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For decades, starting in 1991 after his house in Santa Barbara burned to the ground, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer has taken regular silent retreats at a Benedictine monastery in Northern California as a way to recharge himself through solitude. He writes about those retreats, and the lessons they’ve imparted, in his new book, “Aflame: Learning From Silence.”
Iyer joins us on the podcast this week to talk about his new memoir and his life’s journeys.
“I’m a writer, so I spend most of my day alone,” he tells the host Gilbert Cruz. “And it’s true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery and convert, and I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or pistachio gelato or some such. But I’d always felt this longing.”
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The post How Silence Improves Pico Iyer’s Life appeared first on New York Times.
