The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer Page A

second biggest dorm in the school was called “Gunga Din,” in honor of the native water bearer in Kipling who dies to save a British officer’s life; on Sunday mornings, we assembled again in our classrooms and wrote twice-folded blue Air Letters to our parents. “Dear Mummy and Daddy,” we wrote, “this week Cherwell beat Linton 3–1. You can imagine how excited we all were! Reader-Harris’s parents are taking him out for tea next month—and he’s invited me to come! In Divinity we’re doing the Pharisees and the Gallic Wars are really galling! The School Play this term is
Oliver
!, about the boy who asked for more. But Podge asked for less last week, and he got six of the best with a tennis shoe.”
    In English class, they taught us about a whisky priest, whodrank and fathered a baby and forgot his prayers; when he offered Mass, the only bread he had to offer was from his mistress’s oven. His parishioners were the other unwashed sinners in his prison cell. Perhaps we understood this somewhat, by intuition, as we headed back to our own cells: simple broken humanity was the sacrament, and even a holy man was “just one criminal among a herd of criminals.” The rest of the world—the places of need and desperation that we were being trained to go out and administer—lived in a realm as barren and magical as that of the Gospels.
    And then, overnight, as it seemed, the eighty-four days were up and I was walking down the steps of TWA 761 into the born-again sunshine of California once more, and the relieved indulgence of my parents. My father was explaining the symbolism of
Sgt. Pepper
, his eyes bright with mischief, to his students, and serious young philosophers, prom queens from the beach towns to the south—now called “Radha” and “Parvati”—were asking him earnest questions about
Walden
and “Kubla Khan.”
    Mountain lions could sometimes be seen in the dry hills through the window in my father’s study; a mother bear had been spotted with her cub up the road. We might have been in one of the cowboy-and-Indian movies we’d so excitedly devoured on TV in Oxford (though now the Indians were of a somewhat different kind and the cowboys were mostly shy men from the south, speaking Spanish). Sometimes fires broke out on the ridges up the road—humans were surely never meant to live in wilds like these—and those who had taken my father’s course on anarchist thought might note that you had to get rid of the old if a new order were ever to come into being.

    N o,” I said, one day, many years later, in another small room in an old island empire, when Hiroko asked; it wasn’t really the fact that I’d instinctively given the name “Mr. Brown” to the little sketch I’d written, imagining seeing Greene in Havana (or the fact that “Brown” was the name of his protagonist in
Brighton Rock
and
The Comedians
, his recurrent nom de guerre); it wasn’t the fact that he traveled—all of us had been taught to take off across the world, and for me as for him, travel was mostly a way to see more clearly the questions and shadows it was easy to look past at home. It was that he was always on the move in some deeper sense, never ready to assume he had the last word, reflexively able to see around the corner of his beliefs and to recall how he and his world looked to the person on the far side of the street.
    Always there was a dance in him between evasion and an almost ruthless candor, his instinct for privacy and his need to purge himself of his secrets on the page; he was one of those men who would often tell more to his unmet readers than to his oldest friends. He almost had to guard his public life, in fact, in order to have more to offer, less compromised, in his private; the less you let out freely to every stranger—California had taught me this, along with many of the other laws of restraint—the more and deeper the material you had to share when it most mattered.
    But there was something