Fresh Air - How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

In 1990, writer Pico Iyer watched as a wildfire destroyed his mother's Santa Barbara home, where he also lived. In Aflame, he recounts the devastation of the fire — and the peace he found living in a Benedictine monastery.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Okay, so does this sound like you? You love NPR's podcasts, you wish you could get more of all your favorite shows, and you want to support NPR's mission to create a more informed public. If all that sounds appealing, then it is time to sign up for the NPR Plus bundle. Learn more at plus.npr.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terri Gross. When we first booked today's interview weeks ago, we had no idea how timely it would be and for such a tragic reason. My guest Pico Iyer has written a new memoir about what he's experienced and learned in the more than 30 years that he's been going on retreats in a Benedictine monastery to practice silence and for contemplation, to get

both out of himself and the world and deeper in. But the book begins with fire and fire is a theme throughout. The monastery is surrounded by 900 acres of trees and on one side the ocean. It's in California's Big Sur, one of the most beautiful places in the US. On the first page a monk is describing to Iyer a wildfire that came close to burning down the monastery. It wasn't the first time and it wasn't the last time. At one point the road was blocked and there was no way out. A little later in the book we learned that Iyer's family home in Santa Barbara, where they had lived for about a quarter century where

he was living at the time with his mother that burned to the ground. At the time that fire was part of the worst fire in California history. He was at home alone with his mother's cat when he was suddenly surrounded by flames five stories high and had no way out. After three hours of terror he was suddenly surrounded by flames five stories high and had no way out. After three hours of terror, he was rescued by a good Samaritan traveling around in a water truck with a hose. He and his mother lost everything, but he survived and the cat survived. His memoir is titled A Flame, Learning from Silence. A flame is about the flame of passion and commitment in the monastic life, even for visitors on a retreat like him,

and it's about the destructive, deadly flames of fire. Iyer is best known for his travel writing and for reporting and reflecting on the cultures and religions of the world. His previous book, The Half-Known Life in Search of Paradise, found him traveling around the world to discover what different cultures and religions perceive as paradise. Iyer has known the Dalai Lama for decades and is the author of an earlier book about him. He spent a lot of time in monasteries but remains secular.

His mother was a professor of comparative religion. He was born and grew up in England where his parents moved from India to study. When his parents moved to the US, he remained in an English boarding school. He received degrees from Oxford and Harvard. We recorded our interview Monday. Pico Iyer, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's a pleasure to have you back on the show. This is a very moving book and a really fascinating book because of your experiences at the monastery. