This book made me uneasy. I liked a lot of what he had to say about silence and what one might learn from it. But who gets to have these experiences? Who can just drive down to Big Sur for a month? He knows this — it’s part of the book — but I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

First quote: “When one keeps quiet, the situation becomes clear.” This quote is from Albert Camus.

Second quote, and maybe this goes to what I was saying above:

I’m lucky indeed to the have the time and money to go on retreat, I know, a luxury that most might envy. But riches are not so simply defined. Traditionally, the historian R.H. Tawney reminds me, humans were spiritual beings who, for prudence’s sake, took care of their material needs; nowadays more and more of us are material beings who, for the sake of prudence, attend to our spiritual needs.

I’d turn this into a series of questions: when you think about this moment (or day or week), what are you doing to take of your spiritual needs and what are you doing to take care of your material needs? What is the balance between the two? How much of your day is taken up with each? Do you have a choice in the matter or not?

Iyer, Pico. Aflame: Learning from Silence. New York: Riverhead Books, 2025.