A mutual friend of Julian's and mine has posted, at his blog, Hepzibah, a typically thoughtful and intelligent response to the Pico Iyer article mentioned here and here. I respect Hepzibah's proprietor a great deal, so I hesitate to dissent from his dissent, but my sense from reading his post is that he's using Iyer's article as a convenient peg on which to hang an argument that's been rolling around in his head for a while, waiting for an opportunity to burst into words. We all do this all the time, and when we do it's often unfair to the authors whose texts we appropriate for our own purposes.
What Alan writes is worth pondering, but it seems to me he's reacting to things that Iyer didn't actually say. I don't, for example, find Iyer as overbearingly prescriptive as Alan seems to; my impression was that, rather than trying to tell others how to live, Iyer was merely describing his own mildly unconventional choices simply because they seem to have worked for him. Yes, Iyer found his simple (a relative term, of course) life in a suburb of Kyoto, but he's certainly not, in his article, suggesting that the only place one can find a satisfyingly simple life is in his neighborhood. He would, I think, agree with Alan that "you would not have to look too hard to find someone who has found a simple life in New York over a complex life in Kyoto."
If this reaction to Alan's reaction serves no other purpose than to alert you to the existence of Hepzibah then it's been worth writing.
—David
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