How a Wildfire Sent Pico Iyer in Search of Silence
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I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. The beginning of a new year often inspires a bit of reflection as we think about how best to use the 12 months that stretch out ahead of us. An essential for true reflection, I think, is some quiet, something that is increasingly hard to find in our world. Pico Iyer has been able to find it.

For decades now, the travel writer and essayist has made time to travel to a small monastery in Northern California in search of solitude. He writes about those retreats in his new book, A Flame, Learning from Silence. Pico joins us this week to talk about his journeys, which he started making decades ago after his house burned down in a California wildfire. Pico, welcome to the Book Review Podcast. Thank you, Gilbert. I'm so very pleased to be here.

It's particularly interesting to talk to you about it this week, about your book. It's called A Flame. Given the absolutely terrible things that we're seeing right now in Los Angeles, one of the initial impetuses for you spending time at the new Kamaldali Hermitage was a fire. I'd love it if you could tell us that story. Yes. So 34 years ago, I was in my family home in the hills of California, and I went upstairs.

To find our house was completely encircled by 70-foot flames. So I grabbed my mother's cat, I jumped into a car, we drove down a narrow mountain driveway, and we saw we couldn't move up and we couldn't drive down. The smoke was so intense we could hear helicopters above, but we couldn't see them, they couldn't see us. And the fire was so thick that no fire truck could get

up to us. And so really we were saved only by a good Samaritan who had been driving along the freeway with a water truck, saw a fire in the hills, raced up to be of help and got stranded by chance right next to our driveway.

And so when we came down there, he was shirtless in his shorts in the middle of the road. And every time the fire approached, he just pointed a hose towards it and the fire receded. And then he turned around and pointed a hose in the other direction. So at the end of that evening, I had lost everything in the world. And I was for many months thereafter sleeping on a friend's floor.

Slowly, my mother and I began to reconstruct our lives. At one point, another friend came in. He saw me there and he said, come on, Pico, you can do much better than this. He told me about this monastery three and a half hours up the coast where he took his high school students every spring.

And he said, if nothing else, you'll have a bed to sleep in. You'll have a long desk, a private walled garden with a beautiful view over the ocean, hot showers, food whenever you need it, all for $30 a night. So you're going to be better off than sleeping on this floor. And he

I'll admit to you that I'd never thought of staying in a Benedictine hermitage before and might not have been so tempted to do so. But as you say, thanks to the fire and thanks to my reduced circumstances, it suddenly seemed a liberation.

I have so many questions, of course, about the Hermitage, but I just want to stay on the fire for a few minutes, given its resonance. This was 1991, is that correct? It was 1991 I first began staying in the Hermitage, but it was a few months earlier, 1990, June, when our fire wiped out our house. At that time, it was the worst fire in Californian history, but sadly, of course, that record has been eclipsed every few months since.

How did you wake up and find yourself surrounded by flames? Obviously, we didn't have cell phones back then. It wasn't as easy to access information immediately as it is now. What do you remember about the shock of that moment? And then, you know, this very sad to say sort of material thing where you you didn't have anything anymore.

Well, the simple answer is that the fire was moving at 70 miles an hour. And the other part of the answer is that we live up in the hills and we were really almost the first house that that fire visited. So we're already in a very precarious situation. So what happened was I saw a distant knife of orange cutting through a faraway hillside in the early evening of a hot summer day. And I went downstairs to call the fire department and

And literally, by the time I came up again, three minutes later, the flames were all around us. And so intensely so that my passport was maybe two feet away and I didn't feel I even had time to reach down and collect my most important documents. I realized the only thing I had to save was my mother's aging cat.

And in retrospect, I think it made it much easier to go through that experience because I came so close to losing my life that at the end of the evening, losing all my possessions wasn't the worst thing in the world. And of course, I was saved by the small miracle of that Good Samaritan. Concentrating on the cat meant I wasn't worried about myself as much as I might have been. But you're right to say that...

At one point, for 45 minutes, we were stuck right under my house. And so I could see the flames systematically picking their way through our living room and then wiping out every childhood memento I had in my bedroom. And then, you will appreciate as the editor of the book review, moving on to my office and wiping out really my next experience.

eight years of writing. In those almost pre-computer days, all my notes were handwritten and my next three books were reduced to ash. So as soon as a firetruck finally could get to us after three hours and tell us it was safe to drive downtown, I went to an all-night supermarket. I bought a toothbrush and the toothbrush was literally the only thing I had in the world other than my words and my memories. And

What were the books that you had been working on at that time? Well, the most wrenching was I'd been spending a lot of time in Cuba in the late 1980s before many people from the U.S. were going there.

