Seven Years in Tibet

"Yes! But the difference between them is so striking. For Harrer it seems to have been primarily a cultural experience, or semi-spiritual if you accept the version given in the Brad Pitt film. Harrer respected the people that he knew, but his writing tends to be about teaching them how movie projectors worked and how to dam a river or map a city. Kimura too described Tibet as a place where he met extraordinary people and learnt about this rather little-known culture, but he was able to talk to people as a fellow-thinker, to really listen to the different views that people had and to appreciate the intellectual discussions that were happening amongst Tibetans, in a way that was infinitely more subtle. He didn’t have a strong ideological project. He treated people as thinking beings. That’s surprisingly hard for most of us to do in such a situation, or at least to write about afterwards. We’re so easily seduced by the siren call of the exotic and the foreign."