Pico Iyer’s ‘Learning from Silence’: Finding Stillness and Self-Awareness at Big Sur’s Hermitage

Over the last three decades, Pico Iyer has been repeatedly going for retreats to New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. It belongs to the order of the Camaldolese Benedictines founded by the 11^th century Christian monk St Romuald, who famously said, “Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it.”

Iyer, Christian by birth but non-religious by conviction, has been doing precisely that at the hermitage. In the process, he has found a refuge—a pool of peace away from the sturm and drang where one can sit still and look within for a while, and carry that vision like a flame in the heart while re-engaging with the world. Learning from Silence is about the lessons learnt from the time spent in contemplation in New Camaldoli: “The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing.”

I googled the hermitage and gasped at the vistas it offers: endless blue skies merging with the endless blue ocean, bushes of purple flowers, fallen red leaves dotting the ground, green cliffs sprayed with sea foam, all awash with the bright white light of the sun. Finding the divine in such sublime surroundings should be easy, provided one has the time and money for it, I told myself, a tad enviously. The hermitage takes on retreatants for a fee, which, if not exorbitant, is not negligible either.

Learning from Silence is about the lessons learnt by Iyer from the time spent in contemplation in the Camaldoli hermitage.
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Iyer himself is not unaware of the privilege inherent in the very idea of retreats, not just in Camaldoli. Is it escapism? Is it self-indulgence? Worse, does it mark a late-life turn towards religiosity? Iyer is constantly asked these questions by his friends and by his own self in the book, which, at times, reads like a diary shared with the public. Indeed, if one is not aware of Iyer’s personal history, one might be taken aback by the recurring references to fire here. Is it metaphorical or real, one wonders. Turns out, it is real, at least to begin with.

Trial by fire

Iyer started his visits to the hermitage 33 years ago when his California home was burnt down in a wildfire. The memory haunts him, making his quest for peace literally a trial by fire. And then, more fires break out—both at the hermitage and at his mother’s reconstituted home in California—triggering the panic and paranoia that brought him to Camaldoli in the first place. The entire book is a firefight in more than one sense of the term. Its American title, Aflame, is more apt that way.

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The journey to find the still point of the turning world, is not particular to Iyer alone, of course. Philosophers, thinkers, poets, novelists, musicians have all been walking that path for centuries and Iyer takes them along in his own voyage. The voices of Marcus Aurelius, T.S. Eliot, Henry David Thoreau, Milton, Handel, Emily Dickinson, Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama whisper in the pages. The latter has blurbed Learning from Silence, saying, “I trust that reading this book may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind.”

By referring to peace (which one gains for oneself first) and compassion (which one practices in relation to others), the Dalai Lama’s recommendation encapsulates the duality built-in religious thought and Pico Iyer’s book—while searching for peace of mind is a lonely, even selfish endeavour, involving constant wrestling with the noises inside to reach the core of silence where all external and internal voices cease, the attainment of that calmness demands that you then reach out to others in distress, helping them in their quest, and so throw yourself out into the great bustle of the world again. Even the Buddha left behind the ascetic life of isolation and meditation to build up his order, joining the suffering masses again.  

Iyer underscores this contradiction in the chapter where he briefly describes one of his meetings with the Dalai Lama. It begins with “A monk is at heart the ultimate man of the world”, and says a page later about the Buddhist leader: “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.”  

Not an idyll

So, the Big Sur retreat functions like Shakespeare’s forest of Arden—a place of refuge where one can withdraw temporarily, not to escape from cares but to better engage with them on return. And, like Arden, Big Sur is itself not an idyll for its inhabitants—the Brothers struggle to keep it going financially, fires ravage it from time to time, and a mysterious mountain lion stalks its lonely paths much like the lioness and the snake in the forests of As You Like It.

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The lessons of Big Sur—slow down, pause, reflect—would recall the gleanings from the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Iyer’s words, “The season of taking nothing for granted opens our eyes to the beauty we’ve been sleepwalking past for most of our days.” Unfortunately, we forgot those hard-won realisations as soon as the pandemic was over. Which is perhaps one of the reasons why wildfires have become more frequent in California—while nature has its own process of annihilation and creation, we are hastening the destruction in our enormous folly. We are committing mistakes ad infinitum and perpetuating the cycle of misery.

Iyer’s willingness to break free of the cycle by actively listening to the silence of the mountains and the seas drives the book forward. Its honesty, self-awareness, and pithiness make Learning from Silence much more than a self-help book though Camaldoli does at times seem like the relics of a hippie commune where the flower generation looked for nirvana. But then, Iyer is too good a writer to be ever mistaken for a happiness guru delivering a spiel.