Pico Iyer is also a renowned essayist. Mint Lounge last week devoted a whole page to his ruminations, reproduced from the Wall Street Journal, on a book by a Finnish author that extols the virtues of quitting the rat race and slipping away, at least for a while, from "everything that sounds so important".
Don't you love the way Iyer's opening lines seduce you into reading on?
Which of us has not entertained that deliciously seditious notion: to do a Gauguin? To slip away for a while from everything that sounds so important — a steady job, a settled home, a regular salary — and go off in search of adventure, restoration, fun? There is, after all, more and more to escape these days....
The book in question is The Year of the Hare, by Arto Paasilinna ("To me [at first] he simply looked like a name with too many vowels," writes Iyer.)
The plot of "The Year of the Hare" could not be simpler. A journalist, Vatanen, is sleepwalking through his everyday life, blind to the beauties of the wild, when a hare, "tipsy with summer," runs across the road in front of the car he is traveling in. In the wake of the resulting collision, Vatanen wanders off into the forest to care for the wounded creature. Soon he is drifting farther and farther away from what is commonly known as civilization, till finally he is living in a Nature Reserve in Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle. Free of the daily grind, he finds that his senses are newly sharp, his food has a taste it never had before and he is alive as he has never been in his regular life (besides which, his wife seems hardly to miss him).
After discussing the plot in some more detail, Iyer explains why this story resonated with him:
I, too, was working for a weekly magazine, once upon a time, sequestered in a small office in midtown Manhattan, and it was just a single autumn morning, on a layover in Tokyo, that acted on me like a fast-running hare: I was killing the hours before my flight back to New York by wandering through the little town of Narita, and something in the quiet stillness of the streets, the mildness of the late October light, told me of everything I was missing in my daily life at home. Why was I living according to someone else's idea of happiness, I thought, and not according to my own? I decided to move to Japan.
Many of us might have harboured similar thoughts — Why are we living according to someone else's idea of happiness and not according to our own? — but few of us set out to change the way we live and work. Perhaps Pico Iyer's concluding paragraph may prove to be the inspiration we need:
"The Year of the Hare" reminds us that what seems so important in our daily lives may not be all that permanent or sustaining. The best resolution to make this New Year's Day might be to open your eyes to everything around you — while also recalling that most of our lofty resolutions will ultimately come to naught.
Read the essay in full here: "The Road Into the Open".
- On the same page, Pico Iyer also provides a list of other books that can "set you free". Included among the five on the list are, unsurprisingly, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, and surprise, surprise, Shakespeare's As You Like It.
- Illustration courtesy: The Wall Street Journal
