Cities of Sleep by Pico Iyer

My dreams are simply bringing forth what I think but don’t admit to myself, perhaps; they’re not revealing any truth so much as reflecting my projections back at me. Yet the way they upend what I think I think speaks for some intuitive truth: the least important moments may transform our lives more radically than crises do. I stopped off for an overnight stay at Narita Airport in 1983, and those few hours moved me to relocate to Japan. Meanwhile, the times when I have watched people go mad, try to take their lives in front of me, or die, seem barely to have left a trace.
-Pico Iyer

What fascinated me about Greene during my recent excursions into his life and work was that he seemed split down the middle: at the age of sixteen, he tried to run away from his boarding-school (not least because his father was headmaster), and, though he failed, his parents decided, in response, to send him to live for six months with a wild Jungian dream-analyst in London. For half a year during the most formative time of his life, his only academic obligation was to tell the Jungian every morning his dreams, which occasionally turned around the dream-analyst’s voluptuous wife. From that point on till the last novel Greene published before his death, The Captain and the Enemy, he returns repeatedly to stories of a boy leaving the house to which he officially belongs and descending, sometimes literally, into an underground world ruled over by a colorful, charming rogue and the rogue’s moll.
-Pico Iyer

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