Book #6: Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

The book: Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer

What is this book about: This is a book of travel essays, the locations mainly distinguishable by what drugs Dyer consumed and which women he slept with there. Through the essays, Dyer grapples with external/internal journeys and his post-modern angst.

Why did I read this book: I thought the title was clever.

What did I think of this book: I’ve had a love/hate relationship with this book. For quite a long time I thought the only clever thing about the book was the title. I hated Geoff Dyer and his self-important intellectualism, and his self-congratulation at having been so many places and having such cynicism and contempt for them.

Then I would wonder if I could hate the book, because it is very true that we live in this culture that prizes traveling, that tells you traveling will create these epiphanies and experiences for you, and oftentimes it’s just going from one monument to another. How can we ever just sit and enjoy the view? How can we ever find peace or how can we ever care about why monuments exist and why we go to them? Aren’t we always just looking for the next place to go?

When Dyer was exploring these questions in a lucid way, I was intrigued and did see glimpses of “yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it.” But ultimately, I think I’m too much of an optimist to succumb to such complaining about the opportunity and privilege that Dyer has in his travels around the world. What Dyer is interested in is Dyer, and while everyone is interested in themselves, few want to read about others’ self-interest. It’s why this nation of bloggers and You-tubers is so weird. The point is, while I identified with Dyer at points, I was usually then immediately turned off by his pompousness and his self-absorption.

Also, the book isn’t “mordantly funny” and “side-splitting” as the back cover claims it will be.

What was my favorite part of this book: The essay on Rome was quite charming and evocative, but I think it’s hard to mess up writing about Rome.What did I learn from this book: That it’s better just to do real yoga.

What grade do I give this book: C+

Special feature for this book—Some excerpts I liked (please don’t sue me, Geoff Dyer)

“Things go missing. They just disappear. You invest your whole being in not losing something and still, incredibly, against all odds, you lose it. The more you covet something, the more certain it is that you’ll lose it, and the more devastating this loss will be when it happens—which it will.”
Pg. 216 (in talking about losing his sunglasses)

“I had been drifting for years, and now—like the lone cloud we’d seen at Hadrian’s Villa—I had drifted to a standstill. I may not have admitted it at the time—if that afternoon was a turning point, then I responded as one invariably does at such moments, by failing to turn—but at some level I knew that I had been kidding myself: that all the intellectual discipline and ambition of my earlier years had been dissipated by half-hearted drug abuse, indolence, and disappointment, that I lacked purpose and direction and had even less idea of what I wanted from life now than I had when I was twenty or thirty even, that I was well on the way to becoming a ruin myself, and that that was fine by me.”
Pg. 131