And my very first day in Havana, I'd met a young man whose dream was to come to America. And over many subsequent visits, I saw him draw closer and closer to that dream. And partly thanks to me, but mostly through other circumstances, he finally made it to the U.S. And then I started visiting him in New York and Miami.

to see how the American reality compared with the American dream that he sustained for so long, and to what extent he was disappointed and to what extent relieved by finally having made it to the place that he'd been longing for for so long. So I had, I think, 800 pages of notes collected for that, and it was going to be really the third in a trilogy, a sequel to my two previous books about the dreams we have of other cultures.

Once that was gone, I did write a book about Cuba, but it was fictional, made with characters and plots that were entirely made up. But I was still haunted and possessed by Cuba. But I knew that I couldn't try to draw upon my memories. And in truth, the very day after the fire, I called my long-suffering editor in Cuba.

England and he commiserated with me, but he said, you know, actually losing your notes may not be the worst thing in the world because now you're going to have to write from memory, from emotion and from imagination. And they may unlock doors that would be locked to you if you were hostage to your notes. So it propelled me over the abyss into becoming a novelist, which perhaps I would have been too shy to attempt to do otherwise. And then the two of

books after that were on other places that had been consuming me at the time. Wow, what a smart editor. That was very good advice in the end. Just out of curiosity, what was your cat's name? The

The cat's name was Minnie. Minnie was already on her last legs. But I realized that if Minnie were to expire, my life wouldn't be worth living as far as my poor mother was concerned. So we kept her going for another few months. And as I say, my mother was actually on the far side of the country. And so she just received a phone call from me later that evening saying, you've lost everything in the world. And once more, I would say that by being

In the middle of the inferno, I felt it was much easier for me to go through that experience than for my poor mother, who would feel powerless just receiving a call saying 59 years were reduced to ash. That's terrible. I'm curious as to what you think it was about you at that moment, at that stage in your life, that led your friend to come to you with this idea.

possibly wild suggestion, you should go to this place that you've never heard of. Was there something in you that your friend recognized that said to him, yeah, I think this would be good for Pico?

Initially, I think it was a practical notion that I would be better off with a nice room than on the floor. But you're absolutely right. I think my friend knew me well enough to sense that I'd always had a longing towards solitude. I'm an only child. I'm a writer, so I spend most of my day alone. And it's true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery and convent.

And I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or pistachio gelato or some such. But I'd always felt this longing. And in fact, as I say, my friend would take...

his students up there every year. And he said that even the most fidgety, distractible 15-year-old Californian boy only had to spend three days in silence. So something in him cooled down and cleared out to the point where many of his students, he said, never wanted to return to their normal lives. So in some ways, it's a universal medicine, but I think he also saw that I would be particularly suited to it.

So cast your mind back if you can at this, at this moment, you're there for the first time. Yes. Obviously it's changed over decades in various ways, but maybe it hasn't. You're there for the first time. What do you see?

So I drive along Highway 1 in California, and most of your listeners will know that it's narrower and emptier until you're just in this vast elemental landscape with golden meadows on one side, running down to the thin road and the great blue plate of the Pacific Ocean on the other. And then I come to an even more narrow road that snakes for two miles to the top of the mountain where the retreat house sits. I step out.

And the silence is not just an absence of noise, it's a presence, almost as if great transparent walls have been created by decades of prayer and meditation. There's a motel-like series of nine small rooms, two trailers on the hill, and the cells where the monks live not far away. I step into my small but comfortable room.

And instantly I see a rabbit standing on the splintered fence in my garden. And I watch that rabbit transfixed.

And later I hear bells tolling behind me, and it almost feels as if they're tolling inside me. In other words, all divisions between inside and outside are dissolved. I watch the light falling on the ocean. And then after night falls, and it falls quite early because this is February, I take a walk along the monastery road under this great overturned salt shaker of stars. And I see the taillights of cars disappearing 12 miles to the south.

around the headlands. And honestly, I feel calmer and clearer and happier than I can ever remember. And so I start staying there more and more often and for longer and longer. The monastery is set on 900 acres of more or less undeveloped wilderness in the midst of this very remote setting, 1,200 feet above the Pacific Ocean. So already it's an unusually radiant setting. And I think the silence sharpens and deepens that.

the beauty of that setting. And I loved it when you said some things have changed and some things haven't because I,

Because they've extended a number of facilities where you can sleep there, and every new prayer makes a few adjustments. But the remarkable grace of the place is that over 33 years, essentially nothing has changed. Nothing can change, I feel, the silence, the radiance, and the beauty. So whatever the external changes, the heart of the place remains unaltered.

