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Aflame: Learning from Silence
From the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat.
Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way.
In Aflame, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant a house burns down, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other nonmonastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. And most profoundly, he shows how solitude can be a training in community and companionship. In so doing, he offers a unique outsider’s view of monastic life—and of a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there’s a space for quiet and recollection that’s open to us all.
Radiant, intimate, and gripping, Aflame offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.
Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way.
In Aflame, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant a house burns down, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other nonmonastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. And most profoundly, he shows how solitude can be a training in community and companionship. In so doing, he offers a unique outsider’s view of monastic life—and of a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there’s a space for quiet and recollection that’s open to us all.
Radiant, intimate, and gripping, Aflame offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.
234 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 14, 2025
266 people are currently reading
2185 people want to read
About the author
Pico Iyer
129 books1,084 followersPico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian descent. As an acclaimed travel writer, he began his career documenting a neglected aspect of travel -- the sometimes surreal disconnect between local tradition and imported global pop culture. Since then, he has written ten books, exploring also the cultural consequences of isolation, whether writing about the exiled spiritual leaders of Tibet or the embargoed society of Cuba.
Iyer’s latest focus is on yet another overlooked aspect of travel: how can it help us regain our sense of stillness and focus in a world where our devices and digital networks increasing distract us? As he says: "Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world."
Iyer’s latest focus is on yet another overlooked aspect of travel: how can it help us regain our sense of stillness and focus in a world where our devices and digital networks increasing distract us? As he says: "Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 139 reviews
January 19, 2025
Unusually slow, not particularly profound.
“Eat, Pray, Love”-like if it was just “Silent,” with less engagement.
For this book it seems like Pico Iyer is a person in search of pages written with poor editing rather than providing an interesting story or profoundness.
“It’s more, I suppose, that I’m glad to be away from the self I am when other people are around.”
“Father Robert is washing the feet of his brothers, a reminder that he’s as much their servant as they are his.”
“There’s so much silence you can hear the stars move.”
Liked how the author described flowers as blueberry ice cream.
“Eat, Pray, Love”-like if it was just “Silent,” with less engagement.
For this book it seems like Pico Iyer is a person in search of pages written with poor editing rather than providing an interesting story or profoundness.
“It’s more, I suppose, that I’m glad to be away from the self I am when other people are around.”
“Father Robert is washing the feet of his brothers, a reminder that he’s as much their servant as they are his.”
“There’s so much silence you can hear the stars move.”
Liked how the author described flowers as blueberry ice cream.
Read
February 7, 2025I’ve read quite a bit of the book slowly, devouring it as fast as I could and as slow as I want to, which is to say–I read the book’s first sixty pages in the coffeeshop inside Bookpeople in Austin for three hours, buying more books, walking around, and writing descriptive notes.
I was touched by it. Moved. I was intrigued at first. I first read of Pico Iyer in some sort of travel writing compilation, and ever since then, the name–how iconic!---Pico Iyer just got stamped in my brain. It’s a funny name. Memorable.
The elevator pitch of this book is that it’s about this guy who goes to live with monks even though he’s not really Buddhist to be silent for days and weeks. He then narrates what it was like and what he has learned about the world, and silence, and being still. Another layer of it was that his house burned down–as per the title–and he realized what material things are worth–which is nonconsequential.
I think in the beginning I was enchanted by the idea of it–you know, living with monks, silently. I have always wanted to live in the forest by myself for a long period of time just to write and read. By the time I get home, and have only limited time to myself and no time to wander, reading the book became laborious to me. Everything felt slow and redundant. I’ve just been longing for it to finish with 60 more pages to go. I was reading it side by side with Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family which is a beautiful memoir of his visits in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and the stark contrast is palpable to me. Ondaatje wrote so many moments where I felt a sense of the world, and by that I meant, I’ve had a lot about insights about my life while Pico Iyer is forcing them to you.
Okay, I figured out the words, I was worried I won’t be able to articulate this but here we go: Ondaatje’s ability to make you think and give insights is in his very skillful “show, don’t tell” writing style while Pico Iyer is more “tell, don’t show”--this is what I’ve learned so take it, here are some cute little anecdotes about silence, here are some random quotes about it, here are some characters that I found. I wish it was a little more subtle.
A lot of things are a product of experience and context. Where I am, how I am each day, what happened before and after the reading experience, what have I been thinking about recently, what media have I been consuming, affect my reading experience. Unfortunately, towards the end of the book, it just felt like meh to me. The thing is I really liked the book, I loved it but I felt a tinge of gladness when I realized I had only ten more pages of the book. So yeah, I don’t think I was the right audience for it. I do think fans of Paulo Coelho will inhale it. Someone said, ‘unusually slow’ and I agree. Story could have been cut down more pages but then again, it’s not really a thick book.
Pick the book up if you need some thoughts on silence. Also, I think he’s cute.
EDIT: I'm surprised it's not as well-read as I thought it should be. Saw this in the New Yorker Briefly Noted page.
I was touched by it. Moved. I was intrigued at first. I first read of Pico Iyer in some sort of travel writing compilation, and ever since then, the name–how iconic!---Pico Iyer just got stamped in my brain. It’s a funny name. Memorable.
The elevator pitch of this book is that it’s about this guy who goes to live with monks even though he’s not really Buddhist to be silent for days and weeks. He then narrates what it was like and what he has learned about the world, and silence, and being still. Another layer of it was that his house burned down–as per the title–and he realized what material things are worth–which is nonconsequential.
I think in the beginning I was enchanted by the idea of it–you know, living with monks, silently. I have always wanted to live in the forest by myself for a long period of time just to write and read. By the time I get home, and have only limited time to myself and no time to wander, reading the book became laborious to me. Everything felt slow and redundant. I’ve just been longing for it to finish with 60 more pages to go. I was reading it side by side with Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family which is a beautiful memoir of his visits in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and the stark contrast is palpable to me. Ondaatje wrote so many moments where I felt a sense of the world, and by that I meant, I’ve had a lot about insights about my life while Pico Iyer is forcing them to you.
Okay, I figured out the words, I was worried I won’t be able to articulate this but here we go: Ondaatje’s ability to make you think and give insights is in his very skillful “show, don’t tell” writing style while Pico Iyer is more “tell, don’t show”--this is what I’ve learned so take it, here are some cute little anecdotes about silence, here are some random quotes about it, here are some characters that I found. I wish it was a little more subtle.
A lot of things are a product of experience and context. Where I am, how I am each day, what happened before and after the reading experience, what have I been thinking about recently, what media have I been consuming, affect my reading experience. Unfortunately, towards the end of the book, it just felt like meh to me. The thing is I really liked the book, I loved it but I felt a tinge of gladness when I realized I had only ten more pages of the book. So yeah, I don’t think I was the right audience for it. I do think fans of Paulo Coelho will inhale it. Someone said, ‘unusually slow’ and I agree. Story could have been cut down more pages but then again, it’s not really a thick book.
Pick the book up if you need some thoughts on silence. Also, I think he’s cute.
EDIT: I'm surprised it's not as well-read as I thought it should be. Saw this in the New Yorker Briefly Noted page.
February 21, 2025
First time reading Iyer; likely to be my last. Reading writing like this, I always wonder, “How do these people garner such followings? How and why do people put them on such literary or spiritual pedestals?” It is beyond my understanding, as is the point of Mr. Iyer’s book…so disjointed and so non-linear as to leave me flummoxed from moment-to-moment and sentence-to-sentence. The interjection of random acquaintances—often un-named— whose role or purpose or quips are befuddling as to any relevance to surrounding text. And at other times, Iyer is a name-dropper…to what purpose, one must wonder? To elevate his own status as a cohort among some elite legion?? Example:
What??!! What kind of nebulous fake profundity is that supposed to be?!! “Don’t worry about the answers,” Iyer seems to be inferring. “…Don’t even worry about the questions. Questions are stupid; answers are pointless.”
At another point (p. 57), Iyer casually points out that he’s been visiting the Dalia Lama for more than twenty years, and the dialogue he proffers seems to indicate that he is having rather a private audience with his old-buddy, old-pal.
Iyer, however, and despite his having spiritualist associations and repeated retreats to religious enclaves, claims not to be religious nor to be affiliated with any particular religious belief system. We are, I suppose(?), to take this to mean that perhaps he is “beyond” or “above” the rationalization of common man’s invented religions, and that he is, perhaps, a guru of life itself and its mysteries.
It all seems rather narcissistic.
