“All of mankind’s misfortune comes from one thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.” This famous quote by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) seems more relevant than ever in a world that promotes acceleration and the proliferation of distractions and communications. So what about the practice of silence? Let’s try to decipher it with author Pico Iyer.
I set the scene for the interview with my own recent experience of silence in an abbey in Belgium.
It is ultimately a simple wooden door, utterly discreet, that marks the passage between the outside and the inside. I had rushed to secure one of the few remaining parking spots along the road leading to Orval Abbey, a touristic and spiritual landmark in southeastern Belgium. On this weekend, a steady stream of visitors poured into the abbey shop and then on to the medieval ruins. Beyond the simple door, a paved courtyard awaited me, which I crossed to reach the monk-host’s office. Like dozens of people every day, I had come here for a retreat—a secular one in my case—to rediscover a state of mind that we tend to forget even exists, yet which we may well need: inner silence.
As I make my way to my monastic cell, which is reduced to the essentials (a bed, a table and a toilet), I cross the large courtyard, which has been landscaped into a park with a pond. A wall separates this haven of peace from the public part of the abbey, from where I can hear the joyful buzz of voices filtered through the distance. The few people I meet there avoid eye contact, while some offer a faint smile as we cross paths. Everyone is here for the same reason: to learn what silence can teach us.
Learning from Silence is precisely the subtitle of the book written by Pico Iyer that I brought with me. Released earlier this year, Iyer’s book with the main title Aflame recounts his very personal experience with silence during his 35 years of retreats at a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, California. Iyer, who does not claim any religious affiliation, is best known for his travel writing, which has taken him from California to Nepal, North Korea to Japan, always in search of that connection between inner and outer worlds that seems to be the driving force of this modern-day nomad. In Aflame, Pico Iyer stops and withdraws from the world to observe a small community of monks and the visitors they welcome. Occasionally, he drives down the dusty roads of California to visit his friend, the late Leonard Cohen, who has retired to a Zen Buddhist monastery. Like Iyer, the famous troubadour and composer of “Hallelujah” dedicated a significant part of his life to spiritual retreat rooted in silence. And they are by no means the only ones; throughout history, countless men and women have embraced silence in order to reconnect with themselves and the world. I spoke with Iyer to clarify some questions that arose from reading his memoir.
Pico, what would you say to Blaise Pascal if you were to meet him?
I love this question, Robert, and not a single soul has mentioned Pascal in all the interviews I’ve done so far. But if I were to meet him, I would say, “thank you for putting your finger on the heart of the human predicament, 300 years or more before the rest of us were waking up to it. Thank you for reminding us, all those centuries ago, that ‘distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries’ and then continuing, ‘and yet it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.’ Thank you most of all for living all the truths you pronounced and finding a way to help science illuminate some aspects of our life.”
Originally, I confess, I had lots of Pascal in this book, in part because this great mathematician and man of science, credited with inventing the hydraulic press and even the mechanical calculator, rejoiced in being able to feel “a sense of peace and the passion of fire” at the same time. Few thinkers have dwelled so intently and with such rigor on the inner life; a copy of the Pensées sits always beside my desk here in our tiny apartment in Japan. And maybe most of all because of his “night of fire”—perfect for a book entitled Aflame”—in which he collapsed into almost wordless cries of joy, and sewed his testimony into his jacket so he would never forget it, the great epiphany that put all his other discoveries into perspective.
If Pascal sensed this need for an inner life and quiet even in the 17th century, how much more urgent is it in our age of constant updates, texts, beeps and breaking news? One reason I have never used a cell phone is that I feel I have more than enough data and distraction in my life; what I lack—and deeply need—is the time and space to make sense of all of it. I only wish I could have included more on Pascal—and many others—here. But my self-imposed mission was to condense 4,000 pages of notes, taken over 33 years, into something as short and direct as a haiku.
Withdrawing from the world, as monks do and as you have done during your retreats in Big Sur, may be seen by people who have never had such an experience as an escape from the challenges of the real world. What is your view on this? In your book, you argue that retreat is not so much an escape as a reorientation and a reminder. So does paradise on earth exist anywhere other than Baudelaire’s artificial paradises?