What neither of us has said is the name Big Sur, which many listeners probably have a picture of in their head. It's near there. We're talking about Northern California. In your book, just digging a little deeper on the particular silence, the specific silence of that place, you write, "...the silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop. It's active and thrumming, almost palpable."

It's hard for anyone, maybe, to really think about true silence unless they've experienced something like that. How difficult is it to find quiet in this world? It seems near impossible to me, to be frank. So I can understand the appeal. Yes. And I think it's getting more impossible by the moment. So when I first went there, as you were suggesting earlier, in 1991, there

There was no internet that most of us had heard of. There were no smartphones. There was no social media. The world was a lot quieter than it is now. And still, it was a remarkable liberation to be free of rush and distraction. But as you suggest, it's getting harder and harder to cut through the noise, which is why I think the longing many of us feel just to be freed from the clamor, to be able to remember what we love and to see the larger picture in

increases really with every passing day. And as you say, it's hard for somebody to appreciate what that silence is unless you have experienced it.

But I have found that pretty much every monastery and every convent in any order across the world has some variation of this. I'm so glad you chose to read those two sentences, because if anybody were to ask me to read an excerpt from the book, that would be the excerpt I read. Just to stress that monasteries and convents aren't a quiet place. Silence is one of their almost tangible creations.

I found a piece that you wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1999. You wrote about going to Laos. And you said, again, even then, in 1999, how much louder has your head gotten since 1999? And how does going to a place like this quiet that noise? What does it allow you to do?

Well, I love the fact that nothing has changed since I wrote that sentence 25 years ago. I had forgotten I wrote it and I was waiting to hear what you would read and I wouldn't amend a single thing. And I would say that spending that time in silence has reminded me what a precious treasure it is and how I would get lost in the swirl of the everyday world and what just happened six minutes ago.

unless I try to preserve some form of what I find in the monastery, even in my daily life. So, for example, many of my friends are surprised that somebody who travels a lot and is still a practicing journalist, I've never had a cell phone. I wouldn't know how to turn a cell phone on. So I still live my entire life without a cell phone, which brings certain inconveniences. But I feel the trade-off is worthwhile because...

As you're suggesting, I feel I have enough data and distraction in my life already, and I don't want my life to be cut up and my consciousness to be cut up even further into little snippets and fragments and soundbites. So I try to implement certain ways just to keep my mind in even a tenth of the spacious sense it has when I'm actually in that silence. Pico, you don't even know how bad it can get.

I don't. You don't have a smartphone. Well, exactly. I don't know how bad it can get, but just having this laptop on which I'm talking to you, that seems clamorous enough. So you're right. I can't visualize the alternatives. I am loud. I agree. I'm sorry. Not you. It's the 18 emails that are arriving as we're talking that are the clamor. So you go there for the first time, and over the past many decades, you spend...

Days there, sometimes you spend longer. Walk us through what that looks like. What are you doing with your days? Who are you running into? Beautiful, because...

One of the things that going there involved was dismantling my every expectation and stereotype of monks. And so these Benedictines open their hearts and doors to everybody, men and women of any religion and no religion, and make no rules whatsoever. They just free you to spend the days as you would like. And so truly it's the only time in my life when I can really enjoy a holiday because even when I'm on vacation, I plan every minute.

So when I'm in the hermitage, I wake up and I just let the moment and instinct determine what I will do. Sometimes I'll take a long walk high above the ocean. Sometimes I'll just pick up a book almost at random from the ones that I brought with me. Sometimes I'll just sit in a chair in my garden looking out.

over the Pacific Ocean for long minutes. But there's nothing I have to do. And really, it's the only place in my life where I allow myself to do nothing. And I realized it was only by doing nothing I could do anything at all.

The rest of my time, as my wife would tell you, I'm completely imprisoned in my unsparing regimen. Almost every day of the year, ideally, I wake up and I spend my first five hours at my desk. This is the one place where I allow myself not to write and not to do anything but respond to what intuition tells me to do.

