Learning from Silence

Pico Iyer: Aflame, Learning from Silence. New York: Riverhead, 2025.
Pico Iyer is not a stranger to the themes of silence and stillness, but always on his own terms, little reference to standard resources and thinkers on the topics, often reducing his writing to subjective experiences, interlocutor’s comments, and anecdotal reports amounting to the overheard and observed.

Iyer is a seasoned travel writer, with several novels, plus essays collected into books. His interest in countries, cities, and places geographical and specialized (such as monasteries) is part of his job description, enhanced by his perpetual curiosity and desire to describe. But this curiosity leaves his experiences in silence and stillness difficult to convey. In The Art of Stillness (2014), the subtitle stretches the irony: “Adventures in Going Nowhere.” That project culminated in Iyer’s TED talk — not a self-effacing “nowhere” by most standards.

In Aflame: Learning from Silence (2025), Iyer revisits a favorite setting for personal retreat: the monastery of Big Sur, a Camaldolese monastery in northern California. The style is relaxed, the retreatants are secular, and the agenda is self-determined, presenting motel-like individual rooms for withdrawal and quietude. The retreat is not quite Catholic (symbols without theology), and not quite Zen (given the optional nature of ritual and schedule), but parallels a loose version of an à la carte restaurant where everyone’s psychological taste is accommodated.

Aflame includes occasional references to writers: Merton, Camus, Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson.

In an early anecdote, given Iyer’s regular visits to Big Sur over the years, Iyer’s mother asks him the “name of these people you are staying with,” and about his dogged interest in the Camodolese. Are they friendly? she asks. Iyer replies, “Tremendously. They don’t ask anything of visitors other than a ‘spirit of quiet and recollection.’ Most of the people visiting are women. I don’t think many of them are Catholic.” Then Iyer’s mother gets to her real question.

“You’re not going to get converted?” “No fear of that,” I say, and she smiles back, knowing her only child well enough to see that he’s far too prone to run in the opposite direction.

After Iyer’s many solo stints at Big Sur over the years, his wife Hiroko finally accompanies him to a retreat. Together they had visited many religious retreat-houses (Hindu, Buddhist, and other) but she agrees that Big Sur is different. “True Heaven,” she remarks when asked her verdict. Iyer writes: “By which, I think she means, no words; and the people around us do not as a rule seem to be looking for enlightenment or transport or mystic truth. They’ve simply found a place to renew themselves in quiet.”

While finding quality-time isn’t the entire issue in Aflame, it nearly is. Or, perhaps, it's dilettantism. Iyer isn’t doing research or interviews (just occasional conversations with monks and visitors); he is presumably testing the viability of silence and stillness—but not solitude. At least, this version of silence and stillness, which leaves much to the imagination of the aspirant. Iyer’s writing is elegant, engaging, breezy, chatty, and a little restless; he is extroverted, sensitive, and empathetic. As a veteran travel writer of decades, Iyer is skilled at observing minutiae and can paint landscapes big and small. Aflame is rich in both, from the details of conversations to the grand backdrop of California wildfires that surrounded Big Sur.

In an ironic way Iyer would probably appreciate the Taoist saying: “The farther you travel, the less you know.” Aflame is warm but not a mystic’s “living flame” (to quote John of the Cross); and it is not silent enough to accomplish “learning from silence.”

https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/iyer.html