As with so much of writer and world traveler Pico Iyer’s body of work, Aflame: Learning From Silence takes readers on a different sort of journey—not to some far-flung global destination, but deep into the interior terrain of self-reflection, stillness and solitude.
High above the Pacific, in California’s Big Sur, is a Catholic monastery inhabited by monks of the most contemplative Camaldolese Benedictine order. For more than three decades, Iyer has come here to retreat from the rush and distractions of the so-called real world, to sit in silence with kind, welcoming monks who “don’t ask anything of visitors other than a ‘spirit of quiet and recollection.’ ”
In Aflame, Iyer’s intimate, memoiristic essays steadily chronicle his accumulated observations and journey into the self during these quiet moments within the monastic community, and show how these hours of “nonaction” come to inform his daily life, replete with its responsibilities, cherished relationships, joys, mysteries and tragedies. What especially shines throughout Iyer’s clear, luminous prose are gentle, compassionate wisdoms derived from Catholic and Buddhist traditions. These are also illuminated through Iyer’s ongoing relationships in the “outer” world, including conversations with his holiness the Dalai Lama and Zen monk and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, as well as Iyer’s perusals of the writings of Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
As Iyer’s self-knowledge expands, his growing closeness to the Camaldolese community and fellow retreatants bolsters him. The powerful, centering silence of reflection and contemplation helps him meet various life challenges: missing a spouse who is living far across the world, a daughter’s cancer diagnosis, a parent’s death and the losses that California’s ever-looming fires impose, both on the Camaldolese monastery, lodged in the coastal fire zone, and his family home. In reflecting on these flames without and the flame within, Iyer cites wisdom from Merton: “Sooner or later the world must burn.” Yet, Iyer notes, Merton “also knows that the monk’s first duty is to keep the fires within alight.”
Amid the clear skies, radiant ocean sparkle and wild nature that surround the Camaldolese retreat, Iyer wonders: “I’m not a monk, and never will be, so what exactly am I playing at in my borrowed cell? . . . These days of sunlight can only be a means to gather a candle to carry back into the unlit corners of my, or any, life.” Perhaps it’s a small flame to better explore the human mysteries of living and dying.
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