The first two chapters [or sections] present us with an over-privileged, closet materialist who seems not to understand that his precious “silence” is just another commodity to which he feels a special right…
At halfway through this thirty-dollar, mere 200-page book, I have yet to grasp the importance or relevance of why “silence” is worthy of its 200 pages of bad writing… And please note: I am a former Benedictine monk myself. The final three chapters/sections of the book are slightly more tolerable than the first two chapters. But I still feel like the entire book was misleading (and a disjointed, jumbled mess). Although Iyer is “non-religious” and non-affiliated with any denomination, he is still willing to “steal” the renewing and seclusionary atmosphere and benefits of this Camaldolian/Benedictine retreat center without ever extolling the benefits of the Benedictine Rule or Benedictine contemplative lifestyle. In fact, he seems to take particular joy in pointing-out the syncreticities of the brothers as a mockery of their professed religion rather than focusing on the routine of the Office (prayers) or how Benedictine philosophy is at the core of the brothers’ lives ( or how it benefits him …as in, he has enjoyed the freedom of cheap guest retreat accommodations BECAUSE of the Benedictine rule about welcoming the stranger. But does Iyer even know about this rule? …or take it with him out into the world and share it? …The book doesn’t say, so I presume the answer is, “No.”)
There is no deep or inward reflection about “silence” whatsoever anywhere in this book. Perhaps, part of the problem is that—save by means of, perhaps, poetry—that the very concept of the ineffable character of “silence” is not conducive to…words…or to storytelling…or to description. Because words [outside of personal prayer] and storytelling and description all “break” the spirit of and contradict the very ineffable thing one is trying to convey.
In point of fact, this book is a meditation on anything BUT silence. Instead, anything halfway interesting deals with the people and characters that Iyer meets over his 30+ years retreating at the Hermitage. Indeed, “silence” seems to be a misnomer, because no matter how Iyer might think he’s describing it, there is always a cacophony about. In one of the few single paragraphs in which he actually attempts to directly address the topic, he states:
…But listening to Bach is not silence, is it? And neither is the motor-grinding drone or the honking cars of the highway…nor is the effervescent drone of a million murmuring voices and clomping shoes on cement tiles or the HVAC system in overhead ducts or escalators or the persistence of public intercom announcements [even in a quiet corner] of an airport.
I actually think Iyer has mis-identified the very thing he has tried to write an entire book about… And even if he has MIS-IDENTIFIED “SOLITUDE” AS “SILENCE,” he has still failed, because any snippets of wisdom he has garnered have been through recollections of INTERACTIONS with other individuals.
Frankly, I will never understand Iyer’s use of non-linear writing. There was no theme or topic compartmentalization that benefitted from it. It simply served to make things more confusing (and perhaps dis-serviced the author himself by highlighting his inability to outline or better organize his own writing…nor does it shine kindly on the editors’ skills since basic editorial assistance might have suggested better organization or flow).
And speaking of poor editorial capacity… Iyer goes out of his way to laud his “faithful and unerring editor”…which is unfortunate because neither author nor editor apparently noticed now many awkward sentence-structural or syntax errors were pervasive throughout this book. I’m going to present one glaring example here to prove my point:
…Oh really? Did Emily Dickinson leave you a book of poems in your room? …Did she autograph the book and write you a personalized note as well?
I mean…COME ON… That’s like an Editing 101 mistake… from an example taken from a grade school grammar class.
“‘Here [at the Hermitage] you find answers,’ I suggest to Leonard Cohen shortly before I leave.
“‘Here you find freedom from answers,’ he replies in the grave and gravelly baritone beloved by many [in case any philistines reading this book have forgotten how belovèd and celebrated my friend, Leonard Cohen, actually is]…”
What??!! What kind of nebulous fake profundity is that supposed to be?!! “Don’t worry about the answers,” Iyer seems to be inferring. “…Don’t even worry about the questions. Questions are stupid; answers are pointless.”
At another point (p. 57), Iyer casually points out that he’s been visiting the Dalia Lama for more than twenty years, and the dialogue he proffers seems to indicate that he is having rather a private audience with his old-buddy, old-pal.
Iyer, however, and despite his having spiritualist associations and repeated retreats to religious enclaves, claims not to be religious nor to be affiliated with any particular religious belief system. We are, I suppose(?), to take this to mean that perhaps he is “beyond” or “above” the rationalization of common man’s invented religions, and that he is, perhaps, a guru of life itself and its mysteries.
It all seems rather narcissistic.
The first two chapters [or sections] present us with an over-privileged, closet materialist who seems not to understand that his precious “silence” is just another commodity to which he feels a special right…
“When next I settle into the blue-and-gold silence above the sea [at the Hermitage], it’s to hear a bulldozer protesting as it goes back and forth along the slope down the road [presumably widening the road for increased traffic]… Inwardly, I curse. Do the monks really need to make this place more crowded? Might it not imperil the silence that is the Hermitage’s greatest gift? Many of us [rich and privileged folk who have been taking advantage of the monk’s cheap room and board] would happily contribute to their coffers if that might save them from having to build more trailers…”
At halfway through this thirty-dollar, mere 200-page book, I have yet to grasp the importance or relevance of why “silence” is worthy of its 200 pages of bad writing… And please note: I am a former Benedictine monk myself. The final three chapters/sections of the book are slightly more tolerable than the first two chapters. But I still feel like the entire book was misleading (and a disjointed, jumbled mess). Although Iyer is “non-religious” and non-affiliated with any denomination, he is still willing to “steal” the renewing and seclusionary atmosphere and benefits of this Camaldolian/Benedictine retreat center without ever extolling the benefits of the Benedictine Rule or Benedictine contemplative lifestyle. In fact, he seems to take particular joy in pointing-out the syncreticities of the brothers as a mockery of their professed religion rather than focusing on the routine of the Office (prayers) or how Benedictine philosophy is at the core of the brothers’ lives ( or how it benefits him …as in, he has enjoyed the freedom of cheap guest retreat accommodations BECAUSE of the Benedictine rule about welcoming the stranger. But does Iyer even know about this rule? …or take it with him out into the world and share it? …The book doesn’t say, so I presume the answer is, “No.”)
There is no deep or inward reflection about “silence” whatsoever anywhere in this book. Perhaps, part of the problem is that—save by means of, perhaps, poetry—that the very concept of the ineffable character of “silence” is not conducive to…words…or to storytelling…or to description. Because words [outside of personal prayer] and storytelling and description all “break” the spirit of and contradict the very ineffable thing one is trying to convey.
In point of fact, this book is a meditation on anything BUT silence. Instead, anything halfway interesting deals with the people and characters that Iyer meets over his 30+ years retreating at the Hermitage. Indeed, “silence” seems to be a misnomer, because no matter how Iyer might think he’s describing it, there is always a cacophony about. In one of the few single paragraphs in which he actually attempts to directly address the topic, he states:
“Sometimes I wonder—and friends keep asking—how spending all this time in silence has changed me. I can hardly count the ways [yet he does not], now that joy seems the opposite of pleasure and freedom arises out of an embrace of limits; it’s impossible to take so seriously the self that huffs and puffs along the highway. When I find myself in a crowded airport terminal, I’m drawn, as if magnetically now, to a quiet corner in the sun; as I wait for [my partner] to come back from work—will it be twenty minutes or ninety?—I turn off the lights and listen to Bach.”
…But listening to Bach is not silence, is it? And neither is the motor-grinding drone or the honking cars of the highway…nor is the effervescent drone of a million murmuring voices and clomping shoes on cement tiles or the HVAC system in overhead ducts or escalators or the persistence of public intercom announcements [even in a quiet corner] of an airport.
I actually think Iyer has mis-identified the very thing he has tried to write an entire book about… And even if he has MIS-IDENTIFIED “SOLITUDE” AS “SILENCE,” he has still failed, because any snippets of wisdom he has garnered have been through recollections of INTERACTIONS with other individuals.
Frankly, I will never understand Iyer’s use of non-linear writing. There was no theme or topic compartmentalization that benefitted from it. It simply served to make things more confusing (and perhaps dis-serviced the author himself by highlighting his inability to outline or better organize his own writing…nor does it shine kindly on the editors’ skills since basic editorial assistance might have suggested better organization or flow).
