Pico Iyer: The Age of Movement

*Iyer’s presentation will be preceded by a Telluride Dance Collective performance juxtaposed with a portion of Alan Watts’ piece “Man in Nature.”

Pico Iyer is an English-born travel writer and journalist whose TED talks on issues like stillness and the meaning of home have garnered millions of views. He has traveled from North Korea to Easter Island and Ethiopia, authoring some 12 books, including The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. To describe him as simply a travel writer, however, is doing him an injustice. That’s because Iyer’s meditative musings go beyond travelogue to offer illuminating observations on the human condition. “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves,” he writes.

In this talk, Iyer, who has personal experience with migration (his parents were born in India before moving to England, and he split a childhood between the UK and California) will address the “Age of Movement” that we’re living in. It’s a time when some humans are able to savor the global neighborhood as never before, even as the number of refugees worldwide has risen 4500% since World War II.

“Planetary possibilities are dazzling, and the discrepancies between privileged and less so are terrifying,” Iyer says. Looking at migration as it plays out in Tibet and other essential countries everywhere, Iyer will try to excavate the hidden potential within our new global imaginations — as well as the dangers in what too often resembles less a global village than a global city.