Really, the days last a thousand hours, and one of the surprises is that I feel as if I'm doing nothing. And then I come back after maybe three days there, and I open my suitcase, and I realize, wait a minute, I've actually read seven books, and I've written 40 handwritten pages in these last three days when it seemed to me that I was doing nothing. It's a very creative place, and it's remarkable what the freedom of distraction involves in terms of liberation, I would say.

We'll be right back. Okay, I'm opening the New York Times app. The app has so much more than you might expect. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections. It's just easier to navigate that way. There is something for everyone. When I open the U tab, I get a short list of articles that are more related to me. 10 stories picked for you every day. You're able to add sections that interest you. That's really handy. There are some individuals in here.

I can add Paul Krugman or Jamel Bowie. I like him. The lifestyle tab. The photos are just phenomenal. It's kind of like a collage. I go to games always. Scroll over to the games page. Play Wordle or Connections and then swipe over to read today's headlines. There's an article next to a recipe next to games and it's just easy to get everything in one place. And before you know it, you're going to be late to work.

The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com slash app. Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I am with Pico Ayer. We're talking about A Flame, Learning from Silence. Something you said made me think of sort of the contradictions that you grapple with as part of this particular practice and how

I found a forward that you had written to a book about the hermits of Big Sur. The book is called The Hermits of Big Sur. And you write, I came to realize how much my solitude could deepen and be deepened by community. Those two things on first lands obviously seem like they're polar opposites, solitude and community. But you say, at least in this space, they are intimately connected.

Yes, and again, that's something I would wholeheartedly say even now, a couple of years after writing those words. I love being alone, as I say, as most writers do. But it was being alone there that made me realize that at some level I'm never alone because my friends and loved ones felt closer to me in that silence and in that solitude than sometimes when they're in the same room.

And to go back to your previous question, when I walk along the road and I meet a fellow traveler, another stranger who's staying there, we'll often exchange a couple of sentences. And I very quickly feel as if I've made a new friend and somebody I trust intimately, which never happens when I'm walking down the street in New York City or California.

Because we're defined when we meet ourselves in that uncluttered space, not by what we do for a living or where we went to college or which baseball team we're supporting, but by something much deeper. And both of us have gone there in search of silence. And that makes for...

an instant sense of communion and kinship. I really feel there are no strangers there. The kind of people who stay there to answer your previous question about who do I meet are often executives, lawyers, school teachers, anyone who feels comfortable

They really need a break from the clatter of their life and act on that feeling. And the monks, too, who are a remarkably interesting group of scholars, musicians, artists, and recluses, but who generally are very gregarious and much more down to earth than those of us who go on retreat there. Tell me about the monks. I'm very curious about them. You write about many of the friends that you make there, several of the monks. Who

Who are the type of people who devote themselves to this life? They're very down to earth, as I say. They're the least dogmatic people I know. And I suppose one of the preconceptions I had to rid myself of is that they're not running away from the world. They're running towards something, towards their love. The longer that I've spent with them, the more I admire their courage. Because, of course...

What for me is an exhilarating three days in silence is for them a lifelong commitment. They're not enjoying silence because they're working round the clock to look after visitors like myself and to tend to the other monks. And of course, day after day, they're alone in their cells.

with their fears and their doubts and their frustrations and nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. And some of them would come down and really confide in me about the difficulties of their life. They never regretted it, but they're living in a wilderness that's not just literal, but sometimes emotional or spiritual. Occasionally, I would hear of somebody who made the lifelong commitment to become a monk because he met God when he was 20 years old. And then

God disappeared for a while, and he was left in the emptiness and the absence for year after year. But they're so open-minded that when the retreat rooms are full, often over the years, they've allowed me to stay with them, and I have lunch with them and spend most of my days in their company. And it's been a great opportunity just to see how God

They're so deep in their commitment, they have nothing that they feel they need to protect and they're eager to learn from anybody who comes around. And I was...

