Memoir of a father, silence, and poetry

Source:  Pico Iyer, “From Eden to Eton:  One boy’s transatlantic education,” in Harper’s, 2011 Nov, pp 42-48.

By the time I was five, I was filling my green exercise books with long stories about witches, wizards, and dragons, though making sure (I was my father’s son) that the goodies always voted Labour and the baddies were revealed by their support of the Conservatives.

…

Later, when I was growing up, he would tell me about how he’d been taken, as a boy himself, to see  Maharshi, the famous
mystic—also an Iyer, as it happened, part of our priestly clan—who’d lived in a cave for seventeen years, practicing “self-inquiry” and communicating mostly through silence.  Such unworldly influences my father had balanced and made more rigorous by reading Hobbes and Hume and Locke, as well as the English poets. It was as if his life were to be consecrated to the joining of the spiritual and the political domains; and by linking them together, he could perhaps join East and West as well, separated, for the time being,
as he’d written in his first book, by a “glass curtain.”

…

Without a thought, I’d started writing about the book I’d so proudly discovered in college, a secret talisman now for thirty years. The
Road to Xanadu, by John Livingston Lowes. Would I have loved it so if I’d known how much it meant to my father? It was like hearing, from my mother, three days after he died, that my father’s favorite poem, which she asked me to read at his memorial service, was Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” the same relatively obscure poem (I had thought) I had recited for years to new companions.

So much time we spend trying to run from who we are, as useful an exercise as trying to outrun one’s shadow—or one’s past. Besides, I
thought, I’d always told myself that my father was a mystery to me; but if that was the case, and I found so much of him in me, what did that begin to say about my knowledge of myself?