with them, I thought, “Oh, well, I will learn how to love, and I will learn how to live.” But most of all, as you said, “I will learn how to die.”Then I thought, Actually, there’s something even harder, which is how to be with the dying. It’s hard enough for us to contemplate our deaths, but what the monks have to face is that they’re living with mostly elderly brothers who are very frail, and these people that they’ve lived with every day for thirty years are falling away. How do they tend to them? How do they live with that loss? As you said in the sentences you quoted, how do they make their brother’s lives as comfortable as possible when those guys are fading over the horizon? I haven’t learned anything from that, but I do feel, at some point in life, unless you think about death, you can’t really live. The thought of death is actually what makes life wonderful. 

I mean, I feel we haven’t mentioned this word yet in our conversation, but gratitude is part of it. In other words, I’m happy that, coming on for 68, I’m in relatively good health, as is my wife, who’s the same age. My mother lived to 90. Time has been quite kind to us in that regard—kinder than I might’ve expected. I’m so glad that it hasn’t been my adversary, as perhaps I feared it would be when I was a kid. Who knows when the end will come? But so far, we’re lucky. 

If we’re drawing to the end, though, I would like to ask you two questions. Can I?

SB: Okay. Yeah, I’m not ready for this. But sure. [Laughs]

PI: Good. Even better. [Laughs] I’m interested, what moved you to make time the center of these conversations?

SB: It was a several-fold thing. One was a job—probably not so dissimilar from the one you described in a Manhattan skyscraper. We weren’t in a Manhattan skyscraper, actually, but I was working a fast-paced editorial job at a magazine, and feeling time slipping away, and sensing also that maybe, in our fast-paced media environment, there could be a place for slowness. I was interested in potentially starting a company or a podcast around this idea of slowing down. So that’s where it started.

But then if I go further back, it’s really rooted in the fact that I survived a split-second plane crash in 1989, when I was nearly 4. For me, that experience was very much a before and an after. The way that time shifted in that second made me realize that time can do that for everybody. It happens one way or another. That was my experience and my story, but I feel like everybody has these instances with time, maybe not on the level of a plane crash, but on some level where something occurs in their life, and time shifts. 

There are probably other answers I have to that question, but those are the two that are top of mind.

PI: Just what you said, this last couple of sentences suddenly reminds me: I had, I guess, a near-death experience with a car crash. 

SB: Oh.

PI: A guy on New Year’s Day, in Bolivia, at thirteen thousand feet, a driver who hadn’t slept all night drove right into the side of a mountain, and flipped the car over and over. Maybe as you experienced, as I saw that the mountain was seconds away from us, time did slow down. All these questions went through my head, and it was suddenly in slow motion, just the way you always hear about it. As I listened to you just then, I could remember that sensation—it seemed like an eternity as I saw we were about to crash into the mountain.

SB: Well, in my case, I was in a coma for several days after.

PI: I’m so sorry.

SB: I have no memory of the event. So, in some sense, my life has been an investigation of time. It is trying to understand time on that deep, visceral, physical level. I know my body feels it, but there’s this disjointed thing between my body and my brain in relation to that event. Maybe this show is a selfish way of me integrating those two things by interviewing some of the greatest minds on earth about time.

PI: Such a soulful and beautiful answer. I guess you’ve almost answered my other question, which was— As you said, you and I have been working for a few months together on another project.

SB: Yes.

PI: When I saw the Slowdown Media—that’s what it’s called, right?

SB: Yes.

PI: Of course, maybe like most people, I thought, “I wonder what that connotes, and why they came up with this name.” It sounds like it’s partly because you felt the world was moving too fast when you were in that office building, and that we were craving slowness. Is that right?

SB: Yes, and that—not in a didactic way, but there could be a way for slow media, let’s call it, not dissimilar from Slow Food. If you look back at the history of food in the twentieth century, the creation of the television and the industrialization of food go hand in hand—the TV dinner, frozen meals, the rise of McDonald’s and fast food, takeaway culture, all of that. I think with computers and the speed at which content is distributed, produced, and consumed, there are definitely some connections. 

I didn’t want to create a media company that’s specific about like, “This is how you should consume content, or this is how you should….” It’s more about creating storytelling at a slower pace, a thoughtful pace, a long-form pace, the kind of pace where Pico can come to the studio, and we sit down for an hour, and have a thoughtful conversation that also—on the front end—is hours and hours of research that allow these sorts of things to open up. I think that’s where slowing down is created, actually, is that the time that goes into the production and then the time that comes out of it. 

Ultimately, I want to leave that with the listeners. To me, that’s an ideal that they would feel—it’s felt time. They know that something has been put into this. That’s not just your average, “Let’s sit down and have a talk.” Because if I sat down with you today not having read these books, it’d be the same thing that you’re reading on an Instagram post or something.

PI: Yes.

SB: Not much substance.

PI: Yes. In every case, because you steeped yourself for so many hours or days in my work, you’re asking questions nobody else has asked me. That’s going to elicit a much more excited and alive response from me, too. Of course, I guess podcasts themselves are a form of slowness and returning to a human base.

SB: At their best. At their best. [Laughs]

PI: At their best, yes. Yes.

SB: Well, I have a final, final, final question.

PI: Yes.

SB: You’ve spent a lot of time in monasteries, as is evident to all the listeners now, but also in cemeteries, which I learned through your work in Japan are known as “cities of tomorrow,” a notion I absolutely love and didn’t know.

PI: Yes. Yes.

SB: Aptly, you’ve described a monastery effectively as an R&D lab “for coming to terms with loss.” Do you think this is your life’s work in some sense, or at least of your more recent writing and work, not so much writing explicitly about travel, but rather about engaging in understanding how to thrive in the face of so much loss around us?

PI: Thank you. Actually, yes, I think I said almost at the beginning of the conversation, that seems to be the question of today. Like any writer, before I embark on a project that’s going to take several years, I’m thinking, What does the culture need at this point? What do people need to be addressing? I feel that is the question, certainly for me in my sixties. But also, we’re living in a culture of distraction, and turning away from reality, I feel, so my tiny mission as a writer is to try to bring us back to reality, and face the inevitabilities, not in order to be more depressed, but actually to be more hopeful and to make better use of the time, because we take too much for granted, and suddenly our time is all over.

Talking a minute ago reminded me of a little thing I had wanted to say earlier, which I forgot, and you probably know already, which is that when they conducted a survey, they found that people nowadays are working fewer hours than in the 1960s, but we feel we’re working more. Something’s gone wrong. We’re not putting in as many hours as people did in our parents’ or grandparents’ generations, and yet we’re more stressed. That’s something we need to address. 

The other thing is as we’re multitasking and taking in sixteen text messages in every second, are we failing to address some more-important issue? Because unless we think about dying, we’re not really going to be thinking about how we want to live, as in that quote that you read for me. That’s my tiny social mission currently—personal, because it faces me, but social, because I don’t want death to catch anybody unawares.

SB: Let’s end there. That’s beautiful. Thank you, Pico. This was such a pleasure.

PI: Such a delight for me, Spencer. Really, thank you for all the time you’ve put into this.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on January 24, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, Kylie McConville, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph by Derek Shapton.