Pico Iyer's illustrious writing career has taken him around the world many times, but one of his favorite places appears to be a tiny monastery high above the Pacific Ocean. Aflame: Learning from Silence is a love letter to a place to which Iyer has returned over and over for more than 30 years, seeking solace and renewal in the consolations of solitude.
The location that has played such a central role in Iyer's spiritual and emotional life is the New Camaldoli Hermitage, established in 1958 in California's Big Sur. The monks who reside there are Benedictines whose congregation dates to Italy in 1012, and is the oldest continuous one in the Western church. In addition to operating a bookstore and supplementing their revenue with the sale of "(brandy-soaked) fruitcake," the monks open the property to visitors like Iyer.
Though he admits his own "aversion to all crosses and hymnals," Iyer--who has spent considerable time with the Dalai Lama--finds himself drawn to this place of "just silence and emptiness and light" and its "nine hundred acres of live oak, madrona, redwood and desert yucca, a quarter of a mile above the sea." As he experiences it, "The world isn't erased here; only returned to its proper proportions. It's not a matter of finding or acquiring anything, only of letting everything extraneous fall away." When he's not reading or writing in the small room where he resides during his retreats, he wanders the grounds of a place constantly shadowed by the risk of devastating forest fires.
In addition to his spiritual reflections, Iyer recounts some of his encounters with the Camaldolese monks, most notably Cyprian, the prior, who's also a musician and something of a Renaissance man. He also describes his deep and tender conversations with Thérèse, an elderly French-Canadian woman who lives in a cabin in a nearby valley. Iyer intersperses these reminiscences with glimpses of visits with his friend Leonard Cohen--who spent periods of his life at a Zen Buddhist monastery--at his Los Angeles home in the latter years of the poet-songwriter and contemplative's life.
Iyer forgoes any attempt at temporal or geographic continuity, slipping effortlessly backward and forward over the years and across the globe at will. He weaves insights from thinkers like Meister Eckhart, Albert Camus, and Thomas Merton into his own reflections and evocative descriptions of the Hermitage's physical surroundings in brief, epigrammatic sections that occasionally partake of the quality of Zen koans. As Sarah Anderson recognized in her book The Lost Art of Silence, a life of quietude may be anathema to some. For others, like Pico Iyer, it may just be the antidote that's required to survive in a cacophonous world.--Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Pico Iyer offers an assortment of reflections on his love for the Catholic monastery in California he visits to cultivate self-renewal in silence.