How does stillness help us recollect what really matters and what we truly love? How can silence teach us more than any text or doctrine—and offer us a common space in an ever more divided and despairing world? And how can sitting alone in a small cell somehow be a training in community and compassion, helping us to stand firm as the world seems to go up in flames all around us? These are the questions renowned author Pico Iyer brings to light in his latest book AFLAME: Learning from Silence, in conversation with William Green at Asia Society. 

About the Book

Iyer is celebrated as "one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time" (The Marginalian); with books translated into twenty-three languages, he may be one of the greatest cross-cultural observers of our modern age. His most recent "masterful" (The Washington Post) and "revelatory" (NPR) publication The Half Known Life went on to become a National Bestseller and was crowned one of the Best Books of 2023 by The New York Times. 

In AFLAME, Iyer chronicles three decades of transformative stays at a tiny monastery high above the sea in Big Sur, California. Over half a lifetime he has made more than one hundred retreats in this small Benedictine hermitage—sometimes for a week, sometimes for almost a month, often staying with the monks in their enclosure—emerging, nearly always, with a rare sense of joy, clarity, and liberation. Nowhere in his life of travels has so transformed or reoriented him as his time in silence and his encounters with men and women of every age and background along the monastery road. Radiant, intimate, and gripping, AFLAME is a transfixing mix of meditation and storytelling, as Iyer interweaves his moments of invigorated transport with warm and sometimes humorous meetings around the hermitage—all lit up by the grounding wisdom of other monastics he has known, among them the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen, and a wise Zen abbess. Already being hailed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as a book that “may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind,” AFLAME offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.

Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is the author of 17 books, translated into 23 languages. His most recent work, The Half Known Life, was a national best-seller and was named a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, NPR, Marginalian, and many others. He has regularly been presenting at the Asia Society since 1991.