In the first of a two-part interview, Pico Iyer talks about his book ‘Learning from Silence,’ why he keeps visiting Benedictine monastery, and how as a writer he can usher silence onto the page and into the reader's being
At 68, Pico Iyer has lived more lives than most. Raised in Oxford and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard, he turned away from the prestige circuits of academia to write about the ways people move — across borders, cultures, and inner landscapes. Over four decades and across fifteen books, he has examined the contradictions of globalisation, what exile does to memory, and the quests of spiritual seekers, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In his latest book, Learning from Silence (Penguin Random House India), Iyer peels away the layer — of noise, of narrative, of the self — and invites us into the hush that has shaped him.
Since 1992, Iyer has lived between two kinds of stillness: one in suburban Nara (Japan) with his Japanese wife, Hiroko Takeuchi, and her two children; the other in a bare room at a Benedictine hermitage above the California coast (Big Sur), where for over a hundred retreats he has confronted what remains when everything else is stripped away. In this interview to The Federal, he reflects on silence as a companion that has shaped his language, unsettled his certainties, and, perhaps, returned him to something like home. Excerpts from the interview:
You’ve often said silence isn’t the absence of sound but the presence of something deeper. In Learning from Silence, what does that ‘presence’ become for you over the decades — has its texture, tone, or teaching evolved as life has grown more fragile and losses more personal?
That’s a beautiful question, and in many ways I cherish the silence I find in the hermitage because it seems to stand outside the world of change. It feels as enduring as the ocean below and the wide blue sky above. As I write in the book, the silence I find, in any monastery or convent, isn’t just like the quietness that you might encounter in a forest or on a mountaintop; it’s something active and alive, almost palpable, akin to transparent glass walls constructed over years of prayer and meditation.
All of which probably sounds wishful and vague, but anyone who has stepped into a certain kind of ashram or meditation hall will recognise what I’m saying. So, in some ways, the consolation of the hermitage I visit lies in the fact that it doesn’t seem to change, and it speaks to what is changeless in me. When I go back to the first articles I wrote on it, from 34 years ago, there’s not a word I would change in them, despite all the changes in my circumstances and the half a lifetime that have passed.
Each time I return, I notice new faces, small changes in the protocol, trees that have been cut down. But nothing seems to dent the silence or the radiance — or the self it uncovers in me. As for the presence I meet there, beyond the almost tangible glass walls, it’s likely the presence of everything I sleep-walk past in my hurried and distracted everyday life. As I note in the book, the world suddenly feels present only because I, at last, am fully present to it.
The Benedictine monastery becomes, in your prose, a refuge. What do you think makes a secular, restless soul like yours feel more spiritually grounded in a place steeped in ritual and renunciation? What freedoms does the monastic world offer that the modern one withholds?
I think it liberates me from myself. As soon as I arrive there, I feel that little Pico, with all his concerns and plans and hopes, is left down on the highway and, instead of the chatter in my head, I’m filled up with everything that’s around me — the birdsong, the breeze, the light on the water.
That seldom comes to me even when I’m in Iceland or Bhutan or Antarctica — all of which offer great reserves of silence and quite a refuge from the world. Even when released from the day-to-day in places like that, a part of me is thinking about my plans for the next day, or that message I have to send, or what awaits me when I get home. And even in those places, I’m in the range of the phone and e-mails and the news.
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In the monastery I describe I’m freed of that and in the company of the essential. I suppose I feel that each of us has a social self, which we need to get through the world and our daily obligations to it, and a silent self. And I’m very glad, now and again, to be released from chitchat and whispers and the self I am in public and reminded of some much deeper well that otherwise gets lost in the tumult of the day.
When I quote T.S. Eliot writing, “Where is the life that we have lost in living?” I am trying to gesture towards the very life I find when I step into that silence. And in terms of limitations, yes indeed: the fewer things are around one, the more one can give oneself to each one of them. The tolling bells free me from thinking about, or needing to make, my own schedule; fasting, as Marina Abramović writes, frees us into understanding how little we really need. For a visitor to such a monastery, being next to a life based on poverty, chastity and obedience actually feels luxuriously rich, sensuous and free.