Very touched that when I completed my manuscript, I sent it to two of the monks because I didn't want to presume upon their anonymity. And I didn't want to get things wrong or to be indiscreet and say things or reveal things that they wouldn't want shown to the world. And both of them said, everything is fine as it is. And one of them wrote back to me the day after he received my manuscript. And he said,

I'm so glad that you share some of my difficulties with this life because it's really our brokenness that is our grace. That's what we have to contribute to the world, that we're not above the clouds, that we're not beyond all doubt and fear, that we are mortal and fallible and frightened just like everybody else. But

we still have the confidence to make this commitment. And I think maybe the most important thing I should say really to answer your question and to tie it in with the previous question is that the monks showed me how solitude, which I'd always cherished, is only a gateway to peace.

compassion or community because their lives, as I say, are the opposite to solitary. They've made a vow of obedience whereby they're pledged to look after other monks who perhaps they would never choose to spend time with in different circumstances. But all their work arising out of their contemplation and their isolation has to do with charity and kindness. And so in retrospect,

It's funny to me to think that it's only by spending time in that very solitary place that I was ever moved to make a commitment and get married. I think I might never have gotten married otherwise, but staying there made me realize this is just a means to the much more important end of having something to bring back when I drive down to the mountain. And so I actually...

Flew across the world and married my longtime girlfriend in Japan and settled down in this little two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere with her and her two kids. Well, as you say in your book, at one point, one of your friends asks you, isn't it selfish to leave your loved ones behind to go and sit still? And you respond, no.

This would sound so much better in your voice, I just got to say. And you respond, not if sitting still is the only way you can learn to be a little less selfish.

I'm so glad you read that sentence because I really took pains to include that in there and to challenge myself really at every point in the book because, of course, it looks like an indulgence to many people. And of course, I'm very lucky to be a relatively rare human being to be able to afford the time and the money to go on retreat for three days, ideally every season. Many people can't. And it must be said,

To this day, after more than 100 stays, every time I drive along that road, I'm feeling guilty about leaving my aging mother or my wife behind. I'm feeling fretful that my bosses and my editors at the New York Times can't reach me for 72 hours. I'm feeling upset. I'm missing a friend's birthday party. But as soon as I get there, I realize that it's only by being there that I will have anything left.

joyful and fresh and creative to share with my mother and wife and friends and family. And when I drive down and my mother opens the door and she suddenly sees her son alight with both calm and excitement and not the frazzled, exhausted person she's seen for many months who's mumbling, catch you later, she realizes it's a good investment. And of course, everyone in my life has got on perfectly well for 72 hours without me. It's not as if I'm the center of their world. Yeah.

But it always does seem like a difficult and counterintuitive thing to do. And yet, it goes back to what you were asking before. I feel it's the best investment I can make in actually being a good friend to my mother and my colleagues and the people around me. What do you hear when you go up there and it's silent? What a great question. I hear the tolling bells.

I hear occasionally a car drive up as a new person arrives on retreat. I hear this bird song. From certain places, I can literally hear the ocean washing against the rocks below me. And

Most of all, I can hear what I never hear in the rest of my life. And I always feel that the part of me that talks is the part that's confined to me. The part that listens is where the writer and the best part of me live. I trust the part of me that listens much more than I trust the person that talks.

And so in some ways, it is a training in listening and in catching all the things that usually I sleepwalk past. And one of the ironies of this whole enterprise is that the family house that burnt down and that later we rebuilt sits at exactly the same altitude as the monastery. It's 1,200 feet above the ocean with a beautiful, unobstructed view of the sea. And anyone looking at our home would say, this is the last word in tranquility and remoteness. But

But I can't hear the birdsong at my home because the phone is ringing. And I can't hear the silence around me because I'm too conscious that there are a thousand emails waiting to be answered. In other words, the chatter in my mind is drowning out the beauty of the world when I'm at home and when I'm in my regular life. And I think part of the magic and beauty of going on retreat for me is that it feels as if my mind...

And me and my little hopes and plans are left down on the highway. In other words, the chatter stops. And suddenly my mind and my being feel open and empty and therefore much more ready to be filled with the light coming through the window and the sound of the birds and the glimpse of the rabbit in my garden.

As I read your book and thought about ever engaging in such an activity, my immediate fear was the, you know, wherever you go, there you are. Like you, you, you escape to silence and maybe I can hear myself better. And maybe, maybe I don't want to, you know, I don't know what I'll hear. What thoughts will come to me when I'm not distracted by my phone and my commute and my email and my computer? It's a little scary.

