Pico Iyer talks travel with Rolf

Writing a book has many joys to go with the challenges, and one of the joys in writing Vagabonding was that it gave me the opportunity to meet Pico Iyer, whose writing I have long admired. Pico was kind of enough to agree to an interview, and I’m featuring him in the January 2003 edition of my Writer Profiles at RolfPotts.com. To get an early peek at the interview, click here.

As usual, Pico was full of insight. Here’s an outtake:

“Travel has woken me up, in many ways. It’s taught me how provincial I and my assumptions are. It’s expanded my sense of what is possible among human beings and in terms of human kindness (and at times its opposite). And it has shown me a whole other way to live, without a steady prop, not hemmed in by familiarity, and living according to the principles and challenges I most respect. Best of all, it’s helped me see all of life as a travel, and as an occasion for writing (in order to make sense of it). A few years ago my house burned down, and I lost everything I owned; all my notes, all the books I hadn’t yet completed, all my photos and hopes and letters. And yet traveling helped me see this as a liberation: to live more at home as if I were on the road, to savor the freedom from a past and from possessions, and to think back on all the people I had met, in Tibet and Morocco and Bolivia, who would still have thought of my life as luxurious. Most of the people one meets while traveling deal with more traumas every day than the privileged among us meet in a lifetime. That’s how traveling humbles and inspires.”