Eat Pray Love

(posted from Australia)

Elizabeth Gilbert’s extraordinary Eat Pray Love is a funny, poignant, brutally candid diary of a year in the author’s life following the painful ending of her marriage and an equally painful subsequent affair. Through insights and learning about herself, Ms Gilbert allows us to learn about ourselves, and about the nature of our species.

The diary covers three sequential four-month pilgrimmages, to Italy to discover pleasure (Eat), to an Indian ashram to discover spirituality (Pray), and to Bali to discover how to balance the two (Love).

More than anything, the voyage is one of self-discovery and self-realization:

Sound like someone you know, or suddenly know now?

Ms Gilbert’s tale is a long, terrible, wonderful, personal story, and she is a master raconteur of small anecdotes and incidents with profound meaning:

She intersperses her self-reflections and anecdotes with perceptive insights into Western culture: “Generally speaking, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure…Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one…Americans don’t really know how to do nothing.” Her description of Italian men’s post-football-game rituals is side-splitting. And she describes Yoga in an astonishing and refreshing way, as grappling with

Faith, she says, is “walking face-first and full speed into the dark”. Our destiny, she asserts, is focusing attention on things we can control and accepting and adapting to those we cannot: “I can decide how I spend my time, who I interact with, who I share my body and life and money and energy with…And most of all, I can choose my thoughts… the same way [I] can select the clothes [I’m] going to wear…If you want to control things in your life…work on the mind…Drop everything else but that…Every time a diminishing thought arises, I repeat the vow. I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.“

She describes her moment of Zen, of communion with God, painstakingly and passionately. Then, as she describes the balance she finds in Bali, she reports with astonishment: “I have so much free time, you could measure it in metric tons”. And finally, in retrospect, she says, of her bliss:

Her journey represents the journey of all of us, to get rid of the gunk that prevents us from being, simply, naturally, ourselves. It is my belief that wild creatures do not need to make this journey. They know who they are, and they live in that “eternal presence” without the need to unlearn and relearn and achieve self-mastery to do so. We have moved out of that world, into our heads, and our “spiritual” journeys are all, to some extent, in search of that way home to that place where we are our authentic selves, where we belong.

It takes both great courage and exceptional self-awareness for an author to reveal herself so honestly that the reader can learn from her mistakes and her struggles. For that reason alone this book is a remarkable accomplishment, a profound and purely unselfish autobiography. Forget the self-help books — read this wonderful story and become, by association, a better, more focused, more aware, more directed, moreself-knowing, more sensuous, spiritual and loving person.