Aflame: Learning from Silence
PICO IYER
New York: Penguin, 2025. 240 pp., hardcover, $30.
I’m recalling a poem by Whitman, “Facing West from California’s Shore,” which recounts humanity’s migrations over millennia. Manifest Destiny has swept the American continent, and the torch has now been passed to the poet, who stands alone on a California beach. All human questing is behind and within him. There is nowhere else to go physically. He gazes across the waters towards the ancient cradles of civilization, arriving in the present tense with nothing less than an open mind: “But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?”
Whitman’s poem could be a motto for Pico Iyer, a global soul who is known for his indefatigable travels and trenchant observations. In recent years, however, we read less about the taxi and the terminal and more about stillness, going nowhere, and now silence. Aflame reveals now in detail what Iyer has mentioned in passing elsewhere: a spiritual home above the rugged coastline of California’s Big Sur, a Benedictine monastery repeatedly visited for thirty years, and a brotherly bond with aging anchorites of the order of Camaldoli.
Whitman’s arrest at the shore is not an endpoint but rather the ignition towards a new dimension. This spells the central conceit of Iyer’s book: Fire warms. Fire illuminates. But fire also destroys, and in that destruction there is a clearing of the undergrowth which makes renewal possible. Iyer’s introduction to the hermitage was forcefully occasioned by losing his own home to fire in 1990. The book recounts the varied paths of others—monks and workers at New Camaldoli—who, through loss or an irresistible call, found their way to the hermitage.
Iyer is not Catholic, and the fervency in these pages is not doctrinal, but warmed, as it were, through votive offerings to the likes of Albert Camus, diarist Etty Hillesum, the Dalai Lama, and Pico’s long-time muse Leonard Cohen. The language is strikingly succinct, ascetic in simplicity and clarity. The short, chiseled sentences all repose in the present tense. The arc of narrative is a pastiche of glimpses, impressions, and anecdotes.
Iyer insists that silence is not a flight from the world. Everyone who undertakes a solitary retreat quickly discovers that, while silence can offer relief and elation, it can also be insidiously crowded with unwelcome musings and memories. It is as if there are backlogs of unassimilated experiences ready to flare up for attention, garage clutter calling for sifting and assessment. Every withdrawal is really a prelude to the resumption of daily life, with renewed power and purpose.
Another illusion to dispel is that silence is all light and liberty. Facing oneself is never easy. It must entail confrontations with loneliness, mortality, and error. Under rhythms of monastic life, raw conflagrations may flair. But such is the price for transformation. In fact, smoldering between the covers of this poetic paean to a hermitage is a revolution, because nothing is more revolutionary than contentment, a prosperity without economic demand, a quenching of the flames of “not enough.”
Aflame is a love ballad to a hermitage and its inhabitants, and the inner spaces they have opened up within the author. Iyer is indicating the power—the urgency really—for inner renewal, an antidote for the vexing problems of the information age and the attention economy.
Joseph Miller
Joseph Miller is a writer living in California. He is an associate of the United Lodge of Theosophists and a regular presenter at the Institute of World Culture in Santa Barbara.