Eloquent Silence

David E. Cooper reviews Pico Iyer’s “Aflame: Learning from Silence.”

By David E. CooperMarch 22, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

THE NEW CAMALDOLI HERMITAGE, a monastery and retreat overlooking the Pacific near Big Sur, is home to monks belonging to a Benedictine order founded in the 11th century by St. Romuald. For over 30 years, Pico Iyer has regularly stayed at the Hermitage. His new book Aflame: Learning from Silence is a distillation of “literally thousands of pages of notes” written during these retreats. Unsurprisingly, given this provenance, the book’s structure is fragmentary, and the style, though elegant, is epigrammatic: few notes are more than a page long.

Not all of the notes record experiences at the Hermitage. Iyer recalls as well some of the many global travels that form the subject matter of previous books, and writes briefly of his domestic life, split between Japan, where he lives with his partner and her children, and Los Angeles, where his mother lived. He also recounts conversations with the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen, and other treasured friends met with in earlier writings. These, like the many conversations he has with the Camaldolese monks, in addition to his fellow retreatants, are typically serious, even “dark,” yet the tone of the writing is never oppressive. The author admits to an inclination “to accentuate the positive,” and there are several descriptions of acts of generosity and of festive get-togethers to lighten the mood. There are some good humorous anecdotes too. Frightened at encountering a mountain lion, Iyer is reassured by an old monk who has walked the hills for years, but who then adds, “If you do not see me [again], it means I have met the mountain lion.”  

Aflame is an extended answer to the question Iyer asks himself of why, year after year, he still comes back “to the little cluster of huts upon the hillside.” It would be insufficient, by way of an answer, to invoke the “silence” in the book’s subtitle, for it is not obvious what the author means by the word. Certainly, he does not mean something as simple as the absence of sound. Birdsong, people shouting, even the noise of a bulldozer, he writes, are sometimes part of the silence he enjoys at the Hermitage. At times, the silence that Iyer seeks sounds like the stillness he advocates in an earlier book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (2014). But, despite his sympathy with Leonard Cohen’s perception of “sitting still” as “the real deep entertainment,” Iyer’s notion of stillness is not that of immobility, and requires unpacking as much as his idea of silence does.

Nor is it religious belief that explains the author’s swallowlike return to the Californian coast each spring. He is, he explains to a monk, “someone who’s not a believer,” and his attitude toward the existence of God looks to verge on nonchalance. “It hardly matters,” he responds to a friend asking “Do you believe in God?” And when he offers “Reality” as a definition of “God,” he soon realizes that he didn’t know quite what he meant; once again, he concludes, “It hardly matters.” This is not so much insouciance on his part, however, as a reflection of a wider skepticism about doctrines, opinions, and theories. Cohen, he implies, was right to seek, in a Zen monastery, not only “freedom from answers” but also freedom from the questions that doctrines purport to answer. At several points, Iyer reminds us that we must accept that there is mystery, that “something exists beyond the grasp of our ideas.”

Iyer’s skepticism also explains his welcoming a certain kind of ecumenism, engaged in by several of the people he meets at the Hermitage who, like his own partner, Hiroko, cheerfully combine Buddhist with Christian prayer, or oscillate between Catholic and Zen retreats. The enthusiasm is not due—like that of Iyer’s namesake, the Renaissance thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola—to the conviction that truth emerges through stitching together the insights of many religions. On the contrary, the sheer variety of religions testifies to the unavailability of any truth that could be articulated. If there is “mystic truth,” it is not something that we can understand. The different religions do not rest on a shared doctrine but only reflect, Iyer suggests, an indeterminate “universal intimation.”

Iyer’s admiration, then, is for the wide range of practices informed by this “intimation,” and for a communion between them that is nicely symbolized by a group of musicians, of various religious backgrounds, whose music combines Hindu songs, Christian liturgy, and Islamic chants into a “soaring harmony.” Whatever their conflicting creeds, the practices and disciplines of religious people—especially those of a meditative and quietist hue—at once reflect and nurture compassion, gratitude, community, and selflessness. The most important item on that list is, perhaps, the last one, for what Iyer experiences above all at the Hermitage is a “transformation” in his perception of his own self.

It is not obvious, though, in what the change of perception consists, for Iyer’s many remarks on the self conjure a variety of pictures. Sometimes, the change seems to be a discovery, or rediscovery, of a true or inner self, once the carapace of the “public self” on show in ordinary everyday life crumbles. Elsewhere, it sounds more like a Buddhistic discovery of “not-self,” a recognition that nothing underlies and unites what David Hume called the “bundle […] of different perceptions,” stretched out over a lifetime, that each of us is. True to his skeptical and anti-theoretical bias, Iyer is not, I think, interested in adjudicating between such competing philosophies of the self. At one point, he tells a friend that the relief from his travels that the retreat affords is one of “getting to be one self […] or no self at all”—before quickly changing the subject to basketball when he sees the puzzled look on her face.

It helps in understanding Iyer’s “transformation” to reflect on what, at first blush, is a jarringly inappropriate title for the book. Aflame hardly sounds an apt term for describing someone who finds “clarity and silence” and “calm” at the Hermitage. (The UK edition of the book, interestingly, drops the word, instead promoting Learning from Silence from subtitle to main title.) While there are many references to the recurrent fires that plague California—one of which destroyed the author’s Santa Barbara home—these figure only in the background and cannot explain the choice of title. Better clues are offered by some metaphors that draw on the language of fire. The prior of the Hermitage is “on fire with the thought of kenosis [Jesus’s ‘self-emptying’],” and a Desert Father is quoted as saying “If you so wish, […] you can become aflame.” Iyer is cashing such metaphors when he writes that fire “replenishes wild places much as I replenish myself by sitting in silence.”

Fire clears away “built-up leaves” and detritus, thereby opening space for new growth. Likewise, Iyer wants to say, the stillness of the Hermitage allows him to expel the preoccupations and prejudices of everyday life, the demands of what Iris Murdoch called “the fat relentless ego,” so as to become open to experiencing the world as it is. It is as if, to invoke a favorite metaphor of Martin Heidegger’s, Iyer has himself become a “clearing.” Just as during the COVID-19 lockdown—also replenishing in its own way—his eyes are again open to natural beauties that he has been “sleepwalking past” for most of the time.

The silence sought and found at the Pacific retreat is, in effect, a silencing of the will. This stilling of “the flow of the purposeful” is precisely how, in a pioneering study of the subject in 1948, the Swiss thinker Max Picard defined the idea of silence. It is when silence is understood in this way that sense is made of Iyer’s remark that “the only point of being here,” at the monastery, is “surrender.” For what is surrendered, at least for the time he is there, are the goals and ambitions—the whole occluding realm of the “purposeful”—from which release is necessary if he is to let the world and its creatures present themselves to him as they are.

This gentle and captivating book, with its cast of attractive and sometimes eccentric seekers of tranquility and goodness, is a long answer to the question of why its author keeps returning to the Hermitage. Some readers, as they close the book, will want to ask the question of how Iyer can ever want to go back to the big, wide world out there, so entrancing does he make his retreats sound. His work commitments? His love of his family? Or is it mainly because, as he puts it, he is himself “too perfect an example” of people who, despite their love and need of a period of “clarity and calm […] shy away from […] the all-consuming hard work” of total surrender? Pico Iyer’s ego strikes me as much less fat and relentless than most people’s, but even he, it seems, is unable permanently to silence its call.