The actual title of Pico Iyer’s thoughtful, compelling new book is Aflame: Learning from Silence. The flame has disappeared from our edition (the British) of the title: strange, when fire – physical and inner – is crucial to Iyer’s life and quests, and this book in particular. The new subtitle (“Lessons from Over 100 Retreats”) suggests that this is a self-help travel guide, a more austere version of Eat, Pray, Love.
In fact, the retreats are all at one place in California, the New Camaldoni Hermitage on the rugged Big Sur coast. St Romuald, who founded the Camaldolese branch of the Benedictine order in the early 11th century, advocated stillness, asking followers to “sit in your cell as in paradise”.
Certainly, the Hermitage sounds like paradise: “To our right, a wide expanse of ocean with not a thing to interrupt the blue. A deep valley to our left, and dry golden hills from which mountain lions sometimes emerge, or their prey. Nine hundred acres of live oak, madrona, redwood and desert yucca, a quarter of a mile above the sea.” But it is a precarious paradise, isolated by fog and rock slides, and threatened – like so much of California – with the decimation of wildfires. The Hermitage “seems ready”, Iyer says, “to be wiped out – or cut off from the world again – at any moment”.
There’s a chapel, a bookshop, a cafeteria and a “little cluster of huts upon the hillside”. Iyer arrives as an exile from recent trauma. “Fire has already left its mark on me,” he thinks, hearing of the monks’ recent ordeal with trees exploding in a wildfire. It is early 1991 and the place has been recommended by a friend who found him still “sleeping on the floor of someone’s house, my home all ash”.
In the infamous Painted Cave Fire of 1990, set by someone with a beef against a neighbour, hundreds of homes in the Santa Barbara area were destroyed. When the fire leapt the highway, many people were forced to evacuate at once. My friend’s mother was one of them; she left carrying a clock and her cello, the only things she had time to grab. Everything else burnt.
Iyer, staying alone in his mother’s house, grabbed the cat and drove away through the flames. Fire obliterated the family’s past – as well as eight years of Iyer’s notes and book drafts – and inscribed a profound loss into their history. But it also meant that Iyer found a new home behind one of “an unprepossessing line of motel-like doors”. In his retreat room he saw a bed, a desk, a dresser. “Through the windows, the ocean a sheet of fire. The sense of homecoming instantaneous.”
Readers of Iyer’s travel essays in books such as Falling Off the Map or The Global Soul know the way his investigations into the meaning of “home” – and the cultural and personal implications of spirituality and ritual – ripple through his work. Born in England to Indian parents, Iyer followed them to the US and built his writing career at Time magazine and various newspapers. In the late 80s he moved to Kyoto for a year to study Zen, read Japanese literature and live quietly.
Instead he fell in love with Hiroko, a not-yet-divorced woman, and found a different future. For more than 30 years he has lived largely in Japan – in a “tiny” flat in suburban Nara – returning to the US both for work and to spend time with his ageing mother in California.
Iyer may seem an unlikely person to find a “homecoming” at a Christian retreat. The Dalai Lama, whom he has known for decades and interviewed numerous times, wrote a publicity blurb for this book. Leonard Cohen, ordained as a Zen monk in the 90s, was another friend and makes several appearances here. (So does Oprah, unnamed, who during an interview asks him for his “definition of God”.)
Iyer was educated at Eton and Oxford and says that 12 years “of enforced chapel” at school gave him “an aversion to all crosses and hymnals. In any case, I’ve never wanted to be part of any group of believers.” So why, he asks himself, “am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Christian monastery?”
It is, he says, “the most stimulating site I know”, where he has written “thousands of pages of notes” over the years. On some visits he stays among the monks; other times he’s in a small room looking out to sea, or in a trailer, with Hiroko in a nearby cottage.
“This book is about the beauty – you could say, the sanctity – of clarity and silence,” Iyer writes at the end, noting that this can be found “in many settings, not always monastic”. But much of the book is about the characters in this “community of contemplatives”, including many of his eclectic fellow travellers and the monks who embrace and inspire him. “For 30 years I thought you were an only child,” Hiroko observes. “Now I see you have all these brothers!”
As he did in the moving Autumn Light: Japan’s Season of Fire and Farewells, Iyer documents and seeks reconciliation with impermanence and loss. “Fire is nature’s agent of rebirth,” he reasons. “It replenishes wild places much as I replenish myself by sitting in silence.” Still, he has learnt to dread the whirr of a helicopter overhead because it “means looking for someone lost in the wilderness or the proximity of fire”. During Covid, his “regally composed mother continues her slow collapse” into confusion and frailty. Many of his friends at the Hermitage, visitors and residents, move on – in life or death – from “the silent road above the sea”. But the place itself, Iyer realises, has become a “trusted friend” where he always finds respite from the “dizzy rush” of outside life and his own thoughts. “To find something you can’t doubt,” he concludes, “may be the closest that some of us need to get to faith.”
Learning from silence: Lessons from Over 100 Retreats, by Pico Iyer, (Cornerstone, $40 hb, ebook, audio), is out now.