And speaking of poor editorial capacity… Iyer goes out of his way to laud his “faithful and unerring editor”…which is unfortunate because neither author nor editor apparently noticed now many awkward sentence-structural or syntax errors were pervasive throughout this book. I’m going to present one glaring example here to prove my point:
“In my cell, by the light of my table lamp—my face reflected back to me in the window as if it were hers—I page, very slowly, through the huge book of poems left behind by Emily Dickinson.” (p. 156)
…Oh really? Did Emily Dickinson leave you a book of poems in your room? …Did she autograph the book and write you a personalized note as well?
I mean…COME ON… That’s like an Editing 101 mistake… from an example taken from a grade school grammar class.
January 19, 2025
Here's what I wrote in the newspaper:
https://www.metrosiliconvalley.com/pi...
https://www.metrosiliconvalley.com/pi...
January 24, 2025
I’m usually interested in what Pico Iyer has to say. Indeed his 2014 book, The Art of Stillness, is among my most treasured. But Aflame often reads like an incoherent jumble of notes, quotes and anecdotes scribbled on scraps of paper and collected in a shopping bag over many years. I suppose they have been organized into Aflame by Iyer, or an editor, with some intention, but I mostly struggled to crack the code.
For the devoted reader there are threads, in particular about fire and about impermanence, but you have to do some of the author's job to spot them and unravel them from what too often seems like nothing more than a patchwork. No doubt there are many profound insights that leap from the pages. Even a few that left me astonished, shaken awaken and feeling a tiny rush of something that reminded me of the sensation that accompanies the opening of a window onto a stuffy room. But there are far too many impenetrable aphorisms with often ephemeral meanings fading to nonsense on deeper reflection. I even found myself tempted, on rare occasions, to compare some particularly pretentious passages to quotes from SNL's Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey. But Iyer is so deeply sincere that it seemed disrespectful and probably this urge was just an indication of my own insecurities and shallow understanding of the big questions all of us have occasion to reflect on. How to prepare for death? What is happiness? Why are we here? What is community? Who are these people? So, I’m left to conclude it’s probably just me. Please don’t dwell on my comments. Have a look at Aflame for yourself, but by all means read the Art of Stillness.
For the devoted reader there are threads, in particular about fire and about impermanence, but you have to do some of the author's job to spot them and unravel them from what too often seems like nothing more than a patchwork. No doubt there are many profound insights that leap from the pages. Even a few that left me astonished, shaken awaken and feeling a tiny rush of something that reminded me of the sensation that accompanies the opening of a window onto a stuffy room. But there are far too many impenetrable aphorisms with often ephemeral meanings fading to nonsense on deeper reflection. I even found myself tempted, on rare occasions, to compare some particularly pretentious passages to quotes from SNL's Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey. But Iyer is so deeply sincere that it seemed disrespectful and probably this urge was just an indication of my own insecurities and shallow understanding of the big questions all of us have occasion to reflect on. How to prepare for death? What is happiness? Why are we here? What is community? Who are these people? So, I’m left to conclude it’s probably just me. Please don’t dwell on my comments. Have a look at Aflame for yourself, but by all means read the Art of Stillness.
May 13, 2025
DNF 37%
It felt like some weird promotion for the retreat center. Pico seemed to be happy to leave/handover his life's responsibilities every time he went there. It was also unclear how many times he was going back and worth as it wasn't clearly linear. Definitely a weird narcissistic or self-absorbed vibe that only a man can get away with.
It felt like some weird promotion for the retreat center. Pico seemed to be happy to leave/handover his life's responsibilities every time he went there. It was also unclear how many times he was going back and worth as it wasn't clearly linear. Definitely a weird narcissistic or self-absorbed vibe that only a man can get away with.
August 19, 2025
Who knew what wonders silence can bring? Pico Iyer does, and this is a book in which he shares the knowledge he has gained from years of periodic silence.
I shall read this again.
I shall read this again.
February 10, 2025
maybe it's just not for me, but this felt like one of those books that talks a lot without ever actually saying anything?
May 27, 2025
A fragmented but mostly chronological telling of Pico’s time spent in silence at the Hermitage monastery in Big Sur over several decades. He portrays the silence, silliness, and fellowship he observes amongst the brothers of varying faiths in the community each time he returns. Iyer also brings you into various snippets of his world travels but in a somewhat frenetic manner. At minimum, it’s a bit like an unintentional ethnography of how folks from multiple faiths can commune over a shared belief in the power of stillness and retreat.
As the reader, you can tell that Iyer sees people deeply and is observant of the light within others. He simultaneously explores the cyclically destructive nature of fire in California and its role in rebirth and planting new seeds of hope and optimism. His recurring journey towards, and deep need for, silence is his practice of surrendering to “not knowing” and being at peace with that notion; whatever the question may be.
Half the book was a slog to get through. But I could see how this was in part a reflection of the chapter “Into the Boiler Room.”
As the reader, you can tell that Iyer sees people deeply and is observant of the light within others. He simultaneously explores the cyclically destructive nature of fire in California and its role in rebirth and planting new seeds of hope and optimism. His recurring journey towards, and deep need for, silence is his practice of surrendering to “not knowing” and being at peace with that notion; whatever the question may be.
Half the book was a slog to get through. But I could see how this was in part a reflection of the chapter “Into the Boiler Room.”
July 24, 2025
I enjoyed this rumination on the monastic life of separate togetherness. But I am not sure I'm taking anything away from it. It was a lovely experience, to wander physically and spiritually with Pico Iyer, to listen in on conversations he had with friends. But that is all it was, for me. If you have a few hours and want something to feed your soul but aren't looking for any life-changing insights, this is a solid choice.
April 11, 2025
Listened to this on audio - for now, incredible. 5 stars, hope to write a full review shortly.
July 21, 2025
Pompous. Reads like an amateur year-end letter you may receive from an acquaintance listing all the great things they did.
April 21, 2025
Book #18 of 2025. "Aflame: Learning from Silence" by Pico Iyer. 5/5 rating. 218 p.
I think Pico sums this book up best: "This book is about the beauty - you could say, the sanctity - of clarity and silence."
Pico first came to the Camoldolese Hermitage that this book surrounds after a fire destroyed his childhood home and he was seeking for both a place to stay...and possibly a path to something deeper in his world. This monastic order of Catholics is the oldest continuous running sect of monks and one of the most contemplative and accepting groups within Christianity. They borrow (or at least accept) a range of views from Buddhist, to Islamic, to atheistic views and the Hermitage only asks that visitors respect silence and contemplation from its other visitors.
This book is a deep dive into the beauty of silence and the necessity for it, and time to think, within our lives. Pico writes as a stream of consciousness and truly shows what a life of patience and thought can lead to.
I was absolutely moved by so much of this book. In a time that is important to gain footing and slow down to realize what is important and constant in our lives, this book really called to me. I really am looking to build the type of life that is filled with quiet, contemplation, care, love, and purpose. As I look to move towards this, who knows, maybe find in the Hermitage? Seeking a certain kind of enlightenment and healing.
- "The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing."
- "The season of taking nothing for granted opens our eyes to the beauty we've been sleepwalking past for most of our days. It brings into sharp relief what we really care about. It makes many of us rethink our lives and realize that maybe we don't want - or need - to go back to the blind and dizzy rush we've known before. In a curious way, in the heart of a trembling world, we're living a little as we might in the silence of the monastery."
Additional Quotes:
"The silence of this place is as real and solid as sound. More real, in fact."
"No human, he saw, 'can hope to be completely free who lives within reach of familiar habits and urgencies."
"Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me."
"Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It's not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me."
"One hears, one does not seek. One accepts, one does not ask who gives. Like lightning a thought flares up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form. I never had a choice."
"There being nothing to improve on in the surroundings, the tendency is to set about improving oneself."
"Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter."
"I'm reminded, thrillingly, that this place isn't outside the world, but hidden at its very heart."
"And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head."
"...as soon as I stepped into silence, all I registered was ocean and sunlight and gold."
"I'm ready at last to let every moment make the most of me. 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 extraneous fall away. There's no such thing as dead time when everything is alive with possibility."
"It's never possibility that's not present; only me."
"My house burned down
I can now see better
The rising moon."
"These days of sunlight can only be a means to gather a candle back into the unlit corners of my, or any, life."
"To my friends - to me, two years ago - this might look like a prison; now I can see how luxury is defined by all you don't need to long for."
"[H]ere was a man with the courage to step aside a little from regular society and live at an angle to the norm. The rare soul ready to shape his days in accordance with an inner account-book and not the external spreadsheet that convention tends to encourage."
