Aflame, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, 222 pages)
Pico Iyer is widely known as a travel writer, and he has traveled the globe for his books and essays, but some of his most meaningful experiences have been in a tiny room with a single bed, a chair and a desk and no distractions save an ocean view, nothing but “silence and emptiness and light.”
It is here, at a monastery in Big Sur, California, called the Hermitage, that Iyer has returned to repeatedly over the past three decades, once driving nearly four hours after his father died to sit in the stillness for two hours before driving back home again.
In Aflame, an unnerving title given the recent devastation in Los Angeles, Iyer writes lyrically and movingly about the gifts of solitude and quiet and why they matter, especially in a culture that seems determined to deprive us of them. And yes, he also writes about wildfires, inevitable because the setting is California, and death and suffering. But the title is a metaphor for burning in the heart, as well.
When Iyer tells one friend about his experiences at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, the friend replies, “You sound like you’re in love.” He answers, “Exalted, at the very least.”
The friend cautions him, “A love like that can’t last,” to which Iyer responds, “But it can leave you a different person, not always for the worst.”
This was an unlikely love story for Iyer, who is not a Christian or a member of any organized religious group and says he has an “aversion to all crosses and hymnals” because of having to attend chapel for 12 years in school.
But at the Hermitage he found transformative peace similar to what Admiral Richard Byrd found in the Antarctic, where the explorer made friends with stars and ice crystals, and the playwright Henry Miller, who happily lived alone in a rude cabin with no electricity or phone for three years.
But, as Iyer writes, “The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable.”
Although the website of the Big Sur hermitage is contemplation.com, the monks have work to do — when they are driven out by wildfires that threaten their home, they find similar jobs to do at the places where they evacuate.
Iyer himself is too much acquainted with fire: “I can still feel myself inside that oven, my mother’s cat panting and struggling to breathe in my lap. One minute we had been sitting in our family home, the next we were surrounded by walls of flame five stories high.”
That home was in Santa Barbara, and his mother was in Florida at the time, so Iyer had to call her to tell her that everything she owned was now ash. There are many such heartbreaking stories coming out of Los Angeles right now, but Iyer, having lived through such a fire and recovered, brings to the subject a stoic’s view: As painful as it was, the fire “did clear the way for many things,” he tells a friend. He recounts a Japanese poem:
My house burned down
I can now see better
The rising moon
True hermits are rare, and even those famous for time spent alone, like Henry David Thoreau, weren’t alone as people think. Even while living at Walden Pond, Thoreau visited his mother every Sunday, and “The title of his first talk at the Concord Lyceum was not ‘Solitude’ but ‘Society’,” Iyer writes. Being alone is not an end unto itself, but “the means to becoming a more useful member of society.”
But a little aloneness doesn’t cut it. As one monk tells Iyer, “You have to learn how to enjoy leisure. … But you can’t be leisurely for just half an hour. It’s only in the sixth half hour that things start developing inside you — and then you know you have another three hours to go.”
While not every day is bliss in stays that sometimes last for a month — there is rain, and there are rattlesnakes and occasional bouts of boredom — Iyer comes to understand that it is the learnings of silence, not the busy work of his career or any money in his bank account, that would be useful as his father came to the end of his life.
Still, a friend says to him, “I can’t believe you’re spending all this time with these old guys in hoods.” But those old guys in hoods are quite the sages. Once, Iyer walks in on one working in the kitchen, who says to him, “This bloody peeling of onions, it never stops!” Iyer assumes he is talking literally, but no: “It’s the inner onion I’m talking about. The invisible stuff!”
There is, as there always is, another fire, threatening the Hermitage. And then another.
“The sacred is not a sanctuary, I’m moved to remember; it’s a force field. In many ways a forest fire. You can try controlled burns or back burnings, you can walk towards the heat, but its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled or anticipated.”
Aflame, released the week after the Santa Ana winds blew embers across the Pacific Palisades, is beauty amid those ashes, and those yet to come. A —Jennifer Graham
Featured Image: Aflame, by Pico Iyer
