In 2024, after 18 years away, I returned to the island of Patmos in Greece to spend two weeks in total solitude. Forty years earlier, when I was in my 20s, two winter months alone there had changed my life. Near the end of those months, I’d met Robert Lax, the poet and close friend of Thomas Merton, who was living by himself on the same island. Then and on subsequent visits, Lax taught me what he and Merton knew about the blessings of spending time alone. But it was those solitary weeks before we met that really changed me — that helped me see what I believed and desired and, in their way, prepared me to meet a man as spiritual as Lax. I’d begun writing a book about those weeks when, in the summer of 2023, a friend suggested I return to Patmos to recreate my earlier experience — to see how 40 years had changed my views of solitude, the island and myself.
Since those early months on Patmos, I’d learned to find solitude in many ways and spaces, including the corners of libraries, the silent exertions of long-distance running, the depths of a forest on the edge of an ocean and, with my mother at the end of her life, a quiet park near her nursing home. But it was only when I returned to the island after all those years away that I realized how truly helpful having a particular place to be alone can be. There, in the midst of the wind and the sun and the ochre cliffs plunging into sapphire sea, I felt my spirit soar again. My soul come alive.
By the time I finished my book, An Island to Myself, which came out in May, I’d come to believe so fully in seeking solitude in a specific place — an island in Greece or a closet in your bedroom — that I’d added a subtitle: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life. Then, in one of those synchronistic moments that sometimes come when you embark on a new path, I learned that a writer I’d long admired, Pico Iyer, was about to publish a book called Aflame: Learning from Silence. According to the advertising copy, it was based on “more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California.” Iyer, it seemed, had his own Patmos.
Given the similarities in our subjects and the importance of place in both our experiences, I decided to contact Iyer to see if he’d be willing to blurb my book. I never got my blurb, but what came from that contact was much more valuable: a conversation between us about the benefits, dangers, meaning and purpose of spending time alone.
I first learned of Iyer near the end of the 1980s, a decade in which I’d worked for an international aid organization, interviewing and writing about the poorest people in Asia; traveled for months at a time in Europe and the Middle East, first as a wanderer and then as a tour guide; and spent those silent months alone on Patmos. His name was on the cover of a book with an arresting title: Video Night in Kathmandu. I had little idea what the book was about other than travel, but those four words, combining something as modern as a video night with the name of a city that seemed more magical than real, made me take notice. Inside, I found what the title promised: Instead of trading in myths about so-called exotic lands like other travel writers, Iyer set down what he actually saw during several trips through Asia. Reflecting my own experiences, his essays gave a generally strange, often disorienting, at times profoundly sad account of local ways and traditional practices mixed with incursive and often creatively integrated elements of Western culture.
The book began, for example, with an overview of the many ways the Sylvester Stallone blockbuster First Blood bulled its way across Asia with oversized posters, lavish advertisements and copycat dramas, its hoopla and blood embraced by those who saw Stallone’s John Rambo as an avatar of invincible individualism. Iyer’s world was the real world — the world I’d observed in my travels — and he viewed it through compassionate eyes, rendered it in elegant prose, and dwelt where he could on the beautiful and sublime: the charm of the Balinese girl who brought him tea. The “purity” of Tibetan sunlight and silence.
Iyer has published 16 books since Video Night came out in 1988, written introductions for more than 100 others, and penned essays, articles and opinion pieces for countless magazines and newspapers around the world, from Time and The New York Review of Books to Granta, National Geographic and India Today. His early years prepared him uncommonly well to do the traveling and observing found in much of his writing. Born to Indian academics in Oxford, England, he spent 15 years flying back to Britain by himself to attend boarding school after his parents moved to Southern California. Air travel, he’d say later, became “akin to taking a bus.”
I haven’t read all of Iyer’s books, but I’ve followed his career since that first discovery, dipping into his writings wherever they most intrigued me: The Open Road, for example, about his travels with the Dalai Lama, whom he’s known since he was 17, or The Man Within My Head, his paean to the self-described “Catholic agnostic” writer Graham Greene. What has beguiled me most has been his subtle shift from keenly observant journalist to thoughtful examiner of how to find personal meaning in a multitudinous and often fractious world. By “world” I mean more than the place we all live; I mean the totality of an individual’s experience, at home and abroad, in company with others and in one’s private space.
The seeds of that shift were already present in Video Night. In the chapter on Japan, for example, Iyer describes the Zen temples he visits this way:
There were no signposts along their paths, and no signs. Every visitor had to make his own way, fill the emptiness with something from within. There was nothing for him to see or do, nothing to find save what he had brought himself. And that, very often, was the greatest find of all.