"...being alone was never an end in itself; it was the means to becoming a more useful member of society."
"Everything is simple. It's men who complicate things."
"But there are so many ways of finding release from the prison of the self."
"You have to learn how to enjoy leisure. To do nothing and be peaceful. Because leisure is where things happen to you."
"I hear in his voice the sound of all he's giving up. By choice, of course, and yet obedience can be an unforgiving master. The real meaning of conversion, I read, is 'continuous renewal.' A promise that has to be made again and again, and again."
"All self-consciousness gone in a place where self disappears and consciousness comes to seem as vast, as enveloping, as the ocean all around."
"All of us so tiny, we feel part of something huge, and a little bit less mortal."
"I wish to know and be kinder."
"'I don't feel very much like Pooh today,' says the good-natured bear. 'There, there,' says Piglet. 'I'll bring you tea and honey till you do."
"But I feel there's a longing in many of us, a hunger, for clarity and silence."
"Always this sense of constant agitation."
"We try to slow them down."
"All these years and all these stars, and still you have the capacity to be excited."
"The only point of being here, I realize: surrender."
"Nothing lasts for long, I think, leaving it where it is; it served its purpose at the time."
"Now I want to taste a little of what it is to live - and prepare to die - on the far side of the wall."
"Look at the suffering you're causing, too, in yourself and others - always more important than the suffering you're enduring."
"Sometimes I wonder - and friends keep asking - how spending all this time in silence has changed me. I can hardly count the ways, now that joy seems the opposite of pleasure and freedom arises out of an embrace of limits; it's impossible to take so seriously the self that huffs and puffs along the highway."
"You have to take care of beauty, to make the most of it, because so soon it it gone."
"Desire has so often gotten him into deepest trouble; letting go of his will, his wishes, is perhaps the truest way to peace."
"I'm sorry. We can't give you what you need. We can't help you in your brokenness. But stay here for a bit. Go and rest in the fields. Take off your shirt and enjoy the sun."
"[P]eople need the silence to hear themselves."
"Facilitating the nothing, but in a positive way. Creating the nothingness in which we become nothing. Giving us emptiness so we can be filled up."
"His family, in other words, is the world."
"But what good are words when all someone in distress really needs is a warm hand, or a shoulder to rest on?"
"They've simply found a place to renew themselves in quiet."
"Perhaps it's even the Hermitage that taught me how to direct my gaze."
"'Like love, sometimes hope is a choice...The difference between hope and optimism?' The former is a leap beyond all evidence while the other is simply an attempt to work with what it knows.'"
"'I believe in the goodness of others,' [Pope] Francis had written, as he prepared for ordination. 'I believe I wish to love a lot...I believe in the burning death of each day, from which I flee, but which smiles at me, inviting me to accept her.' The new Pope prayed, I read, not for an answer to any problem, but only for the courage to live with the unanswerable."
"The best day for anxiety, Cyprian had written to us all, is taking care of others."
"To find something you can't doubt, I realize, may be the closest that some of us need to get to faith."
I think Pico sums this book up best: "This book is about the beauty - you could say, the sanctity - of clarity and silence."
Pico first came to the Camoldolese Hermitage that this book surrounds after a fire destroyed his childhood home and he was seeking for both a place to stay...and possibly a path to something deeper in his world. This monastic order of Catholics is the oldest continuous running sect of monks and one of the most contemplative and accepting groups within Christianity. They borrow (or at least accept) a range of views from Buddhist, to Islamic, to atheistic views and the Hermitage only asks that visitors respect silence and contemplation from its other visitors.
This book is a deep dive into the beauty of silence and the necessity for it, and time to think, within our lives. Pico writes as a stream of consciousness and truly shows what a life of patience and thought can lead to.
I was absolutely moved by so much of this book. In a time that is important to gain footing and slow down to realize what is important and constant in our lives, this book really called to me. I really am looking to build the type of life that is filled with quiet, contemplation, care, love, and purpose. As I look to move towards this, who knows, maybe find in the Hermitage? Seeking a certain kind of enlightenment and healing.
- "The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing."
- "The season of taking nothing for granted opens our eyes to the beauty we've been sleepwalking past for most of our days. It brings into sharp relief what we really care about. It makes many of us rethink our lives and realize that maybe we don't want - or need - to go back to the blind and dizzy rush we've known before. In a curious way, in the heart of a trembling world, we're living a little as we might in the silence of the monastery."
Additional Quotes:
"The silence of this place is as real and solid as sound. More real, in fact."
"No human, he saw, 'can hope to be completely free who lives within reach of familiar habits and urgencies."
"Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me."
"Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It's not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me."
"One hears, one does not seek. One accepts, one does not ask who gives. Like lightning a thought flares up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form. I never had a choice."
"There being nothing to improve on in the surroundings, the tendency is to set about improving oneself."
"Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter."
"I'm reminded, thrillingly, that this place isn't outside the world, but hidden at its very heart."
"And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head."
"...as soon as I stepped into silence, all I registered was ocean and sunlight and gold."
"I'm ready at last to let every moment make the most of me. 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 extraneous fall away. There's no such thing as dead time when everything is alive with possibility."
"It's never possibility that's not present; only me."
"My house burned down
I can now see better
The rising moon."
"These days of sunlight can only be a means to gather a candle back into the unlit corners of my, or any, life."
"To my friends - to me, two years ago - this might look like a prison; now I can see how luxury is defined by all you don't need to long for."
"[H]ere was a man with the courage to step aside a little from regular society and live at an angle to the norm. The rare soul ready to shape his days in accordance with an inner account-book and not the external spreadsheet that convention tends to encourage."
"...being alone was never an end in itself; it was the means to becoming a more useful member of society."
"Everything is simple. It's men who complicate things."
"But there are so many ways of finding release from the prison of the self."
"You have to learn how to enjoy leisure. To do nothing and be peaceful. Because leisure is where things happen to you."
"I hear in his voice the sound of all he's giving up. By choice, of course, and yet obedience can be an unforgiving master. The real meaning of conversion, I read, is 'continuous renewal.' A promise that has to be made again and again, and again."
"All self-consciousness gone in a place where self disappears and consciousness comes to seem as vast, as enveloping, as the ocean all around."
"All of us so tiny, we feel part of something huge, and a little bit less mortal."
"I wish to know and be kinder."
"'I don't feel very much like Pooh today,' says the good-natured bear. 'There, there,' says Piglet. 'I'll bring you tea and honey till you do."
"But I feel there's a longing in many of us, a hunger, for clarity and silence."
"Always this sense of constant agitation."
"We try to slow them down."
"All these years and all these stars, and still you have the capacity to be excited."
"The only point of being here, I realize: surrender."
"Nothing lasts for long, I think, leaving it where it is; it served its purpose at the time."
"Now I want to taste a little of what it is to live - and prepare to die - on the far side of the wall."
"Look at the suffering you're causing, too, in yourself and others - always more important than the suffering you're enduring."
"Sometimes I wonder - and friends keep asking - how spending all this time in silence has changed me. I can hardly count the ways, now that joy seems the opposite of pleasure and freedom arises out of an embrace of limits; it's impossible to take so seriously the self that huffs and puffs along the highway."
"You have to take care of beauty, to make the most of it, because so soon it it gone."
"Desire has so often gotten him into deepest trouble; letting go of his will, his wishes, is perhaps the truest way to peace."
"I'm sorry. We can't give you what you need. We can't help you in your brokenness. But stay here for a bit. Go and rest in the fields. Take off your shirt and enjoy the sun."
"[P]eople need the silence to hear themselves."
"Facilitating the nothing, but in a positive way. Creating the nothingness in which we become nothing. Giving us emptiness so we can be filled up."
"His family, in other words, is the world."
"But what good are words when all someone in distress really needs is a warm hand, or a shoulder to rest on?"
"They've simply found a place to renew themselves in quiet."
"Perhaps it's even the Hermitage that taught me how to direct my gaze."
"'Like love, sometimes hope is a choice...The difference between hope and optimism?' The former is a leap beyond all evidence while the other is simply an attempt to work with what it knows.'"
"'I believe in the goodness of others,' [Pope] Francis had written, as he prepared for ordination. 'I believe I wish to love a lot...I believe in the burning death of each day, from which I flee, but which smiles at me, inviting me to accept her.' The new Pope prayed, I read, not for an answer to any problem, but only for the courage to live with the unanswerable."
"The best day for anxiety, Cyprian had written to us all, is taking care of others."