I only believe in a paradise that exists in the middle of the real world, that takes in mortality and pain and shadow and that is available to everyone, not only to those who subscribe to a certain belief. But for me, to go on retreat is a way to see what is truly real and to step behind the performances and surfaces of everyday life. As I go through my days, chattering away, driving to the bank, taking care of my taxes, I always have the feeling that this is not the whole of life, nor the end of the story. Most of us sense that there is something more, beyond our daily routine, what T.S. Eliot called “the life we have lost in living.”
Beneath my social and chattery self is a silent self and it contains the best of me, the part that lives beyond words and that, as Meister Eckhart notes, is “the part of the soul that has not been wounded.” And behind the pantomime of daily life lies a deeper truth that we sense now and then—when we’re in love, when we’re terrified, when we step out onto a terrace in Tibet—but that we misplace along the way. It’s only when I go on retreat that I feel I’m encountering something real—a lens cap has fallen away—and that reminder allows me to see my life in the world in its proper proportions. As I cite in the book, a friend asks me, wisely, if it isn’t selfish—a flight, as you say—to go on retreat. And I tell her that for me it’s the only way I can learn to be a little less selfish.
Otherwise, I’m captive to my unthinking habits and unexalted responses and can never step back far enough to see through them or beyond them. I’m keenly aware that many people don’t have the time or resources to go on retreat regularly as I try to do. But I think nearly all of us sense that we need strength and clarity to deal with the world and we need to build up our inner resources, or what I think of as our invisible savings account. So, if you can’t go on retreat, I think you’ll only be a better friend and a deeper person if you take a long walk, if you visit a friend without your cell phone, if you find some way to ground yourself in what is best and clearest in yourself.
I used to think monks were fleeing the world; but after spending 34 years in their company, I realize they’re actually moving towards what they regard as most real—and in fact giving their lives to an unsparing regimen of hard work, prayer and caring for others. I know few people who work so hard and without a break, in the very real world (I’ve come to think of monks as emergency-room physicians “in a way”).
My fundamental question of myself is “what can I bring to the intensive care unit in a hospital where I and most that I love are likely to find ourselves at some point?” I don’t think driving along the freeway, babbling to my friends, and following the Kardashians online is really going to give me the strength and confidence to deal with such urgent moments. But sitting quietly in silence might.
Many religious traditions praise silence, but it is also promoted almost as a doctrine by many secular thinkers and philosophers, from Seneca to Wittgenstein, Nietzsche to Rousseau, and finally Henry David Thoreau, who, in his essay Life Without Principle, advocates inaction based on the findings of scientific and medical research. How do you relate your own “mystical” experience to all these traditions, and what is the connection here, if there is any?
Again, this is the perfect question, Robert! I took great pains to take all my quotations in this book from people not generally associated with religion, and not part of any formal religion, starting with some soaring mystical words from no less than Nietzsche! But from Henry Miller to Camus, from Emily Dickinson to Etty Hillesum—to, as you say, Wittgenstein and Marcus Aurelius and Admiral Byrd, I wanted to show that anyone who sits quietly alone now and then, just as Pascal recommended, will come to the same conclusions.
None of this is particular to any religion, or corner of the world, which is why, in a book about Benedictine monks (written by someone who’s not a Christian), I worked hard to include the Zen monk Leonard Cohen, the Tibetan Buddhist monk the Dalai Lama, a Zen abbess in San Francisco, a Hindu nun. At a time when our world and our nations seem so furiously divided, I wanted to bring us to a place where men and women from every tradition—or none at all—all voice the same truth. Henry David Thoreau is a perfect example, drawing on the wisdom of Persia, east Asia and India and bringing it all into the heart of America. His essays are to me the great American scripture, in part because they cannot be limited to any one doctrine. They’re neither Christian nor non-Christian.
He also is the perfect answer to your last question. What people often forget about Thoreau is that he retreated to his cabin at Walden Pond for two years, two months and two days mostly so as to be a more productive member of society and a better friend to those around him. His first lecture at the Concord Lyceum was not on the subject of “solitude,” but “society.” He was known around town as a kind and gregarious neighbor who looked after Emerson’s wife and children for ten months at a stretch while Emerson was on tour, who held melon parties every year, who fixed people’s ovens. And while he was living alone, he was completing a book that was in essence a love letter to the brother who had died in his arms. At its center is a 23-page ode to friendship beyond anything I have seen elsewhere.
