Pico Iyer seems to have spent his life in motion, shuttling between homes in Japan and the United States, not to mention journeys to Ethiopia, Tibet, Cuba and beyond. But there’s one place he’s gone to seek out stillness ever since he was young: the Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple.
Perched in the hills above his childhood home, the temple offers sweeping views of the bucolic California town and the ocean shimmering in the distance, and it provided Iyer with an early sense of refuge, he said.
“I think we’re all seeking out places of quiet, to retrieve something we’ve lost,” Iyer said, sitting in the temple gardens in late October, not far from where, as a teenager, he heard Christopher Isherwood lecture on Hinduism. “Even as a kid, when all I wanted was action and excitement, something brought me here, to the quietest place I knew.”
If Iyer’s career has been built on a restless investigation of far-flung corners of the globe, this is the perfect spot to pause and reflect on his new work, “Aflame: Learning From Silence,” an examination of arrival — not departure — and the art of sitting still.
“Aflame” recounts Iyer’s experiences at another place central to his quest for tranquillity: a silent Benedictine retreat in Big Sur, just up the California coast, which he has visited repeatedly over the past three decades. Together with Japan, he calls it “the single most important destination of my life.” He first went there in 1991, after his house in Santa Barbara burned to the ground, along with all the handwritten pages for a book on Cuba.
The fire left him homeless, but also, in some ways, liberated, he said. The monastery provided a roof and a bed, and a new perspective on the truths of life, love and death. From the monks, he writes, he learned about “companionship, compassion — about living with impermanence, and even dying.”
He also discovered a refreshing blend of Old and New World culture at the hermitage, a thousand-year-old order of devotion and discipline set amid California’s natural splendor and wide horizons. His stays there would unleash his creativity, he said, and he’d emerge even more engaged with his surroundings.
“Retreat, I’m coming to find, is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection,” he writes in “Aflame.” “You learn to love the world only by looking at it closely, in the round.”
Like Iyer’s previous book, “The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise,” “Aflame” is an attempt to find a through-line in his exploration of inner and outer worlds.
“Lately, Pico has been more focused on the inner terrain,” his editor, Jynne Dilling, wrote over email. “He’s always had a burning curiosity about the internal lives of others, and now he’s opening up more intimately about his own as well.”
Iyer sees it as a “conscious progression,” a gradual shift in focus. There are still parts of the world he craves to see, he said, but now “the great adventure takes place at the desk.”
Of course, Iyer, 67, has a wealth of material to draw from. “I’ve come to the stage where I’m thinking back and seeing what patterns emerge,” he said, “and what sense it makes in a sort-of late Act 4 of life.”
Act 1, for Iyer, was an audacious escape from cubicle culture in 1980s Manhattan. It was the heyday of magazines and Iyer had a cushy job rewriting international reports for Time magazine. But he was itching to see the world, so he hatched a plan to “write myself out of the office” through a travel book.
He took a six-month leave of absence and made his way across 10 Asian countries. The result, “Video Night in Kathmandu,” was published as an eye-catching, Day-Glo paperback by Vintage Departures in 1989, and became an instant sensation, epitomizing the miniboom in travel literature of the time.
Iyer never looked back. Books followed on Japan (“The Lady and the Monk”) and the “lonely places of the world” (“Falling Off the Map,” which included dispatches from North Korea, Paraguay and Bhutan), as well as novels set in Cuba and Iran (“Cuba and the Night” and “Abandon”).
There were also essay collections on modern dislocation and spiritual jet lag (“The Global Soul”) and on contemporary writers — Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others — who were redrawing the literary map in their own hybrid image (“Tropical Classical”).
And yet there has always been an inward dimension to Iyer’s work. When The New York Times Magazine put together a special issue on adventure at the turn of the millennium, Iyer decided, counterintuitively, that it was “time to speak about going nowhere.”
His 2014 TED Talk, “The Art of Stillness,” further expanded on the wonders of the contemplative life. He went on to give several more popular TED talks — on the meaning of home and the lessons of table tennis, for example — that gave him a “global megaphone” and reached more than 11 million viewers worldwide.
The seeds of “Aflame” are scattered throughout Iyer’s earlier work, but there were reasons he felt compelled to revisit the subject now, he said. When he first wrote about the monastery, in 1993, he wanted to reflect on the importance of stepping “outside the clamor,” of collecting oneself and remembering what’s important. Now, in the age of smartphones and social media, this is even more true, he said.
“The external world is so intense now,” he added, “that the internal almost gets drowned out.”
There was also the matter of the monks themselves. Iyer formed lasting bonds with many of them, and now some are aging and dying, a way of life vanishing with them. Iyer was keen to capture them as they are: not saintly or dogmatic, but down-to-earth, prone to doubt and sly humor. They were more than willing, he said, to share their “brokenness and humanity” with him.
Most of all, though, the monastery is threatened by the natural world, by the storms and wildfires that periodically ravage the California coast. As his “tower of notes” grew, Iyer said, the effects of climate change made the book even more pressing. In 2008, as he was evacuating his own rebuilt house, the Big Sur hermitage was encircled by fire. He sought out another monastery nearby. Before the year was out, it had burned down.
Fire, as the title suggests, provides a central motif of the book and a parable about the precariousness of existence: While the monks struggle to keep the flame of passion alive within, wildfires from without threaten to engulf them and destroy everything. There is no safe haven — all can turn to ash.
“The sacred is not a sanctuary,” Iyer writes, “it’s a force field. In many ways a forest fire.”
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