Pico Iyer on Silence, Solitude, and His Book Aflame

pECO AIR Flaming: Learning from Silence It begins with a scene that has become all too familiar: the loss of his home and all his worldly possessions in a conflagration. He goes on to describe his father’s death, his mother’s rapidly deteriorating health, and his daughter’s cancer diagnosis. With such abundant disaster, you might expect the book to be about suffering, but instead it focuses on the sometimes simple and sometimes profound joys that can be found in silence, and how it can help us get through life’s trials.

For 40 years, Ayer has traveled the world as a travel writer, and over the past 30, he has returned time and again to a Benedictine hermitage hidden in the woods of Big Sur where one can quietly contemplate the questions of existence. Inflamed Created from his notebooks covering this period, in it he explores the virtues of silence, recounts the wisdom he gained from his long friendships with such luminaries as Leonard Cohen and the Dali Lama, and delves into the profound insights that can be encountered throughout the journals. isolation.

Iyer says his latest offering is a companion piece to his latest book, Half known lifeWhich focuses on how to find heaven in a world of conflict. He has previously written about the value of adopting a calmer pace in his best-selling books The art of stillness. with InflamedHe continues his questioning, searching for peace in the midst of a life of chaos.

Optimism is only as useful as the realism on which it is based.

Inflamed Compiled from your observations spanning many years. Why did you decide to write the book now?

Partly because I have never seen the world so divided as it is now, and part of me feels that it is words and beliefs that divide us in two, even as silence – which lies on the far side of them – can sometimes, but not always, bring us together. I have done more than 100 retreats in this hermitage because the people I have met there are the most open-minded I have ever met and the most committed to finding places and feelings that we have in common, not those that tear us apart. .

But also because I have never seen my friends so desperate as they are now. And every time I travel into this vast silence, I receive a strong dose of hope and confidence. Places of quiet will always be valuable in a world of distraction and acceleration, but I decided to condense 33 years of retreats into a little book now because I feel like our world is crying out for medicine.

In our noisy, money-driven world, escaping all the noise to find silence is often an investment in terms of time and money. So what value does silence offer in return?

I like this way of putting it, because going on a retreat really feels like the best investment I can make. Traveling into silence is a way to replenish my internal savings account, my internal resources. And in many ways that’s all I have to rely on when I get into the ICU.

While I was writing this book, my mother had a stroke and was hospitalized in the intensive care unit for 35 days. As I sat at her bedside as she teetered between life and death, I realized that my resume was not helpful at all. All the books I wrote were of little use. My bank account had limited use. The only thing I could count on to help her – and me – was everything I had accumulated by sitting quietly, building up my internal reserves.

Meister Eckhart, the wise German mystic, observed 600 years ago that if your inner work is strong, your outer work can never be bad. If you make this investment inward, your relationships, career, and interactions with yourself can take care of themselves. But if you don’t – and you have been negligent at times in this regard – you are broke and stripped. We all have to make a living, but it will only be as rich and strong as the lives we have built under and around it.

What are some of the greatest challenges inherent in a lifetime or even a temporary period of silence, meditation, and hermitage?

There are certainly no guarantees when you will back down or remain silent. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote, If you go into meditation hoping to get something, you are likely to be disappointed.

Sometimes, as I sit in my lonely trailer on the hill, winter storms come down. The rain beats down on the roof, the wind shakes the flimsy foundations of the old wooden building, and I can see not a single light or sign of human habitation. I’m truly in the wilderness, and I have nowhere to run or hide. What could be very harsh and unsettling for me during a three-day stay is a lifelong vocation as a monk or nun. Despite all their hope and confidence, they often live alone in their cells, surrounded by fears, doubts and frustrations.

Catholic priest Thomas Keating points out that meditation cannot get rid of suffering; It simply allows you to see it on a larger canvas, to put it into perspective. To remember that nothing lasts forever and that this reality, sad to say, is rarely without setbacks and sorrows.

For me, the big challenge of continuing to declutter is that it can be difficult to get back into the noisy, chaotic world, and it’s asking me how I’m going to change my life. Since I’m not a monk, how can I try to keep some of the graces and blessings of that life alive in the midst of my busy life and often divisive world?

We cannot live without fire, and the question becomes how to live with it.

In the book she discusses how, with so much of humanity now living in places we’re not supposed to, wildfires are increasingly becoming a fact of life. The monks chose to keep the hermitage as they knew it was a fire hazard. How can we overcome the tension between being in the places we love and increasing wildfires and climate risk to those places?

Monks in my experience are realists. They don’t live in “never” and don’t expect life to be easy. Their lives, she says, call them to live in the wilderness, often in beautiful, remote, desert-like places where the first Christian priests lived. But they know that it puts them out of reach of medical help, comfort, and more.

I begin my book by describing how, many years ago, wildfires destroyed my house and everything in it. I was lucky to survive, as I was stuck inside that fire for three hours, out of the reach of fire engines and helicopters, and was saved only by a good Samaritan who found himself stuck in the exact same place. I lost everything I had in the world, including handwritten notes for my next three books and eight years of writing.

Because of the nature of the insurance policies, we had to rebuild our house in the same location, in the hills of California, and had to flee nearby fires 10 or 12 times in the rebuilt house, just as my monk friends often do. However, I can’t complain about any of this because, as you say, I know the danger of living in these hills, where humans were never meant to live, and because fire is an important part of the natural cycle. Many of the beautiful landscapes around me cannot survive without regular fires. So we cannot live without fire, and the question becomes how to live with it. How do we keep the fires of conviction and hope alive within ourselves?

This is a book about climate change, where those whose lives are not turned upside down by fires are at the mercy of hurricanes, tsunamis, floods and tornadoes. The climate crisis facing all of humanity reminds us that humans do not sit at the center of the world, and it strips us of all our certainty. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I am drawn more and more to a place where I can see and feel how small we are, our hopes and plans, and where I have learned to learn to live with uncertainty, and with literal and metaphorical fires everywhere. I.

You strike me as an optimist. Do you agree?

I am an optimist, although my feeling is that optimism is only as useful as the realism on which it is based. I like the fact that two of the greatest givers of hope I know – the Dalai Lama and his late, great friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu – stress that they are not idealists, romantics, or even optimists; They have lived so close to suffering and difficulty that they do not expect life to always be sunny or amenable to their plans. But they believe that our end is not despair, and that the arc of the moral universe, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, bends toward justice.

We’ve all experienced traumas and horrors that to some degree never go away. But this does not mean that hope is impossible; This may mean that it is necessary. Life without hope is no life at all. There are many reasons for despair right now, from war to the climate crisis to rising divisions to the latest plague. But the world has improved in many ways during my lifetime, often in ways we take for granted.

The media, in which I have worked for 40 years, always focuses on drama, which often involves violence and suffering. But today’s technology allows us to live longer and healthier than ever before. In the United States, rights are much greater than they were when I was in high school for many who have been oppressed for a long time, and the kids I meet are instinctively more cosmopolitan than they were when I was in college. It’s up to us whether we focus on what divides us or what opens us up.

Main image: Elena Ray/Shutterstock

• Nick Helden

  Posted on January 10, 2025

  Arts, science and travel writer Nick Helden contributes to Proverbs Washington Post, Scientific American, Esquire, Popular Science, National Geographic, And more. You can follow him on Twitter at @nickelden Or Instagram on @nick. Hilden.

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