"To find something you can't doubt, I realize, may be the closest that some of us need to get to faith."
February 11, 2025
Perhaps too deep for me but I still enjoyed it. Just a stream of consciousness narrative for sure. Iyer has been returning to the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California for 32 years to seek silence. "Retreat, I’m coming to find, is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection." Just the usual introspective book from Iyer that has you questioning your life.
Read
August 23, 2025In "Aflame: Learning from Silence", Pico Iyer offers a quiet yet luminous reflection on the unexpected lessons of stillness, solitude, and simplicity. Known primarily for his travel writing, Iyer turns his gaze inward, exploring not distant lands but the landscapes of silence, humility, and contemplative living. He admits from the beginning that he is no monk and not even particularly religious, yet he finds himself repeatedly drawn to monastic life, where silence is less an absence than a living, breathing presence. His time among the Benedictine monks of Big Sur shows how losing everything - sometimes literally, as when his family home burned to the ground in a California wildfire - can become the starting point of a different kind of gain: the discovery that the quietest spaces can offer the most profound forms of renewal.
When Iyer first fled the ashes of his burned home, he stumbled almost by accident into the Camaldoli Hermitage on the cliffs of Big Sur. With the ocean on one side and redwoods on the other, it offered him not sermons or conversion but something subtler and more transformative: silence. The monks imposed no demands; they neither tried to make him Catholic nor urged him toward rituals. Instead, they gave him space and stillness. For a modest donation, he lived in a simple trailer, surrounded by silence that felt alive, vibrating with possibility. It was here that he realized how easily the noise of the modern world drowns out not just others but the deeper parts of ourselves. In this stillness, even ordinary details - a hawk gliding above lavender, the hush of the sea against the cliffs, the amber glow of chapel light - began to feel like scripture, speaking truths that could never be put into words.
Iyer’s retreat at Big Sur echoes the journeys of others who have discovered vitality in silence. He recalls the explorer Admiral Byrd, who found life most alive in solitude at the South Pole, where silence clarified the value of existence itself. Such stories helped Iyer understand how tragedy, like the loss of a home, might create the space needed for deeper meaning to enter. He discovered that in silence, one’s connection to others does not disappear but instead becomes sharper, as if the absence of words makes affection and kinship more vividly present.
Returning again and again to the Hermitage, Iyer found it became less a place of escape than of recalibration. A friend once asked if it wasn’t selfish to vanish into a monastery while loved ones still needed him. He realized that far from being selfish, these retreats made him less self-centered, more patient, and more open when he returned. Silence was not withdrawal but a way of sharpening his ability to serve. This idea recalls Henry David Thoreau, often caricatured as a hermit but in truth deeply devoted to community. His retreat to Walden was not to abandon society but to return to it with renewed clarity. Similarly, the monks of Big Sur live not as escapees but as a community bound to one another, embracing silence as a form of collective attention, a way of fully seeing the world in front of them.
The flame that silence kindles, however, can be fragile. Daily life, with its demands and doubts, quickly smothers the clarity found at the Hermitage. Iyer admits he is no ascetic - he has responsibilities in Japan, a partner and her children, and a mother who lost her home. Yet the days of silence in Big Sur give him strength to face these obligations with steadier eyes. He learns to redefine luxury not as possessions but as freedom from unnecessary desires. A monk once told him that anyone can meditate in a temple; the true challenge is to bring that same attentiveness back into the world.
The book weaves together Iyer’s reflections with those of figures like Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama. Cohen, who spent years as a Zen monk, found that tending to his teacher and living in simplicity changed his music, which shifted from longing and despair toward quiet acceptance. For him, silence was not escape but the most imaginative way of meeting life’s struggles. The Dalai Lama, too, embodies this perspective. Though exiled from Tibet and burdened with unimaginable loss, he places his greatest achievement not in receiving the Nobel Prize but in giving hope to one despairing man in South Africa. Such stories remind Iyer that the measure of silence is not in how it isolates us but in how it equips us to return to the world with compassion and clarity.
At the Hermitage, monks share their own journeys of surrender and transformation. One paints prayers in colors that shimmer like moonlight; another describes the decade-long process of unwinding the self until all masks fall away. Silence, they suggest, is not sterile but fertile, a place where shadows rise gently to the surface and empathy grows. Like sea anemones, they explain, people open up in safe environments and close down when threatened by noise or fear. Within the safety of silence, however, Iyer finds himself more open, writing letters, offering words, and feeling joy defined not as pleasure but as a deeper alignment with life.
Even in his personal grief, such as when his father died, Iyer found that what sustained him was not wealth or accomplishment but the quiet inner resources cultivated in silence. He came to see faith not as certainty but as the willingness to walk through the dark without knowing the outcome. Life at the Hermitage underscored that nothing lasts forever - not even his scribbled poems, some lost in the trash - but that fleeting moments of clarity still serve their purpose before fading away. The monks themselves embody this impermanence with grace, living lightly, laughing often, and tending to small acts - cooking, arranging flowers, caring for animals - with devotion that turns ordinary tasks into radiant gestures.
What emerges in these experiences is the realization that silence does not turn you away from the world but makes you see it anew. At the Hermitage, empathy blooms because you are no longer locked in your own perspective. You cannot curse another when silence has expanded your vision. In moments of fear and doubt, Iyer finds solace in the rhythm of monastic life: the laughter of monks, the echoes of birds, the rituals of daily prayer. Everything is unfinished, yet in this incompleteness, there is space to breathe.
Even the fragility of the Hermitage itself underscores its lesson. Wildfires continue to threaten Big Sur, and the number of monks dwindles, their community aging in a world that resists lifelong commitments. Yet their optimism remains. They see silence not as retreat but as preparation to meet the world with clearer eyes. During the pandemic, when global life slowed into stillness, many caught a glimpse of what the monks preserve every day: the sacredness of quiet walks, the rediscovery of beauty, the chance to see life with new clarity.
The enduring wisdom of the Hermitage is that emptiness itself can be a gift. When a visitor marveled at the monks’ work, one replied, 'We don’t do anything at all.' And yet in that 'nothing,' they create the conditions for transformation, offering a space where people rediscover who they are beneath all noise. Silence is not barren; it is the ground where empathy, resilience, and compassion grow.
In the end, "Aflame: Learning from Silence" is less about monastic withdrawal than about how silence equips us to live more fully in the noisy world. Iyer shows that by stepping back, even briefly, we find new strength to step forward with patience and kindness. The practice of silence reveals that fulfillment is not in accumulation but in presence, not in answers but in the courage to hold questions. Through stories of monks, thinkers, and his own journey, Iyer reminds us that silence is not escape but return - a return to clarity, to compassion, and to the quiet flame that can light our way through life’s uncertainties.
When Iyer first fled the ashes of his burned home, he stumbled almost by accident into the Camaldoli Hermitage on the cliffs of Big Sur. With the ocean on one side and redwoods on the other, it offered him not sermons or conversion but something subtler and more transformative: silence. The monks imposed no demands; they neither tried to make him Catholic nor urged him toward rituals. Instead, they gave him space and stillness. For a modest donation, he lived in a simple trailer, surrounded by silence that felt alive, vibrating with possibility. It was here that he realized how easily the noise of the modern world drowns out not just others but the deeper parts of ourselves. In this stillness, even ordinary details - a hawk gliding above lavender, the hush of the sea against the cliffs, the amber glow of chapel light - began to feel like scripture, speaking truths that could never be put into words.
Iyer’s retreat at Big Sur echoes the journeys of others who have discovered vitality in silence. He recalls the explorer Admiral Byrd, who found life most alive in solitude at the South Pole, where silence clarified the value of existence itself. Such stories helped Iyer understand how tragedy, like the loss of a home, might create the space needed for deeper meaning to enter. He discovered that in silence, one’s connection to others does not disappear but instead becomes sharper, as if the absence of words makes affection and kinship more vividly present.
Returning again and again to the Hermitage, Iyer found it became less a place of escape than of recalibration. A friend once asked if it wasn’t selfish to vanish into a monastery while loved ones still needed him. He realized that far from being selfish, these retreats made him less self-centered, more patient, and more open when he returned. Silence was not withdrawal but a way of sharpening his ability to serve. This idea recalls Henry David Thoreau, often caricatured as a hermit but in truth deeply devoted to community. His retreat to Walden was not to abandon society but to return to it with renewed clarity. Similarly, the monks of Big Sur live not as escapees but as a community bound to one another, embracing silence as a form of collective attention, a way of fully seeing the world in front of them.
