There is promise in the charred hills, we learn right away in Pico Iyer’s new book, Aflame. At the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a silent Benedictine retreat overlooking the Pacific Ocean near Big Sur, where wildfires often threaten the property, words like “radiant” and “incandescent” enter the conversation beginning on page one.
Iyer talks to the monks. They speak to him of nearby damage done, recalling vivid scenes. Roads were blocked. The ocean was blood-red. Sooty smog filled the air. They all know the sheer splendor of one’s landscape might disguise various disasters that await. Yet they forge ahead.
Aflame is about silence. The beauty of silence. Prior to his talk this Tuesday with Kepler’s host Angie Coiro at Kepler’s in Menlo Park, Iyer spoke about the book on a Zoom call from his home in Japan. He explained now was the time for such a book because humanity is more divided than ever. Many people think they know more than everyone else. Such is the world.
“It’s ever more argumentative and binary,” Iyer said. “And I thought silence is a place beyond our words and ideas that belongs to everybody. It’s a non-denominational space.”
Much of Iyer’s recent work is about how the noisy and accelerating world demands the liberation silence provides. But more so, it’s the polarization.
“I think it’s the divided world that made me think of silence as something to highlight,” he said.
Technically speaking, New Camaldoli, where Iyer has spent countless hours, in silence, writing thousands of pages of notes throughout 100 visits in 32 years, is a Catholic facility. Iyer is not Catholic, but any soul, lost or not, of any spiritual persuasion, can book a room at the hermitage for the glorious calm experienced therein. There is no cell phone reception and no Internet access. Just a bookstore, a community kitchen and one’s own notebook.
Even though New Camaldoli is now on Tripadvisor, Aflame is a better travel guide. That is, if one considers travel as a harmonization of opposing forces. In Iyer’s telling, we often sense a poetic threading of polarities, intentional or not. Aggressive houseflies interrupt the stillness. Radiance emerges from conflagrations. Bulldozers that tear through the Big Sur landscape are juxtaposed with a series of Camus quotes in Iyer’s notebook. Sisyphus anyone?
More than anything else, though, solitude brings everyone together. As the book gradually deepens, what begins with Iyer reflecting on his own career as a globe-scouring travel writer on assignment then blossoms into a web of subtle tributes to his fellow travelers. We meet a stew of colorful characters that Iyer has encountered on his visits to the hermitage over the decades. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they don’t, but in the process, we learn more about the monks themselves, their stories, their backgrounds, or whatever they wish to share.
Likewise, other visitors to the hermitage emerge from the pages as the book evolves. Iyer meets people he hasn’t seen in years, people who, like him, have returned to the hermitage on multiple occasions. Over time, Aflame gradually becomes an homage to the collective. Solitude becomes a vehicle for greater compassion and a richer sense of community.
Even when Iyer doesn’t converse with other people along the pathways, even when no conversation is needed, he feels close to them. Such is the case on each visit, year after year.
“When I meet somebody along the monastery road and we just share a couple of sentences, it’s so much deeper connection than when I’m walking down the street in Santa Barbara and I meet a stranger,” Iyer said. “Because by nature, anyone I meet [at the hermitage] is joined to me by something essential, which is, we both come there searching for silence.”
For a travel writer, the best trips are those that send you back home a different person from the one who left. New Camaldoli seems to affect Iyer this way every single time—another prevalent theme he weaves through the pages of Aflame: There is no fixed, unchanging self. Nothing is permanent—not Big Sur, not monastery structures, not human life.
“In some ways, it is a book about travel, or you could say more about transport or transformation,” Iyer said. “Because this place changes the way I think of everything, and changes me even after a hundred visits.”
Pico Iyer will be in conversation with Angie Coiro at 7pm on Jan 14 at Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. $27.24/$45.09 with book. keplers.org