It is scary. And I love your saying that. And certainly as somebody who's traveled a lot, I know exactly what you're describing. Insofar as a very angry person who flies to Tibet is an angry person when he arrives in Tibet and is complaining about the altitude or the food or whatever, that we don't transform ourselves by changing our location. This is a rare place where somehow I think

Because of the silence, it feels as if I'm cleaned out and I'm released from many of my thoughts, but not entirely. Nothing is guaranteed. Sometimes when I go there, suddenly a torrential winter storm will break out and I'm alone on a trailer in the hills and the rain is beating down on the roof of my little structure and the wind is shaking the very uncertain foundations and I look out and

into the mist and I can't see a single sign of human habitation or a single light. And it's terrifying and it's lonely and it really feels like 40 days and nights in the wilderness. And I know that I can't even go out to get a carton of milk without getting sodden. And so it can be very difficult. And I think some people, when they go there, suddenly find maybe bad memories or traumas or wounds rising to the top.

The one thing I feel is that shadows and demons do jump out at me there in that empty space, but I'd rather they jump out at me there than when I'm navigating the freeway or when I'm racing from the bank to the supermarket.

that somehow it's a much safer and a much calmer place than most that I occupy. And the shadows and demons are not going to go away. So if I'm going to have to confront them, I'd rather confront them in that very clement, protective environment than in the frazzle of my day-to-day life.

I mean, removing it from the specificity of this one location, and you touched on this a little bit, you know, do you have any observations as to why, and this is a great generalization, people, as I just referenced, maybe they're afraid to be alone with their thoughts. That is, it might be because we don't really have to experience it all that often. And it's almost a foreign concept, this, you know, imagining thing.

Being alone, being quiet. What will I do? What will I think? Yes. I would say two things to that. Thomas Merton, the great Trappist monk who lived for 27 years in silence, said, unless you spend time alone, you'll always be lonely. Sherry Turkle at MIT, who has researched

our lives in the digital world says the same thing. Leonard Cohen said, you can only cure being lonely by yourself. In other words, if you are lonely or if you're scared of being lonely, you can only get over that by getting through it in some ways.

And the other thing is, as I said, this is the one place in life where I don't feel lonely. And I'm more likely to feel lonely in a crowded cocktail party than in this very kind atmosphere where I feel so close to the people that I love and the things that matter most to me. So you're absolutely right that it would be a reasonable concern for any...

anyone, but I think people will be pleasantly surprised, as I was, to go there and find that they're not unsettled. I have recommended it to friends who I feel are very shaky in their lives, and

They have gone there and often felt very protected in a way they never have elsewhere. The problem is that protection ends when you drive down back into your life. So it's not a permanent solution. But it's nice even if you feel protected for three days, the memory and the prospect of that sense of protection can stay with you when you're feeling most fragile. This is located...

on the other side of the country from me. And it's not, it's not close to everyone. Have you tried other retreats? Like, I'm curious if you've thought about how, how sort of the average person can, can achieve maybe even a smidgen of this without having to

escape to a hermitage. Yes. So I have stayed in many retreats in England, in Western Australia, in Japan. Last summer, I was staying at the Christ of the Desert Monastery in New Mexico, a very remote location down 13 miles of unpaved road. And I think the silence I'm describing is to be found in every monastery and convent across the globe.

And there is one wherever you happen to be in the United States or elsewhere, not far away. I remember maybe 25 years ago, a couple called Jack and Marsha Kelly brought out a list of retreat houses across the US, and it was an expansive list covering hundreds of pages. Of course, some people have little children, busy jobs, all kinds of other commitments whereby they can't even conceive of going for two days on retreat.

And to them, I would say, take a walk. Go and see a friend, but leave your cell phone behind just for the duration of that conversation. When you're waiting for your loved one to come back from work, instead of scrolling through the internet, just turn off the lights and listen to some music.

And in other words, for those who can't, as you say, concretely go on retreat, I think there are lots of small exercises that you can incorporate into your day just to give you the space to hear yourself. And when you were talking about being alone with your thoughts, one of the

beautiful revelations for me was that not only can I hear myself think when I go there, but essentially I can hear myself not think. In other words, I can hear what's on the far side of my thoughts. I can hear my thoughts seem much less relevant and pressing when I'm in the hermitage than when I'm on the freeway. And I always think that

Our thoughts about reality are the least interesting aspect of reality. Reality is always going to be more fascinating than our ideas about it. But for those who can't make a retreat, I think there's always medicine at hand. Talk to me a little bit about how you approach this from a faith perspective. As you write, you grew up in England. You're surrounded by

the Anglican church hymns and Bibles and crucifixes. And when you first went to the hermitage,

You're like, oh no, maybe this is the stuff I don't want to be around anymore. I think I've come to feel that what I believe is much less important than how I act. And so, for example, in the case of these monks, you're right, I just don't share their belief. But I am so moved and instructed by the selflessness with which they care for everybody that I feel I can learn as much from them as from anybody I would happen to meet in my life.

