Free The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer

our priestly clan—who’d lived in a cave for seventeen years, practicing “self-enquiry” and communicating mostly through silence (I’d meet him later in the guru based on him in Somerset Maugham’s
The Razor’s Edge
, and the essay, fascinated though open-ended, Maugham wrote about their encounter, “The Saint”). But such unworldly influences my father had balanced and made more rigorous by reading Hobbes and Hume and Locke, as well as the English poets. It was as if his life was to be consecrated to the joining of the spiritual and the political domains; and by linking them together, he could perhaps join East and West as well, separated, for the time being, as he’d written in his first book, by a “glass curtain.”
    I suppose a main character in a Graham Greene novel might have pretended to mock my father for having more belief than a traditional Englishman admits to; he was an idealist and a vegetarian, like the reformist Smiths whom Greene’s alter egoBrown keeps laughing at in
The Comedians
. He’d been taught, as my mother and so many in their generation and before had been, that the natural culmination of any good Indian student in British India was Britain, but when he got there, he’d found that the place he’d been taught to admire was trapped in a long tradition of skepticism and “on the other hand”s, the stuff out of which Greene had formed his negative creed. The ambition that had brought him there was exactly what wasn’t always welcome, and someone who could rattle off passages from Milton and the King James Bible—and then link them to a text in Tibetan Buddhism—could seem too emphatic and eager to make a point (or an impression).
    So here we were now on the farthest edge of the New World, where my father had been invited to join a think tank, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, at which philosophers from around the globe would gather to discuss, quite literally, how to make a new kind of city on a hill, and put together a fresh version of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. We were driven, on a visit, between a stately pair of gates and through what seemed a tropical Eden to a Mediterranean villa, commanding fifty-six acres of eucalyptus trees above the ocean, the sky so blue it hurt my eyes, and told that we had arrived in “the Athens of the West.” It wasn’t impossible to believe.
    One year after we arrived in Santa Barbara, we bought a new house on a hill, alone on a ridge halfway up what were called “the mountains” and looking out over the white-walled, red-tiled town below to Santa Cruz Island in the distance. It had been a hippie house—kids had dropped acid here and then driven their VWs off the slope, into the cushioning beds of ice plant—and even when we bought it, it sat outside thecity limits, far from anyone’s jurisdiction. Our water came up to us from a well, reached by a jolting, forty-five-minute drive into the valley tucked below, along another unpaved road, and in the evenings the wind often howled around us at eighty miles an hour, rattling our windows and almost blowing us over as we struggled in from the car.
    One night the winds ripped the whole terrace off the side of the house overlooking the city and propelled it across the roof till it lay, grotesquely twisted, on the mountainside. My mother, waking up, and about to step out to feed the cat, almost walked into thin air.
    The house had been built by a fundamentalist who had taken very seriously the biblical injunction to build his house “upon a rock”; he had found a large boulder up amidst the brush, and without benefit of foundations—or architectural experience—laid down a two-story structure. Its rising roof gave it the look of a ship that was about to sail off across the billowing clouds that so often separated us from the town; it seemed as if we had left all moorings behind, to enter some realm of unfettered speculation.

    I felt, at some level that I could not