Paradise, too, is the place just across the border.

Of course, I’d think later, every place likes to demonize its neighbor: if heaven is here, then hell must be that place across the water.

I remembered how he’d written that to have all the answers might be proof that you weren’t asking the right questions. Uncertainty was perhaps the place where all of us—even a monk—have to make our home.

Whenever someone stood up—this happened after almost every large public lecture—and asked him what to do after you’ve been disappointed in some dream (to bring peace to the Middle East, to reverse climate change, to protect some seeming idyll), the Dalai Lama looked over at the questioner with great warmth and said, “Wrong dream!” You have to analy

“It’s not a problem,” said Amir, imperturbable. “It’s an issue. A problem you can solve. An issue you have to live with.” So it was hopeless even to think of a solution? “We’ve been coexisting, not always peacefully, for thousands of years,” he continued. “So long as no one tries to solve their problems, they’ll be okay.”

where all the revolutions of the 1960s were exploding around us. Whatever was unknown, it was felt, had to be better than what was known and found to be imperfect.

And I knew that Iran’s poets echoed what I’d read in the wise, anonymous fourteenth-century guide to clear living, The Cloud of Unknowing: “By our love, the divine may be reached and held; by our thinking, never.”