The flame that silence kindles, however, can be fragile. Daily life, with its demands and doubts, quickly smothers the clarity found at the Hermitage. Iyer admits he is no ascetic - he has responsibilities in Japan, a partner and her children, and a mother who lost her home. Yet the days of silence in Big Sur give him strength to face these obligations with steadier eyes. He learns to redefine luxury not as possessions but as freedom from unnecessary desires. A monk once told him that anyone can meditate in a temple; the true challenge is to bring that same attentiveness back into the world.
The book weaves together Iyer’s reflections with those of figures like Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama. Cohen, who spent years as a Zen monk, found that tending to his teacher and living in simplicity changed his music, which shifted from longing and despair toward quiet acceptance. For him, silence was not escape but the most imaginative way of meeting life’s struggles. The Dalai Lama, too, embodies this perspective. Though exiled from Tibet and burdened with unimaginable loss, he places his greatest achievement not in receiving the Nobel Prize but in giving hope to one despairing man in South Africa. Such stories remind Iyer that the measure of silence is not in how it isolates us but in how it equips us to return to the world with compassion and clarity.
At the Hermitage, monks share their own journeys of surrender and transformation. One paints prayers in colors that shimmer like moonlight; another describes the decade-long process of unwinding the self until all masks fall away. Silence, they suggest, is not sterile but fertile, a place where shadows rise gently to the surface and empathy grows. Like sea anemones, they explain, people open up in safe environments and close down when threatened by noise or fear. Within the safety of silence, however, Iyer finds himself more open, writing letters, offering words, and feeling joy defined not as pleasure but as a deeper alignment with life.
Even in his personal grief, such as when his father died, Iyer found that what sustained him was not wealth or accomplishment but the quiet inner resources cultivated in silence. He came to see faith not as certainty but as the willingness to walk through the dark without knowing the outcome. Life at the Hermitage underscored that nothing lasts forever - not even his scribbled poems, some lost in the trash - but that fleeting moments of clarity still serve their purpose before fading away. The monks themselves embody this impermanence with grace, living lightly, laughing often, and tending to small acts - cooking, arranging flowers, caring for animals - with devotion that turns ordinary tasks into radiant gestures.
What emerges in these experiences is the realization that silence does not turn you away from the world but makes you see it anew. At the Hermitage, empathy blooms because you are no longer locked in your own perspective. You cannot curse another when silence has expanded your vision. In moments of fear and doubt, Iyer finds solace in the rhythm of monastic life: the laughter of monks, the echoes of birds, the rituals of daily prayer. Everything is unfinished, yet in this incompleteness, there is space to breathe.
Even the fragility of the Hermitage itself underscores its lesson. Wildfires continue to threaten Big Sur, and the number of monks dwindles, their community aging in a world that resists lifelong commitments. Yet their optimism remains. They see silence not as retreat but as preparation to meet the world with clearer eyes. During the pandemic, when global life slowed into stillness, many caught a glimpse of what the monks preserve every day: the sacredness of quiet walks, the rediscovery of beauty, the chance to see life with new clarity.
The enduring wisdom of the Hermitage is that emptiness itself can be a gift. When a visitor marveled at the monks’ work, one replied, 'We don’t do anything at all.' And yet in that 'nothing,' they create the conditions for transformation, offering a space where people rediscover who they are beneath all noise. Silence is not barren; it is the ground where empathy, resilience, and compassion grow.
In the end, "Aflame: Learning from Silence" is less about monastic withdrawal than about how silence equips us to live more fully in the noisy world. Iyer shows that by stepping back, even briefly, we find new strength to step forward with patience and kindness. The practice of silence reveals that fulfillment is not in accumulation but in presence, not in answers but in the courage to hold questions. Through stories of monks, thinkers, and his own journey, Iyer reminds us that silence is not escape but return - a return to clarity, to compassion, and to the quiet flame that can light our way through life’s uncertainties.
January 23, 2025
3.5 Read this for a program at work author was a very chill man also now I want to become a monk
March 30, 2025
Some books you read. Others you absorb in silence. Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer belongs squarely in the latter category. This is not merely a book about silence—it is silence rendered in prose. At once a meditation, a personal essay, and a spiritual travelogue, Aflame traces Iyer’s recurring stays at a remote Catholic hermitage in Big Sur, California, and through them, his search for what remains when noise, identity, and ambition fall away.
On the surface, this is a chronicle of retreat: ocean views, monastic rhythms, spartan rooms. But underneath runs a more urgent question: What happens when the self is stilled? “Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter,” Iyer writes. “If you so wish,” he quotes from a desert father, “you can become aflame.” The real fire here is internal—and it burns quietly, insistently, transforming everything in its glow.
Iyer’s style is deceptively simple, but exquisitely controlled. His language breathes. The rhythm is meditative, the tone both lyrical and grounded. His observations have the clarity of haiku: “The sun is sending fireflies scattering across the sea.” References—from Dickinson to Kafka, Thoreau to the Vedas—surface like shared breaths rather than namedrops. Each quote lands like a bell in an empty chapel. And yet, the book never drifts into the abstract. It remains rooted in the body, the elements, the rawness of grief and the grace of everyday gestures.
This is not a book for those seeking quick wisdom or practical takeaways. It’s not “self-help”; it’s self-emptying. Iyer assumes a reader willing to slow down, to pause mid-sentence, to follow digressions like footpaths through fog. In that way, Aflame is itself a retreat. Especially now—in a world always shouting, scrolling, scheming—its quiet is thunderous.
There are fires throughout Aflame—both literal and metaphorical. The wildfire that destroyed Iyer’s home. The internal combustion of memory. The slow burn of mourning his father. “The only thing that saved me was a Good Samaritan,” he writes about surviving the flames, “poking a hose from a water truck he’d driven up, to try to be of help.” But also: the fire of devotion, of attention, of stripped-down presence. In stillness, he discovers not numbness but fierce aliveness: “It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.”
Some of the most memorable moments come from encounters—with Buddhist monks, Hindu nuns, dying friends, and even Leonard Cohen, who tells Iyer: “Forgetting who you are is such a delicious experience. And so frightening.” Iyer’s gift lies in letting these voices resonate without overtaking his own. He walks in step with his sources, not behind them.
The book has an open, spiral structure: no argument, no climax—just a return to silence, each time from a different place. This might frustrate some readers. At times, the lyricism verges on precious. And gender is rarely examined; women appear mostly as muses or emotional mirrors. One may also wish for a more explicit reckoning with privilege—the ability to withdraw, after all, is not available to everyone. But these critiques emerge from the very moral questions Iyer invites us to sit with.
“Every day in silence is an incarnation.”
Aflame is not a book that hands you insight. It’s a book that burns away everything that keeps you from seeing it for yourself. For readers who see stillness not as a luxury but as a necessity, Iyer offers no answers—just the conditions in which better questions might arise. This is a book that lingers. Quietly. Fiercely. Like flame.
On the surface, this is a chronicle of retreat: ocean views, monastic rhythms, spartan rooms. But underneath runs a more urgent question: What happens when the self is stilled? “Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter,” Iyer writes. “If you so wish,” he quotes from a desert father, “you can become aflame.” The real fire here is internal—and it burns quietly, insistently, transforming everything in its glow.
Iyer’s style is deceptively simple, but exquisitely controlled. His language breathes. The rhythm is meditative, the tone both lyrical and grounded. His observations have the clarity of haiku: “The sun is sending fireflies scattering across the sea.” References—from Dickinson to Kafka, Thoreau to the Vedas—surface like shared breaths rather than namedrops. Each quote lands like a bell in an empty chapel. And yet, the book never drifts into the abstract. It remains rooted in the body, the elements, the rawness of grief and the grace of everyday gestures.
This is not a book for those seeking quick wisdom or practical takeaways. It’s not “self-help”; it’s self-emptying. Iyer assumes a reader willing to slow down, to pause mid-sentence, to follow digressions like footpaths through fog. In that way, Aflame is itself a retreat. Especially now—in a world always shouting, scrolling, scheming—its quiet is thunderous.
There are fires throughout Aflame—both literal and metaphorical. The wildfire that destroyed Iyer’s home. The internal combustion of memory. The slow burn of mourning his father. “The only thing that saved me was a Good Samaritan,” he writes about surviving the flames, “poking a hose from a water truck he’d driven up, to try to be of help.” But also: the fire of devotion, of attention, of stripped-down presence. In stillness, he discovers not numbness but fierce aliveness: “It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.”
