Free The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer Page A

articulate then, as if we had stepped out of a cozy drawing-room comedy, written by Greene in a holiday mood, and into some Old Testament text about the end—or the beginning—of the world. But for my father, I later realized, he could not have arrived in a better place at a better time. His deepest commitment had always been to possibility, the mystic’s belief that there’s a better life hidden within the one we see; the maxim he most loved tocite to students was from Greene’s favorite, Unamuno, about how, to achieve the impossible, one must attempt the absurd. He had even named his only child after the Buddha and the fifteenth-century Italian Neo-Platonist who had written an “Oration on the Dignity of Man.”
    And now he was in a state that seemed given over to unlimited potential, discussing
The Symposium
with some of the world’s most interesting thinkers in the mornings and at night walking in candlelit rallies for peace with Joan Baez and other young champions of hope. He was invited to teach at the local university, along with my philosopher mother, and soon they were both finding that students in California in the ’60s, unlike the students they’d taught at Oxford, weren’t embarrassed about professing an interest in their studies, didn’t believe they had all the answers, were sometimes almost touchingly open to transformation. Three hundred, four hundred kids started crowding into the lecture halls where my father was talking on Bakunin and Thomas Paine (and, perhaps, the
Perry Mason
show he’d watched on TV the previous night), binding them all together into a soaring synthesis; he began holding his office hours in an all-night coffee shop, so that students could bring him their questions, their hopes or their plans for as long as they wished. Sometimes, he would still be talking, on Coleridge and Pythagoras, as the sun began to show above the far-off ridge at 6:00 a.m.
    It was those from the Old World who had the keenest sense, I thought, of how much could be done in this hopeful and accommodating society and how, in fact, the very principles of classical philosophy could be given new wings and life in this place so unconcerned with history. Christopher Isherwood, Greene’s distant cousin, came to our local Hindu temple to talk about how he’d decided to devote his literary energies tothe Indian swami he’d met here; he’d seen through the decadence of Europe, the worn-out skepticisms of England, and this life seemed more exciting to him. Felix Greene, the first cousin with whom Graham had grown up in England, helped to found a mystical community in the desert east of Los Angeles where Aldous Huxley, Greene’s contemporary and longtime fascination, could deepen his research into the perennial philosophy. Somerset Maugham, Greene’s most obvious precedent, had told Isherwood, down the road, that his great wish as he approached seventy was to go to India to study Shankara.
    When my parents took me down to the campus in the warm, subtropical evenings, I could hear wild guitar riffs and Oedipal screams—the Doors—floating out of the basketball gym and across to where the Pacific lapped against the shore just in front of the university lagoon; a little later, the students would burn down our local Bank of America and more or less announce that they were fashioning a new world from scratch, whether in preparation for the future or just celebration of the powers of eternal youth, nobody much troubled to say.
    But for a little boy it was all a bit unsettling, and perhaps more so in the presence of a father with vivid and esoteric views, and no siblings to cushion the effect. I didn’t know what to make of the two pictures of Western occultists my father kept on his bookshelves, next to Gandhi, and I couldn’t follow his frequent references to demons and magicians, a mysterious psychic sphere that filled the invisible spaces around us. And the California I knew seemed so far from time and even