I write about silence in a world of contention and anxiety because it sits on the far side of all our beliefs and ideas and, I think, can offer medicine to anyone. And Thoreau has been such a gospel for me, for almost fifty years now, that I take words for him as the epigraph to almost every book I write.
I wonder what you think about the link between solitude and silence. It’s interesting to note that the vast majority of people who seek silence don’t isolate themselves completely, but instead are often part of a supportive community. In your case, for example, you could have chosen to rent a log cabin somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, but you chose a cell in a monastery. Thoreau met the residents of Concord during his stay in the woods (and even his mother for Sunday lunch, as you mention!), Buddhists have the sangha. So how important is the support, even indirect, of a group, and how can the experience of our fellow human beings influence our own lives?
Community is everything, just as you perfectly suggest. And silence and solitude, as Thoreau exemplified, are only a means to a richer sense of companionship and compassion. I recently read how Ananda, the Buddha’s favorite disciple, once said, “admirable friendship is half of the holy life.” To which the Buddha replied, “wrong! Admirable friendship is the whole of the holy life.”
Your question is so beautifully put, and certainly speaks to my sense that I’m never alone when alone. As Thoreau had it, “why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?” I happen to be someone who loves being by myself—an only child who chose to be a writer because it allows (in fact forces) me to spend many long hours alone each day at a desk and who loves to travel because that too enables me to wander alone around the world, in beautiful conversation with it. So when I found myself in a little room above the radiant Pacific Ocean in Big Sur, California, with all my needs taken care of, and nothing required of me—for thirty dollars a night—I was in heaven. But then I started staying with the monks in their “enclosure” and saw that they could seldom afford to be silent or alone. They were working hard, all day, to look after one another and to tend to their fifteen or so guests. And all the time spent alone was simply a means to clearer and kinder action in the world.
I sometimes think that I would never have chosen to get married had I not spent time in that solitary monastic cell, which told me that the point of solitude is companionship. And in truth I felt and felt close to my loved ones much more in the undistracted silence of the cell than when we’re in the same room with the TV on, or when I’m hurrying from supermarket to pharmacy. The beauty of spending time alone, for me, is to realize that one’s never alone, and never needs to be. So yes, my time in intense solitude was really a training in the value and beauty of companionship.
You quote R.H. Tawney in stating that, traditionally, humans were spiritual beings who took care of their material needs; today, more and more of us are materialistic beings who occasionally take care of our spiritual needs. Is there a way to go back, knowing that there may not be a way back?
It is a central point and, once more, you are the first person to mention it. I suspect, when the “death of God” was announced in the late 19th century, many found that they had thrown out the baby with the bathwater, as we say in English. To this day, many people rightly find fault with the church, in its dogmatism, in its intolerance, in its hypocrisies, its humanness. And yet we all long for something beyond—and there seems to be a deep human need, as you suggest above, for community, for ritual, for meaning.
Certainly, for a sense that we are not the center of the world and are, in fact, a tiny part of a much larger picture. Which is one of the reasons many people—like yourself, perhaps—go on long walks, and others go to places such as Big Sur, where human beings look very tiny and mortal in the presence of tall redwoods, a huge unbroken stretch of ocean, high cliffs and much else that will be around long after we are gone.
If we put our mind before our spirit—or, even more crazily, our body before our mind—we’ll always feel lost when reality makes a house call. None of us can survive without inner resources and a close connection with our inner landscape (sometimes quickened by an encounter with the outer landscape). Some people call this “god,” some people call it “reality,” some don’t feel the need for words at all. But in every case, we need this inwardness if we are to survive. And my worry about the current moment is that the external world is so deafening and intense, so everywhere, that it threatens to crowd and drown out the inner and leave us entirely lost.
To quote Meister Eckhart again, from many centuries ago, “so long as the inner work is strong, the outer (which I take to mean one’s career, one’s relationships, one’s connection with one’s ‘better self’) will never be puny.” But to put the material, temporal world before the spiritual is akin to buying a gleaming Ferrari and not caring that it doesn’t have an engine.
Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer is published by Riverhead Books (January 2025).
