A Beginner's Guide to Japan

Über den LUXUS der EntschleunigungIn einer Welt voller Angebote und Möglichkeiten stellt sich der bekannte Essayist und Autor Pico Iyer dem letzten großen Abenteuer: der Kunst des Innehaltens, der Entschleunigung. Nachdem er selbst ein Leben lang unterwegs war, von den Osterinseln über Katmandu bis Kuba, zeigt er uns, wie wir in einer Welt der ständigen Beschleunigung durch das Innehalten, die Konzentration auf uns selbst, mehr Inspiration, Kreativität und Ausgeglichenheit erreichen können. Denn in einer Welt voller Ablenkung ist der größte Luxus, völlig bei sich zu sein.Mit stimmungsvollen Farbfotografien

'Nothing less than a guided tour of the human soul ... A masterpiece' Elizabeth Gilbert<BR>'A work of spiritual evolution [and] inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors' Washington Post<BR>One of our most perceptive travel writers embarks on an exploration of the world's holiest places and where we might find paradise on Earth.<BR><BR>It's so easy, I thought, to place Paradise in the past or the future - anywhere but here.<BR><BR>After half a century of travel, Pico Iyer asks himself what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. In a spectacular journey, both inward and outward, he roams the globe from Jerusalem to Belfast to North Korea, from crowded mosques in Iran to a holy mountain in Japan. By the end, he has upended any of our expectations and dared to suggest that we can find paradise right in the heart of our angry and confused world.

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it's their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty.<BR><BR><BR>Returning to his home in Japan after his father-in-law's sudden death, Pico Iyer soon picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites: going to the post office in the day and engaging in spirited games of ping-pong in the evenings. But in a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, he soon finds himself grappling with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love even though we know that they - and we - are dying.<BR><BR>As the maple leaves begin to turn and the heat starts to soften, Iyer shows us a Japan we have seldom seen before through the season that reminds us to take nothing for granted.

From the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat<BR><BR><BR>Over the past three decades, Pico Iyer has made more than a hundred journeys to a small hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He's not a Christian, nor a member of any religious group, and yet his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence.<BR><BR>In Learning from Silence, Iyer travels deep into inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant change: houses burn, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other non-monastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. Most profoundly, he shows how solitude can be a training in community and companionship.<BR><BR>In so doing, he offers a unique outsider's view of monastic life - and of a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there's a space for quiet and recollection that's open to us all.<BR><BR>Radiant, intimate and gripping, Learning from Silence offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love and, ultimately, how to die.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER <BR> NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2023 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, TIME MAGAZINE & MORE<BR><BR> “Masterful . . . A book of inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors . . . One of his very best.” —Washington Post<BR>  <BR> “Dazzling.” —Time Magazine, Best Books of 2023<BR><BR> From “one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time” (Brain Pickings): a journey through competing ideas of paradise to see how we can live more peacefully in an ever more divided and distracted world.<BR><BR>Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it.<BR> <BR>Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?<BR> <BR>For almost fifty years Iyer has been roaming the world, mixing a global soul’s delight in observing cultures with a pilgrim’s readiness to be transformed. In this culminating work, he brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives.

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today -- not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power.<BR><BR>All this he did. And then he met Sachiko.<BR><BR>Vivacious, attractive, thoroughly educated, speaking English enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of a Japanese "salaryman" who seldom left the office before 10 P.M., Sachiko was as conversant with tea ceremony and classical Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe, and Vivaldi. With the lightness of touch that made Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Pico Iyer fashions from their relationship a marvelously ironic yet heartfelt book that is at once a portrait of cross-cultural infatuation -- and misunderstanding -- and a delightfully fresh way of seeing both the old Japan and the very new.