On Wednesday, Oct. 8, renowned essayist and novelist Pico Iyer visited Swarthmore’s campus as part of the 2025-26 William J. Cooper Series. The focus of the event was Iyer’s latest book, “Aflame,” a nationally best-selling account of the silent retreats that Iyer has taken to a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, CA, over the past 30 years. Iyer described the inspiration for the work before sitting down for a conversation with Andrew Hauze ’04, senior lecturer of music. An audience Q&A session, book signing, and reception followed.
After introducing Iyer, Hauze invited the audience to join him in a brief moment of silent contemplation. Quiet fell over the lecture hall for 60 seconds. On stage, Iyer remained seated in his chair, eyes closed, mouth set in a serene half-smile. When Hauze finally called him up to the podium, the sound of clapping hands that filled the auditorium was stark against the silence it replaced.
Iyer began by speaking about the college. He shared his longstanding admiration for late Shakespeare scholar and Swarthmore Professor Harold Goddard, expressed gratitude for the work of the college’s peace and conflict studies department, and joked that the Whispering Bench appealed to his fondness for quiet places to sit.
The talk then took on a more serious tone, as Iyer began to tell the story of the event that led to his first stay at the monastery:
“One hot summer day many years ago, I was sitting in my family home in California when I saw a distant knife of orange cutting through the hillside. Naturally, I went downstairs to call the fire department. When I came upstairs again just minutes later, it was to find that our whole house was encircled by 70-foot flames.”
Iyer’s life was narrowly saved by a good Samaritan patrolling the area in a small water truck. His mother’s home, however, was reduced to ash before his eyes. When the flames finally died down, all of Iyer’s possessions — including several hundred pages of unpublished written work — were gone.
“That night, I went to a supermarket and bought myself a toothbrush. It was the only thing I owned.”
Iyer spent the following months sleeping on the floor of a friend’s apartment as he and his mother began to piece their lives back together. When another friend of his eventually learned of his situation, he recommended that Iyer seek shelter at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a monastery of the Benedictine Catholic order. Though Iyer was not himself a Catholic (nor a member of any faith tradition), his friend promised that a stay with the monks would be rewarding. Today, after more than three decades of visits to the monastery, Iyer is deeply grateful that he took this suggestion to heart.
“To this day, every time I return to the monastery, there are a hundred reasons not to go. I feel guilty about leaving my aged mother behind; I worry about my bosses and my agent being unable to contact me; I miss my wife, my family, my friends. And yet, as soon as I arrive, I realize that it’s only by going there that I’ll have anything fresh and joyful to share with them. Otherwise, all they’re getting is my distraction, my tiredness, my mumbled ‘see-you-later.’ The words that we share with one another are only as deep as the silences behind them.”
This lesson, Iyer said, feels more relevant today than ever before in his lifetime. His decision to complete and publish “Aflame” at the beginning of this year was a reaction to a sociocultural environment that seemed to him to be in dire need of space for silence.
“Life is accelerating to a post-human speed. I’ve never seen the world this distracted. I’ve never seen this country so divided. I’ve never seen my friends so despairing, never seen them have such good reason to despair. There are two essential questions we have to address: how do we remain calm in the face of uncertainty, and how do we remain hopeful in the face of impermanence?”
The answers that Iyer has found through his years of contemplative practice are by no means intuitive. To connect with one another, he said, we must be conscious of our time spent alone. To act with intention and tangible effect, we must force ourselves to be still. To speak with meaning, we must first be silent. “This way, I’ve found, we can begin to let ourselves participate joyfully in a world of sorrow. In my view, that’s the real goal.”
Over time, Iyer added, his abstentions from speech have allowed him to be more cognizant of the place and purpose of verbal language in contemporary life. He said that his own work’s gradual shift in focus from exploring the external world to the internal was a conscious response to the emergence of technologies that seemed to obviate the need for traditional travel writing.
“When I began writing in the 1980s, all of us were craving sensory information. Now what we’re craving is freedom from that information. I used to flood my pages with details about the sounds and sights and smells of the places I visited, because I knew that it was the only way that people back home could know these things. Today, we have technologies that can convey sensuous experience more vividly than my words ever could. I have to ask myself — what can I bring back from a place that no one can see online?”
It is crucial, Iyer emphasized, that writers of the rising generation ask themselves the same question. While the internet may seem to render all of the world’s peoples and cultures easily knowable, the extent of information available through digital media ultimately precludes any chance of intimate interpersonal connection. It is only through words — and the quiet from which they emerge — that we may truly come to understand one another.
“I don’t have great faith in our governments or institutions, but I have great faith in the ability of our individuals to communicate. Communication is the fundamental human need, and the fundamental human skill.”
“Aflame,” published in January 2025, is available in all major bookstores.
