Pico Iyer

“Enter eagerly into the treasure-house that lies within you,” wrote St. Isaac the Syrian, “and so you will see the treasure-house of heaven.”

Certainty lies on the far side of humanity, and to embrace it is to build a fortress that the winds in time will overturn.

“Tilda cares nothing for the future and has, as a result, a great capacity for happiness”—Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore.

“We live like gods,” notes Richard Powers. “But very forgetful gods. Very amnesiac and babyish gods.”

We spend so much time trying to find our purpose when the only purpose we can trust is the one that finds us.

For three straight years recently, Burma, not one of the world’s wealthiest nations, placed at the top of the world’s Charity index. One of the many reasons we should support an uncommonly blue-skied and open-hearted people as they struggle against one oppression after another.

Each of us is defined at heart by the questions that we ask; the answers we find are almost beside the point.

The ineradicable artist (and devoted husband) who worked so had to document our imperiled planet--and to protect it--is gone. But Sebastiao Salgado's work (and Wim Wenders' portrait of him) will always be with us.

“We’re living in a time now when opinion is becoming as rigid and belligerent as religion and faith—so that’s another reason to keep quiet about most things.”—Leonard Cohen, all of nineteen years ago. Silence became his most eloquent speech.

“Great truth may well be mysterious,” writes Richard Rohr, paraphrasing his fellow Franciscan William Ockham, “but it is never complex.”

“Life—I am both of your directions,” Marilyn Monroe wrote in a poem.

“Traveling makes a person young,” notes Marina Abramovic, “because he doesn’t have time to get old.” She seems the living proof of her own assertion.

If interested in a full day of presentations and conversations with photographers, writers and other artists, learn more, or register, at https://t.co/XrVrKkhtEf You can stream the video at any time and use the code AFLAME for a $20 discount (I will be speaking at day's end).

Britain (home of the bovver-boy, the punk, the hooligan, the Mod and the Rocker) has been at war, by one count, with 171 of the world’s 193 nations. What happened in the other 22, one wonders?

Queen Elizabeth II wsa born in the same year as the television (her most regular foe) and the traffic-light (her greatest friend).

My longing is to go places where I can’t pronounce the names—which is to say, where I’m taken beyond what my rational mind can grasp or articulate and beyond the world I know.

“The great things are too important to be new.” Somerset Maugham.