The Global Soul

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I do think there's a great value in going around the world and being exposed to foreign cultures, but I'm equally a great believer in traveling in, and staying in, one place. I think people who stay all their lives in a single place are not missing out on anything. I think travelling physically is just a shortcut to thinking about the kind of values and issues that we have to face in our day-to-day lives that sometimes we're blind to because of habit or routine.

MOTHER:What do you suggest to people who are not going to leave home, but want the broadening experience that comes from travel?

PI: I would say to look on your home as if you were a foreigner. Try to imagine how it might look to somebody from the other side of the world who might be actually more alert to its graces and beauties than you are. I think we travel when we fall in love, or when we open a different kind of book, or when we get lost driving a car around our hometown. And I think all those are as valuable as going to the far ends of the earth, as long as we have the ability to appreciate the opportunity they represent and the eyes to accept the possibility. I think travel is mostly a way of breaking out of your familiar self.

MOTHER:I've read that you have never used the Internet.

PI: No, I do e-mail, but I've never been on the Internet. Many of my friends tell me, "you know, this is a wonderful whole new universe to explore." But I consider that two-thirds of the people in the world have never even used a telephone. In Cambodia, what they most desperately need are mosquito nets. One costs $5 and can save three lives. Of course, the Internet can help bring them certain facilities and protections that will doubtless save many more lives. But for the time being, travel is a way to remember that we're living in a kind of technological bubble from which most of the world is screened. After my [California] house burned down, I had to think about how I would construct a new kind of life without any physical soil under my feet. But I also was reminded from my travels that the number of refugees in the world has gone up tenfold, and that I am actually still much luckier than almost anyone, anywhere.

MOTHER:It seems that people adjust to what they have. You wrote about acquiring a typewriter after having been without one for a long time, and about how you quickly became dependent on something you'd lived happily without.

PI: Yes, exactly. I find it's not that I distrust technology, but I distrust myself with technology. I think I'm not strong enough to resist its temptations. If I need to check a fact, I turn to my world almanac, which is really my only research material. If I really need to do research I have to take a 90minute train ride to the nearest English language bookshop. In some ways that's not such a bad thing, because it reminds one of how little one really needs. Living in Japanwhere I have very few material possessionsthe thing that hits me most is how little I miss. I rarely say, "Oh, I really need something and it's not here." That almost never happens. I find ways to work around it, as people always have through the millennia when there was no Internet and no trains.

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