When I contacted Iyer in the weeks just after Aflame was published, I wasn’t aware he had sworn off blurbing years before — had, in fact, written two high-profile pieces poking fun at the practice. Instead of simply ignoring my request, he explained his no-blurb policy in one of the kindest, most respectful messages I’d ever received from a writer, let alone one of his stature. When I thanked him for it, he sent another warm response, fostering a connection between us.
I’ve learned as a writer and as a human being to tack toward warmth, especially when it comes from someone I admire. The next time I wrote, it was to propose a deepening of our brief back-and-forth: an interview, in person or by email, about his experiences with solitude and stillness, as detailed in his book. His reply came swiftly again. He’d be delighted, he said, to be questioned by someone who knew solitude as intimately as I did.
As I read Aflame in advance of our conversation, I felt as if we’d discussed our experiences with solitude and self-discovery already. On page 8, I even found a Kafka quote I’d used in my book: “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.”
Although I made sure to revisit Iyer’s earlier books — including The Art of Stillness (2014), his first attempt to explore the phenomenon of “stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply” — it seemed the best preparation for our chat was simply sitting quietly at my table, as Kafka advised, recalling what I’d learned in my own times alone. My own solitary space.
While I was reading, Iyer was “crisscrossing the globe” to promote his book. By the time I sent my questions, he was back in Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife in what he describes as “a tiny two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere” without a car or a cellphone. Their simple life there, he’d tell me, “feels absolutely luxurious, because I can give my days to what I love: reading, writing, taking walks. Step into a classic Japanese tatami room and there are only two things in it: a scroll and a vase. And because there are only two things there, you bring all of your attention to them (as you couldn’t if there were twenty-two) and find the universe therein.”
Aflame is about finding not only the universe but also the self, or maybe more accurately the “non-self” — freedom from the thought of even having a self separate from the rest of the universe — in one of the simple rooms or trailers the monks at the New Camaldoli Hermitage offer to all who desire relief from the outside world. Clustered high on a hillside with the Big Sur headlands far below and 900 acres of “live oak, madrona, redwood and desert yucca” around them, the humble accommodations situate the visitor in the middle of a natural world where sun and fog move in and out and mountain lions roam nearby.
On retreat, Iyer writes, “there’s no ‘I’ to get in the way of the exultancy. . . . 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.” Not the noisy world, the social world, but the natural world, the truer world — the world in which the social self disappears and the soul is “cleansed of all chatter,” including its own.
The monastery, Iyer says, allows for “a shedding of one’s daily self and maybe a recovery of some deeper and more eternal self. Which might almost amount to a non-self, insofar as the person I know too often doesn’t really exist when I’m in my cell, and I feel myself as wide as the sky and as deep as the ocean, made up of everything around me.”
The self and the non-self. The social self and the deeper self. The apparent self and what Thomas Merton called the “true self.” Whatever the terminology, I had experienced the same sense of release and discovery during my times alone on Patmos. For me, what emerged when I was free of expectations and strivings and my own chatter was a self that shared an intimacy with God, a self that came alive in God, a self that disappeared into God without losing its relationship to the natural world. In time, I came to realize that this connection was both ordinary and ongoing, even at home. The difference on Patmos — and in other places I sought solitude — was that I was alone enough, still enough and settled enough to be aware of it.
Although the hermitage where Iyer has sought renewal for half of his 68 years is Catholic, he claims no specific religion. His parents were Hindu, the Dalai Lama is Buddhist (as was his other influential friend, the late singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen), and as a child he spent 15 years in an Anglican boarding school with “chapel every morning, chapel every evening, the Lord’s Prayer in Latin on Sunday nights, the Gospel according to Matthew in Greek in the daytimes.” While recognizing that the “deepest souls” he knows are “firmly grounded in one tradition,” he views being born in a global age — where travel allows him to learn from devoted followers of different paths — as partial compensation for lacking a tradition of his own.
He understands, however, that merely visiting sacred places or having friendships with devout people isn’t enough. To further his search for something beyond what the outside world offers, he’s read extensively in various religious traditions and sought out writers who’ve experienced stillness and solitude. Thoreau pops up regularly in his writings, with his exhortation to “simplify, simplify, simplify” and his pursuit of solitude as a way, in Iyer’s words, “to come to a deeper understanding of love (and the world and the self).” So does Emily Dickinson, who “spent more time in silence and solitude than almost any monastic, never leaving her house for twenty-six years, which is why she traveled into intense states of faith and doubt and ecstasy and terror beyond even what I encounter in St. Teresa of Avila.”
