Doing Nothing Is Everything

Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer; Riverhead Books, 240 pp., $30

It takes hard work to do nothing—truly nothing. And it’s not just the effort of concentration and attention involved in staying still, but all that precedes the act: the years of training and preparation, the self-discipline you need to master, the path of askesis—the “labor on the self”—on which you must embark. When Oscar Wilde quipped that to “do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual,” he placed, as was his habit, considerable seriousness behind the joke.

Pico Iyer knows this better than most. His growing body of work reveals a constant conflict between a life of busyness, striving, and worldly involvement, and his relentless quest for stillness, silence, and detachment from the world. In his 2014 book, The Art of Stillness, based on a highly successful TED Talk, he writes that “making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.” Iyer’s own biography embodies these two unreconciled drives. Whereas one launched him on a life of journeying as a high-profile journalist and travel writer, the other discreetly directed his travels toward places that promised a measure of rest and detachment—if not total stillness, at least some slowing down: Nepal, Bhutan, India, Cuba. Eventually, in his quest for peace and quiet, he left his glamorous life in New York City for a single room on the quiet backstreets of Kyoto, where he tried, with limited success, to live a quasi-monastic life, a period he recounts in The Lady and the Monk (1991). In the book’s aftermath, the failed monk married the lady, and they settled in Nara, near Kyoto. Still searching for stillness (or “freedom from ceaseless striving,” as he calls it), Iyer regularly left his home in Japan and went to find some incarnation of it in a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, California. Over the past three decades, he has made more than a hundred such trips. (It must be one of the great ironies of our time that, to achieve stillness, you must be an avid traveler.) This is the story he tells in his latest book, Aflame.

The New Camaldoli Hermitage, where Iyer regularly takes refuge, belongs to a monastic order founded in the 11th century by the Italian monk Romuald, who was later canonized by Pope Gregory XIII. The order puts a high price on disentanglement from the world. St. Romuald’s Brief Rule reads: “Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it.” Easy to say, but doing it is another matter, as various characters in Iyer’s book find out. For the world can hardly be left behind or forgotten; the world follows you wherever you go, always catching up with you, no matter how hard you try to hide from it. You may eventually find yourself alone in your cell, ready to enjoy your solitude at last, only to discover that it’s already there, locked in with you. We cannot leave the world behind simply because we carry it within, like the germs of a disease. Not even hard-tested monks are safe from contagion. As one of them observes in Aflame, “Even for us monks, we go to town and when we come back, we speak more loudly, more fast. Everything is a race.” The rat race.

So much has changed about the world since St. Romuald’s day, and yet so little: it’s the same strife everywhere, the same injustice, political turmoil, triumph of brute force. The subtler point of St. Romuald’s Rule, I’d venture to say, is not to follow it literally, which would be impossible and perhaps even undesirable, but to adopt it as an ongoing aspiration, something not just necessary, but also realistic. Behave as though you have left the world behind, but take as much care of it as you can. For it’s in the act of caring that you may find paradise. “A monk is at heart the ultimate man of the world,” writes Iyer. “That’s where his sense of kindness and self-sacrifice is most needed, and it’s to those in trouble that he must attend.” When you see the bloody rat race all around you, more spiritual than turning your back on it is to comfort the victims and patch their wounds. As one monk in Aflame says: “Our job is to stay in the cauldron without getting burned.” The point of monastic life, then, is not individual perfection, but what happens to you as you seek it. If there’s something better than a perfect monk, it’s a failing monk. And best of all is a failed one.

One of the great merits of Iyer’s book is to have given us a rich, nuanced, occasionally amusing, always insightful phenomenological account of what happens to the self of the world-fleeing monk as he encounters, in his solitary cell, precisely the world he has tried to escape from. The world he discovers here is one essentialized, reduced to its bare bones, and therefore truer to itself. “The world isn’t erased here; only returned to its proper proportions,” Iyer writes. “It’s not a matter of finding or acquiring anything, only of letting everything extraneous fall away.” The experience makes him see everything with new, uncluttered eyes: his own self, his new situation (“Strange,” he exclaims at one point, “how rich it feels to be cleaned off of all clatter”), but also his relationships with others. “In the solitude of my cell,” he writes, “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 the monk’s solitary cell, the world becomes a more habitable place.

His relentless quest for silence and solitude, rather than any confessional affiliation or commitment, is what drives Iyer to the Benedictine monastery. Despite leading a demanding spiritual life, he is self-avowedly areligious: “Twelve years of enforced chapel at school, every morning and every evening, have left me with such an aversion to all crosses and hymnals.” When a friend, puzzled by Iyer’s ritual visits to the monastery, asks him: “Do you believe in God?” his answer is even more puzzling: “It hardly matters.”

As secular silence-seekers, like Pico Iyer, flock to religious retreats like the New Camaldoli Hermitage, the “religion of irreligion” seems to be flourishing. Shouldn’t that bother the good Benedictine Fathers, and others like them, who give shelter to unbelievers? Not in the least. For they too may answer, albeit from the other side: “It hardly matters.” For them, these silence-seekers are doing the work of God without knowing it.

But isn’t that absurd? It hardly matters. Such is the charm of the world we live in.