In Isherwood’s Footsteps: Seeing the World in the Round

Among his many lives, Christopher Isherwood was a born traveler, leaving his native England for the Berlin that he rendered indelibly, journeying to China, and then, from his new home in Los Angeles, crisscrossing South America. Pico Iyer, who knew Isherwood a little, has read him for half a century and introduced a book of Isherwood’s travels. Iyer will take off from his elder’s example to explain why travel, always a great luxury, is ever more a moral necessity. Whisking us from North Korea to Iran and from Yemen to Japan, he will aim to show how, in a global neighborhood, it’s urgent (and warming and surprising) to meet our neighbors in the flesh. All the images in the world can never add up to real life.

This is the Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture.