It’s a couple of days after the U.S. presidential election, and Pico Iyer is contemplating the results from his home in Japan.

“Kamala Harris is actually an Iyer,” he says with a chuckle during a video call, referring to Harris’ original Brahmin middle name, which her parents changed to Devi two weeks after she was born. “She’s part of my clan, so it would have been nice to see a member of my extended family in the White House.”

Raised in England and in Santa Barbara, California, Iyer, who is 67, moved to Japan in 1987 with the hope of becoming a Buddhist monk in the temple city of Kyoto. Instead, he met Hiroko, his wife-to-be, and the couple has lived in nearby Nara ever since. “Soon after I came to Japan,” he says, “I heard this wonderful [saying]…about life being joyful participation in a world of sorrows—the Buddhist feeling that suffering and difficulty and challenge is the essence of real life.”

The election may not have gone the way Iyer wanted—“I’m constantly surprised by events,” he says—but none of life’s obstacles, he maintains, should be “incompatible with wonder and beauty and joy.”

The sentiment echoes words by Albert Camus that Iyer cites in his open-minded and enriching new book, Aflame: Learning From Silence (Riverhead, Jan. 14): “The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death.” The French philosopher’s “enduring lesson,” Iyer writes, “was that the difficulty—the irrationality—of life need not rob us of our joy.”

A prolific author who is well versed in several genres, from travel writing to essays to fiction, Iyer centers his latest work on a place that has nourished him for decades: the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a small community of Roman Catholic monks in Big Sur, California, that was established in 1958; its deep roots go back to a hermitage founded 1,000 years ago in the Tuscan hamlet of Camaldoli. Kirkus’ starred review calls the book “essential reading for anyone interested in the monastic tradition and those who follow it.”

Iyer first visited the monastery in 1991 on the recommendation of a friend. Initially, he had doubts.

“I grew up in a strong Anglican setting in English boarding schools,” he says. “So, 15 years of chapel every morning, every evening.…I thought, Well, I’ve had a lot of crosses and hymnals already in my life. I don’t need more of that tradition.”

But Iyer quickly shed his preconceptions: “When I drove up there the first time, I noticed the cross, and I noticed the copy of the Bible and noticed the lectern, and within an hour, I didn’t notice [them] at all. I just noticed the silence and the light and the beauty.” The true gift that the hermitage has offered Iyer is an appreciation of silence in a serene setting—what he describes in the book as “nine hundred acres of live oak, madrona, redwood and desert yucca, a quarter of a mile above the sea.”

In one of the book’s many poetic passages, Iyer writes, “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.”

The monastery has only helped Iyer’s writing. “As soon as I step into my little cell, I start wanting to scribble,” he says with an easy smile. “I sit down and write and write and write.…It’s the most creatively stimulating place I’ve ever met, almost to a fault.”

Iyer was also drawn to the monastic order’s longevity. “They’ve dealt with every kind of plague and war and political cataclysm,” he says, “and over 1,000 years, I think they’ve refined a system that is pretty resilient and knows how to deal with changes in the world.”

That includes fire, like the wildfires that occasionally surround the monastery. And the blaze that burned down Iyer’s family house in 1990. A more recent fire forced his mother to be evacuated from her home in Santa Barbara; Iyer also writes touchingly of caring for her after a stroke that led to her death in 2021 at age 90.

Iyer has visited the hermitage more than 100 times in the past 33 years, but one of the reasons he decided to write a book about it now, he says, is that “the world is more divided and despairing than I’ve ever seen it.…Words and ideas are what separate us, but there’s a certain kind of communal silence that speaks for the deepest part of us, where we have much more in common than apart.”

At the hermitage, in the company of 15 or so monks and the fellow guests with whom Iyer shares the silence, worries tend to dissipate: “Such a fresh, unpretentious circle of souls, I think, as I start to chat with the brothers, meal after meal.”

“My homies,” as Iyer affectionately calls the brothers, are “bright, sociable, kind.” He says, “These hermits are the least hermetic people of all, because they’re always looking after other people.” They’re “regular guys,” he adds, “much less full of piety or sanctimony than many people outside the cloister. They’re very down to earth.” One of their rituals is watching Monty Python on Sunday nights in their rec room.

That playfulness was also evident in Leonard Cohen, a close friend who spent time as a monk at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in Southern California. “He would say enlightenment means lightening up,” Iyer says of the late gravel-voiced singer-songwriter. “He was a heavy guy acquainted with suffering, and so for him, his monastic practice was about shedding some of that seriousness and gravitas.”

Iyer dedicates many pages of the book to his friend, whom he calls “a connoisseur of silence.” Cohen, he says, “always had that craving for a simple, uncluttered life.…I was struck at how homemade was the life that he constructed for himself—a little house in a beat-up part of LA where most of the houses had bars on their windows.” As Iyer observes in his book, the true challenge in Zen isn’t to sit still atop a mountain but in the middle of the world.

Iyer’s time in a monastery has inspired him to live modestly, too. In Nara, he and his wife share a $500-a-month two-room rental apartment in a quiet neighborhood. He tries to spend 15 minutes a day reading something that speaks to “my deepest part—it could be Emily Dickinson or Thoreau.” And he walks a lot. “That’s when I’m liberated from my tiny concerns—a bit.” He owns neither a car nor a cellphone. As he writes, citing the Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart, “The soul evolves not by addition but by subtraction.”

Iyer continues to travel, not wanting to be an ostrich. “I don’t want to feel that I’m ignorant of what’s happening in the world, which is why, when I first started going to the hermitage, I made a point of taking myself to Haiti and Yemen and Bolivia and very difficult places. I thought to see one without the other would be very shortsighted.”

And wherever he goes, he says, he carries the hermitage with him—its calm and clarity and the benevolence of its monks. 

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.