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.
