Pico Iyer

To write is to step away from the clamor of the world, to take a deep breath and then, slowly and often with shaking heart, to try to make sense of the bombardment of feelings, impressions, and experiences that every day and lifetime brings. The very act of putting them down—getting them out of the beehive of the head and onto the objective reality of paper—is a form of clarification. And as the words begin to take shape and make pairings across the page, gradually you can see what you thought, or discern a pattern in the random responses, so that finally, if all goes well, you're convinced you've got something out of your system and into a domain where it creates a kind of order. Random experience becomes teaching, cautionary tale, or even blessing.

All the words, the hours at the desk, are just gestures, it comes to seem, to the emptiness that lies behind the curtain at the back of the stage, unseen by spectators and even actors. I write and write and write and what I come up with is a sense of the arbitrariness of everything that's written; I know I'll believe something else tomorrow. It's no more to be relied upon than that play of light through the trees.

Writing Undoes Me, Pico Iyer, Shambhala Sun, November 2005. link

The Value of Suffering,Pico Iyer, NYT September 2013.
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