A QUIET MIGHT

What silence has done for Pico lyer

- ANJULY MATHAI

Someone once said that it is only in solitude that one can hear the mystic notes of the universe. Writer Pico Iyer would agree. After all, he has been courting silence for close to 34 years. Ironically, it is the chaos of a wildfire that first draws him to the calm of a monastery. It is while he is sleeping on the floor of someone's house, after a wildfire destroys his, that a friend suggests he visit a Catholic monastery in Big Sur, California. What has he to lose, he thinks. He gets into his dusty white Plymouth Horizon and follows the interstate freeway, into the inky darkness of the unknown.

Once there, a monk guides him to his room, with a single bed on one side, a rocking chair next to the blond-wood dresser. Through the windows, “the ocean a sheet of fire”. And a wide expanse of silence, waiting to be tilled and tamed.

“Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery?” he writes in his recent book, Learning from Silence. “Maybe because there is 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.”