Aflame: Learning from Silence
A non-Christian has been going on retreat to a Benedictine hermitage above Big Sur for thirty years. This is what he found there about attention and loss.
Iyer has been going on retreat to a Benedictine hermitage above Big Sur for more than thirty years, as a non-Christian. This is what he has learned there about attention, loss, and how little silence has to do with belief. The hermitage burned in the California wildfires during the years he describes, which gives the book its second subject: what it means to love a place that may not survive.
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Maria Popova
Pico Iyer, that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence (public library) — a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence
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