The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise

What is heaven?

As a travel writer, my idea of ​​paradise comes from glossy travel brochures filled with images of far-flung places: white-sand beaches with long-necked palm trees, the snowy mountain retreats of Shangri-La, or sunny destinations like Santorini in the Greek islands.

Ayer has upended my idea of ​​heaven in terms of travel. I no longer want to travel as a tourist with a checklist of must-see pages in a guidebook. In fact, Iyer pays little attention to tourist sites, preferring to write in frank prose about the people he meets and the colorful, if not the most bizarre, facts close to our hotels and tourist bus stops.

He writes: “True heaven has no meaning until one has transcended all notions of perfection and taken the measure of the fallen world.” In other words, we should take off our blinders, deal with the world as it is, and embrace what we cannot know.

For Ayer, “the beauty of travel is that the visitor can see the blessings in a place that locals might take for granted.” He conveys this point playfully when he describes meeting a local official atop the sacred Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka who “seemed very keen to talk about the year he had spent in that paradise known as Providence, in Rhode Island.” It was an irony all the more ironic because Adam’s Peak is a pilgrimage of religious devotion for Buddhists, Christians and Hindus alike. For Ayer, the Adam Summit was “a lesson about how eager we are to project our hopes into what we don’t know.”

During his travels, Ayer encountered numerous religious beliefs about heaven in the afterlife, which led him to believe that “a Buddhist heaven must be different from a Christian heaven” and, by inference, from all other heavens. When Ayer visited Iran, “the culture that officially invented heaven,” he was surprised by the many visions of heaven “that criss-cross every hour here with furious intensity.” He concludes that “theological arguments are misplaced” and notes that even the Dalai Lama (with whom he has traveled ten times) prefers to talk about “shared experience, common sense and scientific discoveries.” Ayer would like to believe that there is a heaven for everyone, although he hopes this is not only achieved in the grave.

Visit the paradise of the world

The author takes us on an amazing tour through travel paradises and famous holy places of the world in this book. As he travels in the footsteps of pilgrims, he is influenced by the sacred, although he does not claim any religion of his own. Over the course of more than fifty years, he visited Tibet, the Maldives, the Seychelles, and Bali, as well as war-torn religious paradises such as Iran (once Persia, where the likes of Verdovsky, Omar Khayyam, and Rumi poetically sang), Kashmir, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Paradise on Earth, the hermit kingdom of North Korea. He takes us to Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock), which he describes as having an “almost alarming allure”. We accompany him to the secluded Koyasan Temple in Japan, the eerie “Death City” of Varasan, India, and walk through the tough streets of Belfast, where we are surprised to learn that he is searching for the old neighborhood of “the snarling transcendent singer, Van Morrison.”

Dark truths

Poetic writing with rich dialogues, literary references and vivid descriptions of Eyre’s experiences make this outstanding travel writing. But there is another dimension to Ayer’s travel memoirs. He is the philosopher (with journalistic chops) who exposes the contradictions and dark truths about the paradise we dream of.

• “In Sri Lanka, the dark side haunted me more than ever: perhaps it was my mere presence here that enabled the island to affix the label of paradise, above more thorny truths.”
• And so, the infamous Jerusalem: “A riot of paradise scenes overlapping at crooked angles until one is left with the grief of six different Christian sects, sharing the same space, hitting each other with brooms.”

Our lives can only be half known

I found Air flights great. He is a former journalist who establishes himself in the places he visits. The book is short on dates, but that’s because The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise is not just a travelogue. It is a philosophical quest based on lifelong curiosity and wonder.

Ayer reflects on his journeys to earthly paradise and believes that “our life can only be half known as its last act.” Since that would be death, he believed, “heaven must be found not only in the midst of life, but in the midst of death.”

For the unflinching Ayer, “Truth is neither an insult nor a perversion, but the partner with whom we must build our lives.” He says (and this is a quote I took to heart) that it’s about “finding the wonder in the moment.”

My final thoughts

The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise It is a masterpiece of travel writing. Ayer’s observations and insights are a compelling invitation to take off our blinders to see the world in all its raw glory. If we’re really serious about finding a piece of heaven during our travels, it’s time to stop worrying about the colorful cruise and resort bracelets that give us access to lobster or tequila when the dinner bell rings. There are much bigger questions to explore and ponder as we explore our mysterious world. To better experience and understand other cultures, we must choose an authentic experience that designer travel tours, all-inclusive resorts and themed cruises cannot provide.