And one reason that after 33 years I published the book now was I do feel that our nation and our world are more violently divided than ever before. And the divisions are often on the basis of belief. If you and I were to talk for two hours, we would agree on so many things. But if we get to politics or religion or other things, you probably believe something otherworldly.

other than I do. And we're suddenly at odds. And I think one reason that I stress silence is that it's what lies on the far side of both our beliefs and our words and ideas. And that even as belief is always going to separate us, human action is what separates us. And

You and I know that if we're walking down the street this afternoon and we see somebody fall to the sidewalk, we'll probably instinctively reach down to help her up. We're not asking if she's from a red state or a blue state, whether she's a Christian or a Muslim or Jewish or Hindu. We're just responding to the human in her. And

I respect a lot the beliefs of friends in every tradition, and of course their beliefs are a large part of their actions. But nonetheless, I'm less keen to quibble about what you or I believe in than to be moved by the way you act in the world. And I have friends who share my beliefs and do things that I find horrifying. And I have so many friends, like my Benedictine monk friends,

who don't share my beliefs, but do actions that seem to me the last word in heroic selflessness. I'd like to return, as we approach the end of our conversation here, to the fires. It is a metaphor that is built into the book, which, again, is called A Flame. You're talking about the inner fire, of course, but, you know, the monks themselves have to

deal with the danger that nature presents to them during dry season. I'd love if you could talk a little bit about how sort of scary that is for them and how they continue to operate in that location.

At the very beginning of the book, I describe Thomas Merton walking around his darkened monastery on Firewatch on July the 3rd. I think it was 1951 at the end of his book, The End of Sign of Jonas. And just as you were saying, he's walking through the place through the night with a lantern to make sure there are no embers or sparks that will burn down this wooden building.

But at the same time, he's realizing he has to keep the flames of conviction and commitment alive within himself, the flames of passion. And indeed, my monk friends, because they're in this very remote location, are again and again sent out of their home by a roar of approaching flames.

And I remember, as you know in my book, at one point, nearly all the monks had to evacuate as yet another fire broke out in the forest around their home. And three monks stayed behind with firefighters to try to protect their home. And the prior was sending out daily updates to concerned friends such as myself. And one day he said,

There's smoke everywhere around us. We can see a surge of orange flames rising above the ridge, maybe 200 yards behind us. But don't worry, we're continuing with our offices. We're maintaining vespers and vigils and matins in the chapter room. Blessed day all. Blessed day all, he said.

on the very day that it looked as if maybe he would lose his life and very conceivably his home. And that's the kind of conviction that really humbles and moves me and indeed shows how he had really kept the fires alive.

a faith, a light within himself, even as literal fires were threatening to tear down so much of what he loved. I just recently, after writing the book, came across a quote from Jung who said, the difference between a good life and a bad life is how we walk through the fire. And at some level, I think all of us sense this, because whoever you are and wherever you are, you're facing the metaphorical challenge of

fires, whether it's typhoons or flash floods or hurricanes or tsunamis. And I think the question that climate change is posing to us all right now is how do we begin to remain calm in the face of such uncertainty? And how do we maintain hope in the midst of impermanence? Because I think most of us across the globe are more aware than ever

as we were during the pandemic, of how fragile life is. But we can't afford to give up hope because that is to give up life. And so I think in my case, I want to turn towards examples, whether it's the Dalai Lama, whom I've known for 50 years, or these Benedictine monks, of how to remain steady and indeed aflame in the midst of a world that seems so precarious.

Well, Pico, I think anyone who reads your book, A Flame Learning from Silence, will come away with even just a little smidgen of inner peace. And I certainly felt that in our conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to join and talk about it. I hope that anyone you know in California and Los Angeles is staying safe these days. Thank you so much, Gilbert. And maybe the final little thing I'll say is I did write the book,

in a specific way to try to make it as slow and quiet as possible so as to try to transfer some calm to anyone who reads it. So if you felt calm when you were reading it, as well as when we were talking, I'm very happy. But thank you so much for inviting me into this conversation. Thank you. Thank you.

That was my lovely conversation with Pico Iyer about his new book, A Flame Learning from Silence. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and I'm going to be silent now.