Camus’s wisdom arose from never forgetting the power of sunlight. He grew up in poverty, he often writes, in the industrial coastal town of Oran, in Algeria, but in another sense he was always rich; he and everyone around him had light and water and sunshine at their doorsteps. He was born with blessings that his friends in the gray classrooms of the Sorbonne envied. “Even my revolts,” he confesses, recalling his boyhood, “were brilliant with sunshine.” His upbringing likewise instructed him in honoring the invisible. “I lived on almost nothing,” he writes at one point, “but also in a kind of rapture.” He clings “like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”
I look around me—the wonky room, the squeaky terrace, the wide blue grandeur in the distance—and think: No house to maintain, no phones to answer. No noise to block out, no traffic to navigate. I can bring every part of myself to every moment.
— Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, January 14, 2025). Written from his cell at New Camaldoli Hermitage in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, California.
Notes:
- Other highlights from early in the book:
- “Success might be another word for peace and peace, at heart, for freedom from ceaseless striving.”
“And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head.“ - “I’ve never wanted to be part of any group of believers. The globe is too wide, too various, to assume one knows it all.”
- So why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy…Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
- “Success might be another word for peace and peace, at heart, for freedom from ceaseless striving.”
- Review of Pico Iyer’s new book here: Pico Iyer Made His Name Traveling. Now He Explores Inner Landscapes. (NY Times, Jan 3 2025)
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Is it the absence of clutter around someone, or is it the absence of clutter taking place in his thoughts?
That was arguably the most embarrassingly constructed sentence in a long while – but you get my drift
LAUGHING. Good morning Mimi. Love it! Way to start the comment chain in such a profound way!
Now I’m doubly red-faced – didn’t mean to respond with a heavy hand…No doubt because of the perpetual clutter in my own head
Heavy Hand! Absolutely not. Sleight of hand is closer to it.
Laughing – you’re way ahead of me on the awake scale,,,
2011 this blog gig started. I’m slowly drifting/fading, and you are the ever-bright spark plug that you have been all these years following along. What a blessing you are. Appreciate you. Every morning (at least when I post)
Appreciation is mutual. You are my touchstone – your posts pull me back into a direction I didn’t even realize I had wandered from, your humor totally matches my own, and the friendship that has evolved over these years is valued beyond measure.
I love you both. This exchange made my day. As to this blog, I was thinking of how to put it the other day. How to express what landing here meant. The best way was to think of who Sawsan would be had she not discovered Live & Learn. I wouldn’t be me today.
The sense of humor I don’t get most times lol. But I’m a foreigner.
Too early to fade, dk, I beg you. Please !
I love you too – I love your ‘conversations’ with Dave – it is affectionate sparring and it’s wonderful
Smiling. Thank you Sawsan.
And agree on your use of “foreigner” not in terms of land of origin but line of thinking. 🤔
If a blog can be land of origin, it would be L&L
Thank you Mimi. 🙏
It looks like a wonderful book but doesn’t appear to be out in the UK yet. Thanks for sharing as always David.
Hi Julian. Too early for me into the book to endorse yet, but I’m enjoying it very much.
I love that you never stop exploring and questioning and learning. and teaching.
Thank you Beth.
just yesterday evening, when I FINALLY finished Ann Tyler‘s Precious Days I thought to myself: Haven‘t seen a book on Dave‘s blog I really wanted badly to read….
But it doesn‘t matter: It maybe just a single thought, a simple phrase or a short sentence you pick from ‚anything‘ that makes me sit up, wonder, explore, reflect or, simply pause for a moment. Sometimes it awakes thoughts which then ‚make‘ me phone somebody, search for something someone mentionend, or asked for…. always worth my time. Ta!
Thank you Kiki. Appreciate you.
Love this “So why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery?” It’s true. Every time I went on a silent retreat, there seems to be a sense of profound joy.
I wonder if it’s the holy ground? The sacred silence?
It’s it all holy ground? 🙂 And yes, sacred silence is his reference.
As always to visit your blog and your post is the most beautiful thing for me dear David. Because you share many beautiful literature, books, etc.
When I saw this writer, I want to search him more. I learned that https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5259687/
Pico-Iyer-aflame-silent-retreat “Southern California families who have lost everything the in recent wildfires are reckoning with what it means to start over. Writer Pico Iyer’s eerily timed memoir, Aflame: Learning from Silence, speaks to that experience. Suddenly, it seemed, he was surrounded by flames.
“I literally didn’t have time to pick up the passport that was two feet away,” Iyer says. “I just grabbed my mother’s cat, raced into a car and drove down the driveway, not thinking that the car was probably the worst place to be.”Trapped in the car with a panting cat on his lap, Iyer says he tried to focus on keeping the cat alive — and not on how vulnerable felt as as he watched the house he had just escaped from burn to the ground.
And here I am now. I hope I can find his book in my own language too, because I want to read. On the other hand, we all have ours’ silence and deeply impressed me, made me to think about this. Thank you dear David, have a nice day and weekend, Love, nia
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing Nia. I’m less than half way through the book and enjoying it very much.
What a welcome respite from the hurried cacophony of modern society!
So agree Laurie!