You describe the retreat as redirection. In a culture addicted to momentum and visibility, what have you discovered about creativity as a function of subtraction — what is gained when the noise is lowered and the self is diminished?
I’m tempted to say that everything is gained — and this book is an attempt to answer that question, because I began with 4,000 pages of notes (all that I had scribbled over more than 100 stays in the monastery) and worked very hard to reduce it to something as short and direct as a haiku. I never knew, when young, that creativity is in large part a matter of keeping things out; that it’s less about the words you use to fill the page than about the words you hold back so that the reader is invited in. The beauty of a haiku is that it’s just a suggestion, really, that the reader completes in the context of her own life.
In other words, creativity has less to do with lecturing than listening, and is less to do with one person’s self-expression than with dialogue. It’s a conspiracy — between writer and reader, and between writer and something wiser than he or she is that he tries to channel. A traditional tatami room in Japan is like an architectural haiku: it is empty save for a vase and a scroll, and because there are only two things in the room, you bring all your attention to those two and find a whole universe therein.
In much the same way, the monastery I describe is the most creative space I know precisely because of all that’s not there: there’s no television, no computer, no clutter, which means it is an emptiness waiting to be filled. And the visitor soon becomes the same. When the self is diminished, to use your fine phrase, one can hear what’s beyond or bigger than the self, which will always be more important and more lasting.
Your entire career has been spent between movement and stillness, between airports and abbeys. Has writing itself become your most enduring form of pilgrimage — your portable monastery? And if so, how does language preserve, disrupt, or simulate silence?
I love your perception and couldn’t agree with it more. And I think a lot of language is an attempt to catch what words never can; it’s a finger pointing at the moon, as they say here in Japan. However, a writer can try to use language to try to bring silence into the conversation. You will have noticed that there is a lot of white space in this book, and it’s a short book. In some ways, I’m hoping that the reader will hear all that isn’t being said and will feel the emptiness around the words, the refuge and space that that affords, as much as the words themselves.
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What always strikes me about the monks I meet in my monastery — and the other retreatants — is that they’ll share just two sentences, and one can feel the twenty-two sentences that lie beneath that. I can sense the deep well from which the words come, which means that in some ways the words mean less than what one can feel around them. As a writer I’m obliged to use words, but if I can keep them to a relative minimum and try to make the sentences openings rather than closures, and the narrative unresolved, I hope I can usher silence onto the page (and into the reader’s being). While also (such is the hope) slowing her down and opening her up. It’s like the difference between a poem and an editorial. One opens a door — at least sometimes — while the other fills the room.
The fire that consumed your past — your house, your childhood mementos, even your unwritten books — was both literal and metaphorical. In retrospect, was it also an initiation? What did incineration teach you about impermanence, and what role did silence play in that lesson?
I suspect it was indeed an initiation, perhaps into realism and humility, a sense that life makes us as much as the other way round; I’ve never thought of it like that, but I think that’s an inspired way to look at it. It certainly reminded me of the value of simplicity and emptiness, to go back to your earlier questions; I felt free in some ways, without all the clutter of my room, and also able to start my life anew, with a blank page. It liberated me to try things I might otherwise always have shied away from — such as fiction — and it moved me to spend more time in what felt like my secret inner home, Japan, rather than just the physical house where I’d been staying in California.
Most of all, it reminded me of what was important. I had always believed that home is not where you live but what lives inside you, and now that became powerfully apparent: I had been stripped of all material possessions but I still had my mother, my wife-to-be, the songs that went through my head, my favourite poems. Incineration was a forcible reminder of what a part of me knew already: the Buddha’s fire sermon or the Catholic monk Thomas Merton reminding us that “everything must burn.” The fact that nothing lasts forever, as I wrote in my last book, is the reason that everything matters.
And, to speak of its relation to silence, I think of the pandemic. Almost all of us across the planet were joined then in an enforced retreat. And for all the tragic losses and horrors, I think many of us were reminded in that uncluttered time and space, as we might not have been otherwise, of what we really cared about, what mattered in the world and how we should live. Living close to death sharpened one’s sense of how one wants to live.
(Part II of this interview will be published on March 19)