The Western writer he cites more than any other is Merton. As with the Dalai Lama and Cohen, part of Merton’s appeal is his devotion to exploration of the internal world without renunciation of the outer one. The Dalai Lama, Iyer tells me, is a monk “whose life is mostly conducted in the world,” and Cohen was “an archetypal man of the world who chose to become a monk.” About Merton, he says:
I am drawn to him not for his life in the world but because nobody I have read has given a more constant and vital and honest record of his life in solitude; he is one of our great chroniclers of the inner life and landscape. And of course it’s his doubts, his hesitations, his restlessness that make him so real, the fact that his faith is always alive and being challenged. Had he been calmer, more settled, more at ease, he might have seemed a lot less human and less vital.
In The Silent Life (1957), Merton writes:
The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living. Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when man cannot attain to the spiritual peace that comes from being perfectly at one with his own true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting. For he cannot go on happily for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul.
The first time Iyer went to New Camaldoli, in 1991, it was in the aftermath of a fire that had destroyed his family’s Santa Barbara home, leaving him, he thought, with nothing. In the silence of that hillside high above the Pacific Ocean, he realized he still had the things that were really important: “my mother, my wife-to-be, the songs that always go through my head, my favorite books.” Home, he was reminded, “isn’t where you live; it’s what lives inside you.” Over time, he came to believe, like Merton, that in solitude and simplicity he became a richer man: “In the hermitage, freed of the distraction of plans and possessions, I own nothing but the light, the silence and the stillness, which seem the greatest luxuries one could ever possess.”
Culling from 4,000 pages of notes made over 33 years, Iyer assembled Aflame without dates or other markers and gave it a fragmentary structure so a reader “could pick up the book anywhere and read for five minutes and feel calmer and a little closer to her deeper self.” But Aflame is not just about personal discovery or serenity; it’s also about taking the fruits of solitude back out into the world. And it’s about how the Camaldolese monks and devoted souls in other religious traditions give themselves more fully to others than most of us do.
When I ask what he learned from Cohen, Iyer replies, “Service and silence.” About his visit with the singer in the Southern California monastery he entered as an older man, Iyer writes, “It was deeply moving to see a man who had been a celebrity for more than thirty years, able to do anything with anyone, choosing, in his sixties, to give himself over to the back-breaking discipline of five and a half years in a Zen monastery.” Part of that discipline was “scrubbing floors, cooking for the abbot, driving the old man to the doctor.”
“A monk,” Iyer explains, “is at heart the ultimate man of the world. That’s where his sense of kindness and self-sacrifice is most needed, and it’s to those in trouble that he must attend. He may deepen his commitment in private, but it’s on the streets that he has to reap the blessings of his practice.”
In Aflame, when an interviewer asks if Iyer has a definition of God, he responds without thinking: “Reality.” The answer delighted him, he tells me, “because it came to me instantly, and without preparation, and so felt truer than if I’d given a fancy or impressive, well-argued answer. I do believe that God, whatever one understands by that term, has to live beyond all our explanations and expressions. But I also think — and this is the heart of the book — that what I believe is less important than how I act.”
In accordance with this feeling, he opens the fourth of Aflame’s five sections with a memory of driving past a sign outside the Big Sur retreat house that says “No entrance please. Monastic residence.” For the first time after years of visits, he would be staying with the monks themselves; not in the accommodations set aside for visitors, but in a house that seems at first to be “some rough and uncared-for, all-male B and B.” There in the monks’ humble inner sanctum he comes to know them more fully as individuals and has a glimpse of a life dedicated not only to silent devotion and introspection but even more to compassion and service.
Among the things the monks talk to him about is “the gift of tears” — “the grace of feeling for one’s neighbors.” It is out of this gift that they offer what they do, without strings or expectations, to all who find their way to the hermitage. One of the great beauties of his time with them, Iyer says, is that “it’s wonderfully freed me from many of my received notions and dogmas. It’s reminded me of Christianity’s remarkable and humbling commitment to service, to charity and to tolerance. My monk-friends make no demands of any visitor and simply have faith that each person will find what he or she needs, whatever words we put to that.”