Some of the most memorable moments come from encounters—with Buddhist monks, Hindu nuns, dying friends, and even Leonard Cohen, who tells Iyer: “Forgetting who you are is such a delicious experience. And so frightening.” Iyer’s gift lies in letting these voices resonate without overtaking his own. He walks in step with his sources, not behind them.
The book has an open, spiral structure: no argument, no climax—just a return to silence, each time from a different place. This might frustrate some readers. At times, the lyricism verges on precious. And gender is rarely examined; women appear mostly as muses or emotional mirrors. One may also wish for a more explicit reckoning with privilege—the ability to withdraw, after all, is not available to everyone. But these critiques emerge from the very moral questions Iyer invites us to sit with.
“Every day in silence is an incarnation.”
Aflame is not a book that hands you insight. It’s a book that burns away everything that keeps you from seeing it for yourself. For readers who see stillness not as a luxury but as a necessity, Iyer offers no answers—just the conditions in which better questions might arise. This is a book that lingers. Quietly. Fiercely. Like flame.
April 25, 2025
A enjoyable and thought provoking mix of memoir, philosophy, and contemplation. The book is much like a series of diary entries recording Iyer's thoughts and reactions to his many years of retreats to a Benedictine hermitage in the hills above Big Sur, with asides on his frequent visits with Leonard Cohen during his time at a Buddhist monastery in LA. Iyer reflects on the peace of those visits, the terrible California fires including the one that destroyed his house and led to his first retreat, on the lives of the monks and on the people he encounters over the years. And on the specific value of sought after silence and contemplation and how those help deal with a variety of losses and challenges over three decades.
It is worth a second read, and I have marked several passages that particularly moved me.
It is worth a second read, and I have marked several passages that particularly moved me.
March 21, 2025
I listened to this because another writer whose work I enjoy recommended it.
I did not enjoy it. It's self-indulgent and self-focused, two traits that I really cannot abide. It is also rather superficial. I really expected something quite different, based on the author who recommended it. If this had been by a female rather than a male author, I am not sure it would even have gotten published.
I did not enjoy it. It's self-indulgent and self-focused, two traits that I really cannot abide. It is also rather superficial. I really expected something quite different, based on the author who recommended it. If this had been by a female rather than a male author, I am not sure it would even have gotten published.
July 5, 2025
I really wanted to like this book more. As an occasional visitor to Benedictine monasteries, I am always blown away at the clarity, silence, and kindness I find there. This book is written in a type of narrative that is very hard to follow- he skips around time and places, sometimes in the same paragraph, without warning. Half of the time, I was rereading a sentence trying to figure out what was happening. There are moments of clarity, but most of the time it was a slog. 😕
May 5, 2025
It hurts me to give a book by Pico Iyer 2 stars, he is on my favorite author list. Aflame was so slow and unfocused I struggled to get though it. Maybe his publisher demanded a book or maybe these ideas of fire and silence had been on his mind forever. Whatever the reason, Aflame will not stay with me. Every book can't be the author's best, so I'll look forward to his next one.
January 15, 2025
ARC review• I'm grateful to Riverhead books for the gifted ARC of the book.
Aflame: Learning from Silence is Pico Iyer's experiences living at a Hermitage weaved into a beautiful book.
He explores the paradoxes of human existence, and how they can be aligned with sustainability of the human consciousness. He focuses on the point that change is constant, and we mostly learn to accept it in adverse or unfavorable circumstances.
He has woven personal experiences of loss, spirituality, and healing via the medium of examination of dialogues he had with the members of the Hermitage, his friends, and above all, Dalai Lama.
He has put examples from real life, one being his friend's divorce and reconciliation after a break - for looking at same things with different perspectives.
It's a quick read, the language is easy, and is quite evocative and brings a retrospective aura along with it.
Aflame: Learning from Silence is Pico Iyer's experiences living at a Hermitage weaved into a beautiful book.
He explores the paradoxes of human existence, and how they can be aligned with sustainability of the human consciousness. He focuses on the point that change is constant, and we mostly learn to accept it in adverse or unfavorable circumstances.
He has woven personal experiences of loss, spirituality, and healing via the medium of examination of dialogues he had with the members of the Hermitage, his friends, and above all, Dalai Lama.
He has put examples from real life, one being his friend's divorce and reconciliation after a break - for looking at same things with different perspectives.
It's a quick read, the language is easy, and is quite evocative and brings a retrospective aura along with it.
February 8, 2025
A moving treatise on the power of silence and what it teaches us. How to live, how to find joy in this confounding world, and finally how to die.
June 15, 2025
Reflectively jumbled like our minds and souls, which we only hear when our outside life quiets.
July 12, 2025
Not bad but also not profound, and all of the other books I've read on mindfulness and silencing the mind have been better. For me, Eckhart Tolle is still the best author in this area, but Pema Chödrön, the Dalai Lama, and others have also written great books on the topic. I also felt like way too much of this book was spent with Iyer talking about his daily life rather than his daily life as it relates specifically to silence (i.e., he just wanted an excuse to tell us about himself.)
March 9, 2025
I felt at peace.
April 5, 2025
Pico Iyer is a travel writer also with a desire for solitude.
July 12, 2025
He writes so beautifully, refusing you with the calm and peas that he gets from his visits to the Hermitage. I have to say the little snippets with Zen master Leonard Cohen were lovely.
March 16, 2025
A pleasure, a respite, and so informative.
May 26, 2025
Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
“It’s very interesting to me,” she said, “this dual citizenship. Between the stars and the stones.”
A gem, a revelation, a story, an inspiration. Iyer is a conversation partner with the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen, Zen Buddhist practitioners and the Catholic monks who run the hermitage he writes of and distills and narrows down the wisdom they can all bring to the table. But also, there is the wisdom of stillness, silence, and solitude that permeates the air of these stories. It is the Buddhist idea of equanimity in a person and his stories. Iyer is like me, not practicing any particular faith, but open to all the wisdom in it. I also love the part of the California coast where the hermitage is located, finding its rugged beauty to be invoke hallelujahs and deepest wild gratitude. This quiet wisdom, if merged somehow with indigenous thought, could save the world.
My various sojourns to this area for inspiration:
The sixty-mile stretch of coastline along Central California has always felt like liberation as I nose around blind turns on Highway 1, a sheer drop beside me falling to the sea. Groves of coastal redwoods that enfold one in a primal darkness; high cliffs that tumble down, when it rains, toward the water; an ocean unmarked by oil rigs or islands or anything at all. “Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions,” wrote Robinson Jeffers, who left Europe and his classical education to build a stony tower above this coast and hymn the Homeric ruggedness for forty-three craggy years. Here was a “shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man.”
Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.
Blue above, blue below. A barely paved road bumping down towards the wide expanse of ocean. Rough, red earth and squirrels scurrying across the path. This, I think, is the real scripture, inscribed in all that moves.
And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head.
In my life below, I’m so determined to make the most of every moment; here, simply watching a box of light above the bed, I’m ready at last to let every moment make the most of me. 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. There’s no such thing as dead time when everything is alive with possibility.
In love it often feels as if we’re glimpsing the hidden architecture of the world: no convergence is coincidence and every moment seems to observe a hidden logic. Everything makes sense and life becomes a shining web of correspondences. But how long does such a vision ever last, and what can we do when it subsides? Fire illuminates a life quite brilliantly, but in that very blaze it threatens to bring down everything in its path.
I’m thrilled, in the wide-awake silence, to sense that all the scattered filaments inside of me come together in a singing whole. I’m reminded that the best in us lies deeper than our words.
Dalai Lama
The man who bustles into the room has been a monk since the age of four. But in uncommonly specific and urgent ways, his destiny is in the emergency room. Yes, he tells me, perhaps—perhaps (he stresses again with a scholar’s caution and precision)—some in his tradition have had the chance to practice meditation to quite a high degree; but when it comes to caring for those in need, the poor and suffering, they need to learn from their Christian brothers. Buddhists, I think, are experts when it comes to defusing the suffering in the mind; the Christians I know are often deeply attentive to the suffering in the world. Neither, however, can pretend that pain can ever be entirely healed.
I’m lucky indeed to have the time and money to go on retreat, I know, a luxury that most might envy. But riches are not so simply defined. Traditionally, the historian R. H. Tawney reminds me, humans were spiritual beings who, for prudence’s sake, took care of their material needs; nowadays more and more of us are material beings who, for the sake of prudence, attend to our spiritual needs.
