Aflame
Learning from Silence
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Reading Aflame may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind.” —His Holiness the Dalai Lama
From the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat
Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and rush: it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way.
In Aflame, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant change: a house burns down, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other nonmonastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. And most profoundly, he shows how solitude can be a training in community and companionship. In so doing, he offers a unique outsider’s view of monastic life—and of a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there’s a space for quiet and recollection that’s open to us all.
Radiant, intimate, and gripping, 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.
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Novelist and essayist Iyer (The Half Known Life) shares in this luminous account the lessons that more than 30 years of visiting a Benedectine monastery in California have taught him about silence. Convinced by a friend to visit the retreat in 1991, he describes it as less a place of solitude than a tightly woven "communal web" where silence is not a means of retreating into the self but shedding it to better live in the world. As a result of his visits, Iyer comes to see the ways in which the sacred shows up again and again in the mundane. For example, the tiny Tokyo apartment he shares with his girlfriend and her small children becomes a self-contained paradise ("Now I can see luxury is defined by all you don't have to long for"), while the wildfires that regularly break out in the hills of California—and over the years claim his mother's house and endanger the monastery itself—serve as a reminder that "the sacred is not a sanctuary... its power comes from the fact that it can't begin to be controlled." The author brilliantly illuminates philosophical insights about the nature of the self, the world, and how silence serves as a conduit between the two, often in elegant, evocative prose: at the monastery, "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." This is stunning.
