When Silence Roars
A Review of Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer (Riverhead Books, 2025)
by Cheryl Sadowski
240 pp., hardcover, $30
January 14, 2025
Riverhead Books
ISBN: 978-0-593420-28-7
Pico Iyer’s memoir, Aflame: Learning from Silence, recounts the author’s experience residing at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a small Benedictine monastery located high above the sea in Big Sur, California. Iyer’s first stay in the monastery followed the loss of his family home more than thirty years ago, after it was engulfed in flames in one of Southern California’s notorious wildfires. He has periodically returned to the Hermitage ever since. From this slim and unassuming book comes a journey of gradated insights and revelations attained through weeks spent in silence and relative isolation amid rugged cliffs, coastal redwoods, and the occasional mountain lion.
Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian descent, known primarily for travel writing and cultural commentary. He is also a secular writer with an abiding interest in mysticism and spirituality. Iyer’s parents, both philosophers of comparative religion, named him after the Renaissance-era scholar and Catholic heretic, Pico della Mirandola. He grew up “prone to run in the opposite direction” of any religious dogma and orthodoxy, making his choice to spend significant periods among Catholic monks that much more fascinating. “Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery?” he asks. “Maybe because there is no ‘I’ to get in the way of the exultancy.”
Iyer is altogether at home inside the monastery’s modest lodgings and its spartan chapel, designed by “a Japanese man . . . who knew that little was needed but light.” He identifies the Camaldolese who run the Hermitage as “the most contemplative congregation of Benedictines,” and while Iyer isn’t here to reflect upon scripture, he readily engages in conversations about God with fellow residents. While the monks go about their ordered lives, Iyer attends to his own rites. He organizes his books, writes, explores the grounds, and exchanges pleasantries in the shared kitchen. He sits in the chapel, joins an occasional service, and listens to the monks’ vigils. There are no rules, no required methods or practices—only long runways of time and stillness. Iyer is interested in what happens when the ceaseless chatter and striving of the outside world is buffered, and there is nothing left to encounter but oak trees, a distant ocean, and variegated ribbons of sky.
These revelations don’t come as a thunderclap, but as a dawning which gradually unfolds over compact essays that bring the reader into the Silence, the World, the Heart, the Boiler Room, and finally, the Mystery. Through vignettes and anecdotes—some lyrical and touching, others humorous and quirky—Iyer recounts his respect for the monks, their daily rituals and work in the world, and his conversations with other seekers, some of them famous, who reside in and around the Hermitage. Echoes of writers Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, and Thomas Merton are ever present (in the Hermitage’s library, especially). Like Iyer, each was spiritually seduced by the hills and hollows of Big Sur’s powerful landscape.
The paradox thrumming within Iyer’s enduring experiment is just how loud silence can be, and how worldly and environmental realities persist despite the visual beauty and enrichment of seclusion. Beyond a metaphor for personal awakening, the book’s title, Aflame, recalls the wildfire that consumed his family home, and the flames that now lick at not-so-distant mountainsides. Fierce storms, rain, and wind throttle the monastery’s electrical power, and rattle the trailers and cells of the residents. There is an unspoken recognition that the elements are neither good nor bad, but a hard fact that accompanies the decision to live so high in the hills. Fires, floods, and landslides, while destructive on a human scale, are nature’s path to regeneration—an eerie promise of renewal that returns again and again.
Difficult family matters are never far away, but drift into Iyer’s monastic stillness as if on clouds and land like hail: his mother struggles with her husband’s death, his daughter is diagnosed with cancer, the COVID-19 pandemic thins out the monastery for a few years. “How to stay calm amidst the flames? Or trust the dark so deeply that you can walk through it night after night as predators stir on every side?”: questions that ultimately lead Iyer in submission “to an order one cannot begin to second-guess” and to the conclusion that “death might not be the enemy of life.”
Not everyone is fortunate enough to experience a sanctuary provided by friendly monks in an environment of ravishing natural beauty. Most of us struggle to secure a few quiet moments with a cup of coffee, or if we’re lucky, an occasional, advantageous weekend to ourselves. How we spend these moments, it seems to me, is the heart of the matter. Contemporary life offers every flavor of leisure to distract us from looking upon ourselves and upon the beauty and cruelty of the world. Taking stock of life through purposeful silence—without the veneer of technology and constant commentary—requires as much discipline as anything else worth practicing or perfecting. Such an undertaking can be viewed as a gift, or if one chooses, as a challenge: “Anyone can sit in [retreat],” Iyer quotes from a Zen Buddhist monk. “The trick is to sit in the world.”
Aflame is filled with poetic observations: the last moments of a wasp’s life, the way a drop of water transforms an empty glass. “Retreat,” he discovers, “is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection. You learn to love the world only by looking at it closely, in the round.” Iyer writes for readers who are interested in the revelations that occur when everything else is stripped away, and rewards our interest with enough universal wisdom to inspire even the most distracted individual to spend some portion of their day, or week, in silence.
Cheryl Sadowski writes about art, books, landscape, and nature. Her essays, reviews, and short fiction have been published in Vita Poetica, The Ekphrastic Review, After the Art, and other publications. She is a 2023 Pushcart nominee and winner of a Grantchester Award by The Orchards Poetry Journal. Cheryl holds a Master of Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University and lives in Northern Virginia.
