Pico Iyer
speaker
117 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Pico Iyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes.
You know, I've been lucky enough to go to many of the idylls that we might think of as paradise, from the Seychelles to Tahiti to Bali.
And I remember when I was in my 20s, I flew through the day and through the night, and I arrived in Bali, and I woke up, and there was this golden morning all around me, and there were these smiling, kind people who were bringing me fresh fruit and tea to enjoy on the terrace of my bungalow.
Down this palmy little lane was a golden beach of my dreams.
And I thought, this really is paradise.
But then night fell.
I heard the weird, jangly sound of the gamelan orchestras in the distance.
Wild dogs were barking.
And apart from anything, I thought, even if this is paradise for me, it's probably not for the locals.
They're working so hard to make me and other visitors comfortable.
and it also made me think because I was living in New York City well if the wonderful Balinese people around me were to arrive in Manhattan tomorrow they'd probably think that's paradise which it wasn't for me working in Midtown on 25th floor office and so it was a nice way at an early stage in my life of realizing how much paradise is a projection and often an illusion and then thinking about what lay on the other side of them and
And not in the realm of fantasy, but very much in the heart of reality.
I think like pretty much everybody across the globe, I was in this state of uncertainty and close to grief, feeling death breathing around the corner and wondering how I could find hope and light and inspiration even in the middle of this difficulty.
And I thought if I can go to places of conflict and difficulty and find something that sustains me even there,
Maybe that will give me a hope that can take me even through a global pandemic and all the other challenges life is sure to throw up.
Exactly.
From Iran to North Korea and war-torn Kashmir to war-torn Sri Lanka and Varanasi.
And as you say, all the places that are not the ones that instantly come to mind.
The natural place to embark upon such an inquiry seemed to be the culture that had given us both our word for paradise and some of our most soulful images of it.
The old Iranian term, paradija, had been brought into Greek by Xenophon when he'd served as a mercenary in Persia.
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