Book review: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer

When silence speaks

Pico Iyer`s companion volume to his iconic The Art Of Stillness (2014) is out, titled Learning from Silence, as also Aflame. The second title seems to be derived from a Desert Father (an early Christian hermit) who said, `If you so wish, you can become aflame.`

Picking up from where the first volume left off, Iyer continues his ode to silence, stillness, calmness, equanimity.

We meet the usual suspects: the late great musician-monk Leonard Cohen, the Dalai Lama, Emily Dickenson, Wittgenstein, T S Eliot, Henry Thoreau,  and also a  new name or two like Henry Miller and Albert Camus.

Each chapter carries vignettes, little haikus of prose,  of the author`s chance meetings with people in the Benedictine monastery he regularly visits, has visited  for more than three decades now. There are lay people seeking their own form of succour in the quiet place perched high above the sea in California`s Big Sur, hedged by forests that catch fire almost every season. There are those who work on the property, each carrying their own epiphanies inside them. And then, there are the Camaldolese monks, a congregation that offers everyone a space to find the light within themselves,  going  about their lives in the face of tumult, fire, earthquakes, mudslides and other Acts of God.

Truths laid out clearly       

The truths are laid out clearly for those who would read and absorb, musings on how we pay for our blessings, that the point of being here is not to get anything done but to see what might be worth doing. That contemplation is not about closing our eyes but opening them to the glory of everything around. That we need the silence to hear ourselves, that it will help us direct our gaze. That we cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all it cannot control.

Iyer quotes the scientist-priest Teilhard who knew that humanity is `matter at its most incendiary stage.` He quotes Meister Eckhart who said that the soul evolves not by addition but by subtraction. He offers a haiku from Japan, which resonates with him, the  survivor of a fire that burned down his house and turned his possessions to ash:

My house burned down

I can now see better

The rising moon.

The quiet he seeks is a sunlit silence but he is clear that the dark places don`t vanish when one steps into silence; if anything, they rise to the surface. But here you can see them clearly, he says.

Of course, seeking the silence within is easier said than done. A friend asks the writer, isn’t it selfish to leave your loved ones behind and go sit still. His own partner makes her misgivings clear, asking how she could compete against a temple, terming his need to be alone the `devil` in him. But the writer is determined to seek silence, to reap the benefits of that harvest. At one point he says, I might be a sunlit river overflowing its banks. And you know that for him, all this is worth it. The retreat is actually a resort for him.

So what is Pico Iyer saying here? Essentially, it`s the old gospel he`s been espousing for years now, and it bears repeating. That if we learn to recognise the sanctity of silence, live life in the moment in a quiet contemplative manner, that could well bring to us the peace we so desperately seek. That if we let everything extraneous fall away, the world could be returned to its proper proportions.

Now for an oblique comparison. Back when we read Ayn Rand`s The Fountainhead for the very first time, we were seized by the immediate desire to become Howard Roark.  In quite the same way, reading The Art of Stillness and its companion book Learning from Silence, his twin odes to the power of quietude, we immediately wish to absorb what Iyer lays out, to calm ourselves, to learn to look beyond the noise of everyday life, to strengthen ourselves with silence.

The best of us lies deeper than our words, says Pico Iyer. However, it’s the magic contained in his words that draws the contemplative reader back to his books, time and again.

Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer. Penguin/Hamish Hamilton Books. 214 pages.Rs 599.

https://www.deccanherald.com/features/books/beyond-the-noise-of-everyday-life-3499800

This ran in the Deccan Herald of 20 April 2025.

Related Links:

Book review: The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer

Book review: The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer

Book review: A Beginner`s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer