Pico Iyer interview: ‘It’s the best in others that I feel most strongly in silence’

For Iyer, silence isn’t escapism but preparation — ‘an inner savings account’ that sustains us during life’s gravest moments. He talks of death not as a negation but as a companion to joy, a reason to cherish the ephemeral. Stillness, he suggests, may be our truest form of paradise — not a faraway utopia, but a humble, shared sanctuary hidden in the here and now. And to write from such a place is to offer a quiet door — not to escape the world, but to return to it more whole. Rather than cloistering him from the world, his practice of quietude grounds him more deeply in it, allowing him to see, write, and live with a clearer sense of what matters and what does not.

Excerpts from the interview:

You’ve said the monks offered you companionship and compassion, even as they vowed to remain mostly voiceless. In what ways has silence taught you more about connection and community than conversation or confession ever could?

I often feel closer to my friends when I’m sitting in silence than when they’re chatting to me in the same room. Partly because that chatter comes from their social selves, partly because words remind us of all the beliefs and assumptions that we don’t share. The best in us lies deeper than our words, and it’s the best in others that I feel and see most strongly in silence — maybe because I’m closer to the best in myself.

In silence, I can also clear my head of the thousand things, many of them trivial, that otherwise fill it, and focus on what really matters. Which means I can see more clearly whom I love and why. When I’m hurrying from the bank to the post office, I lose sight of that, as of my priorities. That’s one reason why I often think that it was only by going on silent, solitary retreats that I decided to get married.

As you know, I write quite a bit in this book about Leonard Cohen, the singer-songwriter who became a monk whose monastic name means “the silence between two thoughts.” What so moved me about Leonard, among many other things, is that this wizard of golden words, the most spell-binding speaker I had met, would, when I visited him in his house, simply take two chairs out to his tiny front garden and invite me to sit next to him in silence.

He knew that that would be the ultimate sign of trust and fellowship; that the words we didn’t share would bring us together even more than the words we did. I should point out that there are no rules in the hermitage I go to, though all of us who visit are surely in search of quiet. But the monks, as you read, are friendly, sociable and very down-to-heart — always ready to chat or to offer spiritual counsel —and visitors are invited to take long walks down the monastery road, in conversation with one another or what a monastic brother. So people speak with words there as well as with silences, but the words have clearly been washed clean by the silence.

Your work often suggests that the stillness of the monastery isn’t an end, but a preparation — to return, re-enter, re-engage. How do you carry the residue of silence back into the clamorous, caffeinated world? What practices help you sustain its clarity amidst chaos?

In some ways, I remade my life in the light of what I learned and felt in the monastery — moving to this two-room flat in the middle of an anonymous suburb in Japan where we have no car (a hundred things not to worry about), where I’ve never used a cell-phone (a thousand distractions that I’m free from), and where each day seems to last a hundred hours, in the absence of commotion.

I try to devote fifteen minutes a day to Lectio Divina (divine reading), which is to say reading from books that will speak directly to my soul. It could be from a wise religious being, or it could be from a great poet, or Emily Dickinson or Henry David Thoreau. I also take two long walks every day, often around the same blocks, day after day, and devote one hour each afternoon to losing myself in either a work of fiction or of serious non-fiction.

Also read: Pico Iyer interview: How to use language to bring silence into the conversation

And I try, when tempted to kill time, to restore it instead: instead of scrolling around idly online or turning on the TV, I’ll turn off the lights and just listen to music. My hope is to open the empty spaces inside me, so I feel as if I’m in a vast open meadow, rather than a clatter of skyscrapers.

In this era of algorithmic attention and curated distraction, silence may seem quaint or even threatening. How do you see the vocation of the writer changing in such times — and how might learning from silence be a subversive act of literary resistance?

You’re so right, and silence or retreat does indeed seem counter-intuitive or even quixotic in an age bent on advancement and noise. But I think it’s a way of reclaiming the best and deepest in us, which is the only hope and treasure we have and which so easily gets lost, or obscured at least, in the noise.

When my mother suddenly had a stroke some years ago and I was sitting by her side for 35 days in the intensive care unit as she trembled between life and death, I didn’t think the day’s news, or my latest tweet, or a blast of distraction would help her. The only thing I felt I could bring to that situation — and such situations will arise in every life, more than once — was my inner savings account, or whatever time I had spent sitting in one place in silence.

