One planet. One people.

As a compulsive collector of quotations, I hereby add the following to the bulging shelves of my archives:

All the world’s stories are America’s stories now, and this is the current glory of our literature; as never before in our lifetimes, so many histories are flooding into America, and so many Americans going out to claim the world as an extension of their homes, that our imaginations are being stretched (one hopes), along with the words we use, the wisdoms we inhabit, the sounds and philosophies we can begin to reinvent. What Barack Obama represents on the global stage, those of his generation and younger (from Ken­ya, from the Dominican Republic, from Korea) are bringing to life on the planetary page.

—Pico Iyer (from a review of Yiyun Li's The Vagrants in the March 6th edition of the New York Times Book Review)

Iyer's essay for Salon on "Why We Travel" is also worth a look. Though Iyer was born in the U.K., his parents were Indians who taught philosophy at Oxford. For many years, he commuted back and forth from schools in England to California, where his parents moved to accept other teaching positions. Iyer has written a biography — which some critics might describe as a hagiography — of the Dalai Lama.