When Iyer speaks of monks, he generally makes little distinction between those in a Western or Eastern tradition, but he does note some differences. The Dalai Lama, he observes,
tells his Tibetan monks to learn from their Catholic brothers and sisters when it comes to social justice, to dealing with suffering. He feels that the Tibetan tradition, because it was developed in seclusion behind the highest mountains on earth, is quite mature when it comes to meditation; but when it comes to compassionate action in the world, he feels the Christian tradition has a lot to teach every one of us.
It is, in fact, the Camaldolese devotion to something beyond stillness and solitude — to an awareness of God and the needs in the world — that gives a place of retreat like the hermitage its power. The monks have taught him, Iyer says, that solitude is “a gateway to a richer and deeper sense of community.” And the silence you find in a monastery or convent “is not just the silence of a mountaintop or forest; it’s not simply the stillness of a quiet place. It’s something positive and alive that was created by worship and mindfulness.” It’s a wordless connection to — and through — a deeper and higher power.
Although I didn’t spend time among monks on Patmos, I felt a similar connection there. The Greeks call Patmos the Holy Isle because St. John was exiled there and wrote his Book of Revelation during his time on the island. As the spiritual descendants of the Apostle of Love, the islanders take seriously Jesus’ call to show hospitality to strangers.
“These monks teach me so much about service, confidence and surrender,” Iyer says. “I can’t fail to be both moved and inspired by their example, and in many ways I visit them in order to learn how to live.”
The relationship between solitude and the outside world — the world of suffering, loneliness and oppression; the world in which most of us live — is one of the least understood and least talked-about aspects of taking time for oneself. In my visits with Robert Lax, we often spoke of the need to be “alone for others.” Even before I met him, I’d come to the conclusion during my weeks on Patmos that solitude is never for yourself only. Away from the voices at home, even my voice at home, my awareness of myself and the world around me deepened in a way I knew would emanate from my words and actions wherever I went.
Although he’s an incredibly talented and accomplished writer, Iyer doesn’t view his new book as something of his own, born of his unique insights and gifts. “What I love about staying with my monk-friends,” he says, “is that everything I write doesn’t feel as if it comes from me, and I’m guessing many of the unmet strangers staying in rooms down the corridor are writing the same thing, in the same words. . . . My little self disappears when I’m with the monks, to be replaced by something that feels much larger and more collective.”
I’m reminded of his definition of God as “reality.” In solitude, the quieting of the endless chatter that makes it so hard to know yourself in the outside world feels like being born anew into a larger reality. Your heart slows and your eyes open — not only to the bees in the lavender but also to the interconnectedness between all beings, all life, even inanimate things. Reality, you realize, is not only God or love or the cosmos in a maximal sense but also every perception in every moment, every interaction with every creature, every flower you see on every hillside — and all of them are mystical, magical and marvelous beyond whatever you have ever imagined, even the ones that cause you pain.
Given the feelings of freedom, peace and quiet community a place like the hermitage offers, it’s easy to see why Iyer has returned to it over the years, no matter how far afield his travels take him. “Knowing I have such a sanctuary — and such a deeper truth — in my life saves me from getting as anxious and downcast in the middle of the world as I might be otherwise,” he says. “Keeping it always in my mind reminds me that the world in which I live is not the whole of the picture and the many challenges that life throws up are not the end of the story.”
But the hermitage isn’t the end of the story either. It isn’t even the escape for Iyer it once was. It’s easy — and wrong — he says, to see retreat “as an alternative to the world, rather than a preparation for it.”
The hermitage opens doors to stillness and depth, he writes. “But the longer I’ve been there, the more it has educated me in kindness, service and obedience, which are surely equally essential things . . . and even closer to what one needs to bring to the world at large.”
Iyer’s relationship with the monks at the New Camaldoli Hermitage began in escape and self-searching, but it has flowered into a celebration of the more outward-looking qualities of perspective, humility and service. Near the end of Aflame, he writes, “The sacred is not a sanctuary, I’m moved to remember; it’s a force field.”
Half a lifetime of exposure to that force field hasn’t turned Iyer into a monk or even a Catholic, but it has given him a sense of stability in an unstable world, a model for reaching out in service to others, and the assurance we all need that there is something greater than our small social selves — both inside and beyond us.
The beautiful thing is you don’t need to go to Patmos or even Big Sur to be recharged by that force field. All you need is an empty corner in a library, a quiet walk in the woods, or a silent moment with an aging parent at the edge of a sunlit park.
Michael McGregor is the author of An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life and Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. A former professor of creative writing, he leads the popular summer workshop Apart and Yet a Part at the Collegeville Institute in Minnesota. Read more about him and his work at michaelnmcgregor.com.