In Aflame (Riverhead, Jan.), essayist Pico Iyer draws from his visits to a Catholic hermitage to explore the value of silence in an increasingly noisy world.
What was the most unexpected part of being at the hermitage?
The biggest surprise was that the solitude was really just a means to community. I’m a writer, so I love spending time by myself. That’s what excited me when I went to this very quiet place. And then I realized that monks are amongst the least solitary beings because they’re constantly caring for one another and for their guests. And that really solitude is a means to the much greater end of compassion and community, and the virtue of my spending time alone was so I could bring much more back to my mother and my bosses and so on. I cite, for example, Henry David Thoreau. People often think of him as the great patron saint of solitude, but his concern was being useful to the community. He went into his cabin partly to commemorate his dead brother and so that he could come back out and help everyone around him in Concord.
Fire is a prominent theme in the book. Can you talk about that?
I first went to the hermitage because my house had burned to the ground, and I lost everything in the world. I was back to ground zero. And the hermitage seemed like a perfect place of safety, except it’s sitting in the wilderness of central California and is constantly encircled by flames, and the monks are often having to race out of it, not knowing if they’ll have a home to get back to.
At the same time, the monks are always trying to keep the fire within alive—fire is a destructive force, but it’s also necessary to the cycles of nature. And so it’s kind of the paradox that the monks have to live with: they’re at the mercy of the heavens, of acts of God, but they don’t want to inhabit a world without fire. They have to keep themselves aflame.
Is there a message you’d like to leave readers with?
It would be to take a break, step out of your crowded life in any way you can. Even if you don’t have the opportunity to take three days away, take 30 minutes away. I think it’ll help you so much to be more creative and focused in the other hours of the day. Something that surprised me when I arrived in this place is that silence isn’t just an absence of noise, it’s almost an active state that has been created through years of prayer and meditation. So it’s wonderful if you can go to a quiet place, and perhaps it’s even more liberating if you can go to a place where the silence is actually an act.
