Two men in white robes stand at the end of the road, high above the empty highway. “That fire last October,” says one, young and slim, his eyes burning under his shaven head, “it came within three miles of us. At one point our road got blocked and there was no way out. It was radiant.”
His older monastic brother says nothing.
“For three days and nights,” Cyprian goes on, “the sky was black. Like sooty fog all the time. I went down to the last bench and the whole ocean was blood-red. Plumes of smoke were rising from the hills; I heard trees exploding. It was incandescent.”
I don’t know what to say. Fire has already left its mark on me.
“You pay for your blessings,” I venture at last.
“We do,” says the other, burly, with gentle eyes. “A lot of people don’t understand that. They see only the beauty.”
The beauty, of course, is hard to miss. In the distance, headlands that stretch toward the cities to the south, surf scribbling white around their edges. To our right, a wide expanse of ocean with not a thing to interrupt the blue. A deep valley to our left, and dry golden hills from which mountain lions sometimes emerge, or their prey. Nine hundred acres of live oak, madrona, redwood and desert yucca, a quarter of a mile above the sea.
“I wonder if beauty always has to carry a trace of mortality,” I try, and my two friends are wise enough not to say a word, looking out over the charred hills to the promise all around.
In my small sun-washed room, ten minutes later, I can’t imagine death. The sun pinpricks the water through the long windows behind the desk; in my compact walled garden, a rabbit’s ears twitch pink, almost transparent. A single white chair sits in front of a low wooden fence, and then there’s nothing but brush all the way to the sea.
I set down my carry‑on and walk to the desk. For what feels like hours, I can’t stop writing, though I had nothing to communicate when I drove up. I stand at last, to see four long pages covered with my scrawl. A bell is tolling behind me, suggesting that barely twenty minutes have passed.
“You sound like you’re in love.”
“Exalted, at the very least.” Steve looks at me shrewdly, after I’ve come down from the mountain; he’s known me long enough to be wary of my enthusiasms.
“A love like that can’t last. You know that.”
“I do. But it can leave you a different person, not always for the worse.” He looks away; my friend grew up under the iron hand of priests. He knows that even the loftiest ideas – even the most beautiful spaces – are in the hands of fallible humans.
“What’s so special about this place?”
“The fact there’s no need of texts or theories. Of anything, really. It’s just silence and emptiness and light. No screens at all.”
“No screens,” he says, registering that I mean something more than television sets. When Steve joined a seminary, his consciousness came so unhinged that he was found walking in his sleep, night after night, and had to be sent home.
“You’re not getting religious?”
I look at him. “If you’re freed of all distinctions, there’s no need of words like ‘God.’”
In truth, I’m as surprised as my friend is. Twelve years of enforced chapel at school, every morning and every evening, have left me with an aversion to all crosses and hymnals. In any case, I’ve never wanted to be part of any group of believers. The globe is too wide, too various, to assume one knows it all.
So why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.
“The silence of this place is as real and solid as sound. More real, in fact.” The words in front of me feel as close as if I’ve written them. Alone in a shack near the South Pole for five months, the author stepped into a sense of communion with everything around him. Everywhere he looked was a vastness that made his plans and achievements seem very small indeed.
Admiral Byrd was receiving messages by radio from his friend President Roosevelt as he sat in the polar cold and dark; he was the only person ever to have been feted with three ticker-tape parades through New York City. But in his little cell he came to see that success might be another word for peace and peace, at heart, for freedom from ceaseless striving. Though close at times to death, he “felt more alive,” he confesses, in his solitude, “than at any other time in my life.”
His friends in seclusion were moon haloes, the “bright pebbles” of stars, “ice crystals falling against the face of the sun.” His greatest enemy, he came to see, was a “discordant mind.” He watched a brilliant aurora, he paged through a tale of monastic romance, he sat for long hours in enveloping silence and began to appreciate what TS Eliot would call the “life we have lost in living.” No human, he saw, “can hope to be completely free who lives within reach of familiar habits and urgencies.”
It was visiting my parents’ friend Kilian, earlier in the week, close to home, that brought the admiral back to me; I’d glimpsed the copy of Byrd’s memoir Alone beside his chair. For a quarter of a century, none of us has ever seen Kil ruffled or without his air of quiet self-possession; usually his small figure is to be found seated at a terminal, chuckling over fractals. Brown corduroy jacket, gold-rim specs, shock of frizzy brown hair.
I don’t think I’ll ever meet a brighter soul; he mastered both physics and philosophy at Harvard. But when I moved to Boston, he volunteered to drive with me all the way across the country so he could show me round his old hometown. The one time we stopped, for eight hours in a motel, I awoke at first light to find him at the check‑in desk, scribbling across a postcard of bright-eyed raccoons to send back to his two young daughters.
Now, as I look in on him, Gregorian chants fill the space. He’s long been drawn toward the wisdoms associated with Asia, but cancer, it seems, has moved him to turn to solace closer to home.
What words can be of any use? I recall my friend has always delighted in Kafka’s nutty riddles.
“I just found this unexpected passage,” I say, pulling out the worn notebook I carry in my pocket. “‘You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked; it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.’”
Kil smiles; sitting still is his only option now.
“I should let you rest,” I say, trying not to think that forty- nine years are far too few. “But I’ll see you two weeks from now. With the latest news from Europe.”
Kil struggles to his feet. Movement is so difficult these days. He shuffles over to hold me, and I realize we have never touched before. I feel his bones through his shirt, so fragile I worry they’ll crumble in my arms.
“Take care of your mother,” he says quietly, as if knowing that two weeks is much too long to hope for.
Excerpted with permission from Learning from Silence, Pico Iyer, Penguin India.
