Pause and effect

He found silence in the wake of a wildfire that swallowed his childhood home. That was in California, in 1991. The author moved into a monastery, embracing the wide-awake stillness’ that is more than the absence of sound. What does it take to translate that onto the page? An exclusive interview

- Kanika Sharma

It's an unusual thing to hear from a prolific writer, but Pico Iyer, 68, says he measures joy not in words as much as silences.

He was 34, adds the British-born author and journalist of Indian origin, when a California wildfire burned his childhood home to the ground in 1991. His mother was away when it happened; he fled with just what he was wearing, and their cat.

With nowhere to go, a friend suggested a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur. There, after journeying and writing about far-flung countries such as North Korea, Paraguay, Japan and Bhutan, he finally made the journey within.

What he found, and began to hold sacred, was a pulsating silence.

The books that followed were of a different kind.

After the bestselling Falling off the Map (1993) and Video Night in Kathmandu (1988) came The Art of Stillness (2014) and The Half Known Life (2023).

His new book, Learning from Silence (February; Penguin Random House India), traces that first inner journey at Big Sur, a place he has returned to scores of times since. Excerpts from an interview.

What is silence?

It's the place on the far side of our thoughts and assumptions and ideologies. The place where our truest self and the deepest reality lie...

At a time when the world is so divided, it seemed particularly useful to throw a spotlight on silence because it's our words that cut us in two. And I think it's often our silences that bring us together in some deeper identity where we're connected rather than at odds.

The silence I'm talking about is not just an absence of noise, but a very particular kind of positive presence that I have found in monasteries and convents.

Being silent on a mountaintop or on a deserted beach is wonderful, but this active, wide-awake silence is something even beyond that.

Before the fire, at 29, you left a successful journalistic career in New York to move to Japan...