The Global Soul by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer [Iyer, Pico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76463-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

One night, I went to have dinner with my friend David, whom I’d met on a plane down to Havana (he springing out at the first stop to play catch on the tarmac with a boyhood friend who turned out to be the editor of a Canadian magazine called—of course—Borderlines). David lived in an area that was now known as Portuguese (most of its signs Italian and Vietnamese and who knows what), and his girlfriend, Alicia, was a shining young Goan Christian who’d spent her earliest years in Pakistan. We sat around their kitchen table, eating tomatoes, munching on olives, the sounds and smells of Portugal wafting in through the garden window. I admired a framed print of Rabindranath Tagore (“Yes. David gave me that for my graduation!”) and Alicia’s sky blue salwar kameez (“I got it in Hyderabad, actually. Twelve dollars. Because it’s bright: Toronto needs bright colors”).

My eye fell on the box of “Global Frozen White Eggs” that sat by the door, on a program for a conference Alicia had just organized, called Competing Realities (eager to find a voice for her own heritage, she was studying South Asian writers, especially female; David, meanwhile, held Spinoza reading groups every Tuesday night to try to draw closer to his Jewish roots).

“Did you see the paper today?” he was saying now, picking up the Globe and Mail. “That piece on the back page about multiculturalism? I went to high school with that woman. Beth! I couldn’t believe she was writing so beautifully about the blending of cultures.

“See, when I was growing up”—David, I recalled, was a born storyteller—“we had this really strong nationalism, this xenophobia, and it was directed against Americans! One time—I’ll never forget this—I was sitting at my friend Beth’s dinner table, and her father was there, too, this quintessential New York Jewish intellectual. He used to cook, and he had polio, but that didn’t stop him from getting up between courses to play the violin. He lived as if he were still in New York!

“But to the nationalists, that meant a kind of ambivalence! And one time he was talking, and this other guy at the table, he just said, ‘I can’t take any more of you Americans!’ and he threw his glass—this big heavy glass—over his shoulder. Went right through the window; I’ll never forget it.”

He smiled at the thought of how far the country had come. “Now, the new form of nationalism is multinationalism. This nationalistic impulse is toward all nations. And I love it! It makes me weepy. Ask Alicia—it’s true. Two things, they can make me cry: one is the new multiculture we’ve got here. The other is the lakes and wilderness. Make me weepy every time.”

“It’s true,” said Alicia, smiling fondly. “It does.”

“It’s a beautiful thing,” David went on. “There’s nothing else like it in the world. It can bring tears to my eyes, this multiculturalism: the glorious promise of it.”

Suddenly, the phone rang—it was one of David’s best friends from his

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