Background Information泛读L22.pdfVIP

Background Information 1. Pico Iyer (1957-), Iyer is a longtime essayist and novelist, also one of the most revered and respected travel writers alive today. As a child of Indian parents he was born in England where he never saw an Indian face, immigrated to California as a boy and raised there, educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard, and now spends much of his time in Japan. He defined himself as “a traveler from birth”, a global village on two legs, and said that movement was in his blood and he “could never get it out”. Iyer is a prolific and articulate writer and has been regarded as one of the most eloquent and incisive observers of the emerging global culture. His works of fiction and non-fiction include Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Falling off the Map, The Global Soul, and The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. 2. George Santayana (1863-1952) Santayana was a Spanish American philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. Santayana’s well-known quotes are Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and only the dead have seen the end of war. He refuses to be associated with a philosophical school and declared that he stood in philosophy exactly where [he stood] in daily life. He believes in naturalism and put emphasis on creative imagination. He published his only novel The Last Puritan in 1936 and his autobiography Persons and Places in 1944. The former was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the latter was ranked by Edmund Wilson among the few first-rate autobiographies like Yeats’s Memoirs, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. 3. Moral holiday A moral holiday does not suggest lying, cheating or stealing. A moral holiday is when someone takes a leave from his normally responsible behavior, to relax his anxieties occasionally,