Books
Learning From Silence By Pico Iyer
Radiant, intimate, and gripping, Learning From Silence 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.
In Learning From Silence, Pico Iyer reflects on his transformative retreats to a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur. Through personal stories of loss and change, he explores how silence reveals deeper truths, offering profound insights on solitude, community, and the wisdom that arises from embracing stillness in our chaotic world.
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 Learning From Silence, Iyer travels deep into inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant change: houses burn, 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. 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, Learning From Silence 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.
About The Author:
Pico Iyer is the acclaimed and bestselling author of more than a dozen books translated into twenty-three languages, most recently The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise. His journalism regularly appears in Time, New York Times, New York Review of Books, Financial Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His TED talks have been viewed over eleven million times. He divides his time between western Japan and central California.
The official release for the book is in February 2025.
