Pico Iyer on What We Can Learn From the Monastic Life

The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable. And part of its beauty—what deepens and extends it—is that it belongs to all of us. Every now and then I hear a car door slam, or movement in the communal kitchen, and I’m reminded, thrillingly, that this place isn’t outside the world, but hidden at its very heart.

In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them; in silence, all the unmet strangers across the property come to feel like friends, joined at the root. When we pass one another on the road, we say very little, but it’s all we don’t say that we share.

*

Coming out one afternoon into the singing stillness, I pass a woman, tall and blond, looking like she might be from the twenty‑fifth‑floor office in Midtown where my bosses await my essays. She smiles. “You’re Pico?”

“I am.”

“I’m Paula. I wrote you a letter last year to see if you could come speak to my class.”

She’s a novelist, I gather—complete with agent, good New York publisher, grant from the National Endowment for the Arts—and she teaches down the road, two hours to the south. She fled Christianity as a girl, growing up in Lutheran Minnesota, but now—well, now she’s been brought back into silence and a sense of warm community.

“Do you write while you’re here?” she asks.

“All I seem to do is write! But only for myself. This is the one place in life where I’m happy not to write in any public way.”

She smiles in recognition. The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing.

*

The others I pass along the way, or see in the shared kitchen, are not at all the solemn, stiff ones I might have expected. One greets me with a Buddhist bow, another with a Hindu namaste. On the cars outside the retreat‑house I read i brake for mushrooms, notice a fish that announces, darwin. We’re not joined by any doctrine, I realize, or mortal being or holy book; only by a silence that speaks for some universal intimation.

“What do you think of this?” an older man asks as we pass one another near a bench.

“Nothing,” I say, and he looks puzzled until he sees what I’m about.

“That’s the liberation, don’t you find?” I go on. “There’s nothing to think about other than oak tree and ocean. Nothing to smudge the wonder of…” and then I say no more.

We look out together at the tremble of light across the water.

*

“Do you go to the services while you’re there?” asks my Hindu nun friend back at home; she ended up in her convent while looking for the largest empty parking lot in which to protest the Vietnam War.

“I go to the chapel when no one’s there.” The beauty of the space is that there’s almost nothing there as well. Six small windows on either side of the cream‑colored walls, their panes painted yellow so light floods gold under the low roof. A large, high‑ceilinged, dark rotunda with nothing but a single tiny cross suspended from a majestic skylight, through whose cone‑shaped octagonal panels the sun streams down in shafts. Underneath that, a bare concrete block and nothing else.

The strongest image in the simple, intimate space is an Orthodox painting of Virgin and Child, set against a golden background. At the entrance, a picture of three angels gathered around a table at which the last setting awaits a fourth. None of the heavy wooden furnishings, the icons and gold and fussiness of the churches I grew up among; the Japanese man who designed this chapel knew that little was needed but light.

*

I do go to a service once, at Vigils, propelled by a sense of gratitude and duty. Out into the foggy morning—no sun above the ridge yet—and joining a handful of others on the three long blond‑wood benches gathered behind eleven chairs in a straight row on either side.

I watch the men in white robes file in from their enclosure, each bowing in turn to the cross hanging in midair, then taking his seat on one of the chairs lined up in front of us.

As soon as the psalms begin, I hear of the “ungodly” and the “filthy,” of “licking the dust” and “hating those who hate thee.” A metaphor for the struggle within, I know, and the singing is celestial, but soon I’m registering which robes look dirty, which ones clean. I’m counting the hairs in an elderly monk’s ears. I’m back on the outside of everything, observer in the worst possible sense.

The instant the fifteen minutes are over, I walk swiftly to the heavy door and out to the large hexagonal window that greets all who step out of the church, its heavy wooden shutters pulled back. Blue above, blue below. A barely paved road bumping down towards the wide expanse of ocean. Rough, red earth and squirrels scurrying across the path. This, I think, is the real scripture, inscribed in all that moves.

*

As the days mount in silence, I’m quickly freed of most of my preconceptions. A monk, I see, is not someone who wishes to live peacefully and alone; in truth, he exists in a communal web of obligations as unyielding as in any workplace, and continuing till his final breath.

He’s unlikely to want to proselytize; those with their eyes closed in prayer seldom have designs on others.

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.

On my first drive up to the Hermitage, all I saw was the large cross on the highway, the name of St. Romuald on my door, the crucifix above my bed; as soon as I stepped into silence, all I registered was ocean and sunlight and gold.

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From Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer. Copyright © 2025. Available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.