In that way, I think that tending to our inner resources is a matter of life and death. If we don’t do it, we’re defenseless at the many moments when reality makes a house call and suddenly we face a terrible challenge. In the context of literature, silence can seem a distraction, but I think of Samuel Beckett, who worked so hard to pare his words down to almost nothing — or, for that matter, of Harold Pinter, whose main instrument and weapon was silence. Both were rewarded with the Nobel Prize because they distilled so much of experience into very few words, or none at all.

In an age of shortened attention spans, I think the maximalist novel is up against more and more problems, though they’re not insuperable. The haiku clearly has an advantage, so long as it is not a tweet, but a 17-syllable condensation of 1700 syllables. Again, a work of writing is deepened by the presence of all that has been left out. One of the most celebrated haiku in Japan, written by the long-suffering poet Koyabashi Issa after his beloved young daughter had died, says, simply, “this world of dew/ is a world of dew/ and yet…”

Your writing, particularly in Learning from Silence, makes room for death — not as a conclusion but as a teacher. How has silence shaped your understanding of mortality? And what does it mean to write about the ‘inevitability of vanishing’?

Thank you. It was very important for me to have a lot of death in this book, right from the very beginning. And it was equally important for me to have a lot of joy. Because I think our task in life is to balance hope and realism and not try to ignore either. As our other task is to see that impermanence isn’t incompatible with wonder and beauty and gratitude — and in fact may be the catalyst to those. A reason for celebration in a world in which tomorrow can’t be counted upon.

Also read: Pico Iyer broadens the idea of paradise, shows we are all bound up in our humanity

Soon after I arrived in Japan I heard the formulation that life is about “joyful participation in a world of sorrows,” a Buddhist truth that suggests that real life — old age, sickness and death — are non-negotiable, but none of that means there’s no place for light or confidence. If you look at perhaps the most prominent Buddhist in the world today, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, you see that though he has suffered more than anyone I know, he constantly radiates laughter and warmth and conviction.

I’ve written a lot about the ‘inevitability of vanishing’ in recent years because for me it goes with the urgency of cherishing things. Of course that’s partly because I’m growing older, and seeing people and places fall away, but it’s no less because I’m finding more causes for celebration and gratitude than ever before.

I think silence has opened up to me those things that aren’t so subject to mortality — such as the ocean below, the wind all around, the skies above. None of them are immortal, but they belong to a much larger canvas than the human. So seeking out silence has taken me a little out of the fractured, wounded, very mortal human world and into the realm of larger things that last a lot longer.

And sitting in silence has been a way to sit calmly with impermanence and the fact that nothing I love will last forever. I have been thinking a lot about how a haiku is an emblem of impermanence — but it’s also a stay against impermanence. Every sentence one writes has the possibility of lasting much longer than I ever will and certainly much longer than my chatter in the day-to-day world.

In your last book, The Half Known Life (2023), you journeyed through the paradoxes of paradise. In Learning from Silence, you seem to enter it. Do you now believe stillness is the closest we come to paradise not so much as a place, but as a state? And if so, how does one write from paradise without shattering it?

Your questions are so astonishingly thoughtful and well-considered. You’re right that these last two books belong together: the one as a way of cutting through various illusions of paradise — that it lies on the far side of the world — and the other as a way of spotlighting some humble souls who, in the tradition of all monasteries, have found paradise where they sit and work to sustain it and to share it with us visitors.

They know, as Emily Dickinson wrote, that the one who has not found the heaven below will fail of it above. I worked very hard, for many years, to make this book not an essay but an experience: in other words, to put the reader in this provisional paradise I have found. To give her the light and the calm and the stillness that had so restored and clarified me.

Without coming between her and the experience too much, I hope; I just wanted to open a door for her, maybe a door that she might not otherwise see in a very busy life. So that was my attempt to write from a special sanctuary without, I hope, destroying or distorting it, too much.

I seek to share the sensation of being in that place above the clouds much as I might share a medicine I had found that works well if you’re feeling rushed or confused. I don’t have a key to paradise, but if I can open a door whereby someone I have never met can come a little closer to it, I feel my job as a writer has been partly fulfilled.