Book review of The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer

In many spiritual traditions, paradise names an otherworldly realm overflowing with lush greenery, luscious fruits, honeyed scents and cascading waterfalls. In others, paradise will be attained on this world, even within the midst of the clattering cacophony surrounding us. Bestselling journey author Pico Iyer shares his personal seek for paradise in The Half Known Life, traversing the world’s vibrant spiritual traditions to uncover paradise’s contours, its purported areas and the position it performs in earthly conflicts. 

With vivid imagery and sterling prose, Iyer paperwork his wanderings from city to temple. In Tehran, Iran, for instance, he realized that Rumi endorsed readers to discover a heaven inside themselves as a result of paradise isn’t some idyllic place that transcends this world. Rumi’s poetry created a “paradise of words,” Iyer discovered, amid the unceasing strife of the nation’s numerous Islamic branches. In the Kashmir area of India, which some declare was the situation of the Garden of Eden, Iyer embraced a paradisiacal second as he floated in a houseboat within the center of a lake. In Sri Lanka, he visited Adam’s Peak, a forest outcropping that Buddhists, Christians and Hindus all declare as sacred floor. In Jerusalem, Israel, he questioned the place a “nonaffiliated soul” may discover sanctuary and “make peace among all the competing chants.” He tried his luck on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, “a riot of views of paradise overlapping at crooked angles till one was left with the sorrow of six different Christian orders sharing the same space, and lashing out at one another with brooms.” At the tip of his quest, Iyer woke to a “thick pall of mist” in Varanasi, India. It was so troublesome to see by way of that it “made every figure look even more like a visitor from another world.” Observing them, he writes, “it was easy to believe we were all caught up in the same spell, creatures in some celestial dream, ferried silently across the river and back again.”

Part travelogue, half theological meditation and half memoir, The Half Known Life shimmers with knowledge gleaned from exploring the nooks and crannies of the human soul and the world’s city and rural, secular and spiritual, landscapes.