To celebrate the one thousandth birthday of the Camaldolese congregation, the monks organize a gathering, at a retreat-house by the sea ninety minutes to the north of their home. Friends converge from every direction.
One monk stands before us and tells us the history of the Camaldolese: a century ago, he says, its numbers dwindled to just thirty, but still the fire refused to go out. The prior in his talk explains that to “sit in your cell as in paradise” really means to “sit in your self as in paradise.” A monk from Italy, the Visitator here to check up (as he does every three years) on his Californian brothers, points out how “people need the silence to hear themselves.”
They sing songs drawn from the Bhagavad Gita mixed with liturgy, Islamic chants set to tabla and sitar; in words or thoughts, the mixing of traditions can sound promiscuous, but in music it makes for a soaring harmony. There’s no way I can stop getting to my feet and starting clapping, dancing, the infectious rhythms and melodies pulsing through me for day after long day. One lunch, an entire meal is taken in silence, and the sense of intimacy, of intensity, builds till it seems ready to break.
It’s as if we’ve turned ourselves inside out, as in the silence, but collectively: our public selves are left on the highway, and we’re sharing our innermost beings with unmet friends.
The Church had wanted to ban harmonies in the sixteenth century, he explains, because they can blur words that are designed to be holy. But Palestrina found a way to layer sounds so that many voices could be heard at once, yet not a syllable lost.
I try to explain how the Song of Songs and the Book of Job keep going round in my head; sometimes I feel that everything I need to know is in them. Rapture and humility; the joy of exulting in all the sensory beauty of the world, and the importance of recalling that none of it will play out as we expect. The meadows all around, alight with golden poppies, and the flames that could at any moment overwhelm what looks to be a simple group of devoted souls trying to give themselves up to what’s beyond them.
choose to spend my autumns in Japan, a seasoned culture built around impermanence that has, for fourteen hundred years or more, refined a sense of how to live with suffering and loss and the many illusions the mind can throw up. And every spring, by instinct, find my way back to New Camaldoli, which I associate with resurrection, hope, the light that floods the chapel.
Both, I notice, are offering a hallelujah. The Los Angeles choir that offers renditions of Handel’s Messiah at Christmas for the inhabitants of Skid Row sometimes concludes, I hear, with a solo performance of Leonard’s “cold and broken” hallelujah.
The season of taking nothing for granted opens our eyes to the beauty we’ve been sleepwalking past for most of our days. It brings into sharp relief what we really care about. It makes many of us rethink our lives and realize that maybe we don’t want—or need—to go back to the blind and dizzy rush we’ve known before. In a curious way, in the heart of a trembling world, we’re living a little as we might in the silence of the monastery.
“It’s very interesting to me,” she said, “this dual citizenship. Between the stars and the stones.”
A gem, a revelation, a story, an inspiration. Iyer is a conversation partner with the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen, Zen Buddhist practitioners and the Catholic monks who run the hermitage he writes of and distills and narrows down the wisdom they can all bring to the table. But also, there is the wisdom of stillness, silence, and solitude that permeates the air of these stories. It is the Buddhist idea of equanimity in a person and his stories. Iyer is like me, not practicing any particular faith, but open to all the wisdom in it. I also love the part of the California coast where the hermitage is located, finding its rugged beauty to be invoke hallelujahs and deepest wild gratitude. This quiet wisdom, if merged somehow with indigenous thought, could save the world.
My various sojourns to this area for inspiration:
The sixty-mile stretch of coastline along Central California has always felt like liberation as I nose around blind turns on Highway 1, a sheer drop beside me falling to the sea. Groves of coastal redwoods that enfold one in a primal darkness; high cliffs that tumble down, when it rains, toward the water; an ocean unmarked by oil rigs or islands or anything at all. “Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions,” wrote Robinson Jeffers, who left Europe and his classical education to build a stony tower above this coast and hymn the Homeric ruggedness for forty-three craggy years. Here was a “shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man.”
Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.
Blue above, blue below. A barely paved road bumping down towards the wide expanse of ocean. Rough, red earth and squirrels scurrying across the path. This, I think, is the real scripture, inscribed in all that moves.
And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head.
In my life below, I’m so determined to make the most of every moment; here, simply watching a box of light above the bed, I’m ready at last to let every moment make the most of me. 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. There’s no such thing as dead time when everything is alive with possibility.
In love it often feels as if we’re glimpsing the hidden architecture of the world: no convergence is coincidence and every moment seems to observe a hidden logic. Everything makes sense and life becomes a shining web of correspondences. But how long does such a vision ever last, and what can we do when it subsides? Fire illuminates a life quite brilliantly, but in that very blaze it threatens to bring down everything in its path.
I’m thrilled, in the wide-awake silence, to sense that all the scattered filaments inside of me come together in a singing whole. I’m reminded that the best in us lies deeper than our words.
Dalai Lama
The man who bustles into the room has been a monk since the age of four. But in uncommonly specific and urgent ways, his destiny is in the emergency room. Yes, he tells me, perhaps—perhaps (he stresses again with a scholar’s caution and precision)—some in his tradition have had the chance to practice meditation to quite a high degree; but when it comes to caring for those in need, the poor and suffering, they need to learn from their Christian brothers. Buddhists, I think, are experts when it comes to defusing the suffering in the mind; the Christians I know are often deeply attentive to the suffering in the world. Neither, however, can pretend that pain can ever be entirely healed.
I’m lucky indeed to have the time and money to go on retreat, I know, a luxury that most might envy. But riches are not so simply defined. Traditionally, the historian R. H. Tawney reminds me, humans were spiritual beings who, for prudence’s sake, took care of their material needs; nowadays more and more of us are material beings who, for the sake of prudence, attend to our spiritual needs.
To celebrate the one thousandth birthday of the Camaldolese congregation, the monks organize a gathering, at a retreat-house by the sea ninety minutes to the north of their home. Friends converge from every direction.
One monk stands before us and tells us the history of the Camaldolese: a century ago, he says, its numbers dwindled to just thirty, but still the fire refused to go out. The prior in his talk explains that to “sit in your cell as in paradise” really means to “sit in your self as in paradise.” A monk from Italy, the Visitator here to check up (as he does every three years) on his Californian brothers, points out how “people need the silence to hear themselves.”
They sing songs drawn from the Bhagavad Gita mixed with liturgy, Islamic chants set to tabla and sitar; in words or thoughts, the mixing of traditions can sound promiscuous, but in music it makes for a soaring harmony. There’s no way I can stop getting to my feet and starting clapping, dancing, the infectious rhythms and melodies pulsing through me for day after long day. One lunch, an entire meal is taken in silence, and the sense of intimacy, of intensity, builds till it seems ready to break.
It’s as if we’ve turned ourselves inside out, as in the silence, but collectively: our public selves are left on the highway, and we’re sharing our innermost beings with unmet friends.
The Church had wanted to ban harmonies in the sixteenth century, he explains, because they can blur words that are designed to be holy. But Palestrina found a way to layer sounds so that many voices could be heard at once, yet not a syllable lost.
I try to explain how the Song of Songs and the Book of Job keep going round in my head; sometimes I feel that everything I need to know is in them. Rapture and humility; the joy of exulting in all the sensory beauty of the world, and the importance of recalling that none of it will play out as we expect. The meadows all around, alight with golden poppies, and the flames that could at any moment overwhelm what looks to be a simple group of devoted souls trying to give themselves up to what’s beyond them.
choose to spend my autumns in Japan, a seasoned culture built around impermanence that has, for fourteen hundred years or more, refined a sense of how to live with suffering and loss and the many illusions the mind can throw up. And every spring, by instinct, find my way back to New Camaldoli, which I associate with resurrection, hope, the light that floods the chapel.
Both, I notice, are offering a hallelujah. The Los Angeles choir that offers renditions of Handel’s Messiah at Christmas for the inhabitants of Skid Row sometimes concludes, I hear, with a solo performance of Leonard’s “cold and broken” hallelujah.
The season of taking nothing for granted opens our eyes to the beauty we’ve been sleepwalking past for most of our days. It brings into sharp relief what we really care about. It makes many of us rethink our lives and realize that maybe we don’t want—or need—to go back to the blind and dizzy rush we’ve known before. In a curious way, in the heart of a trembling world, we’re living a little as we might in the silence of the monastery.
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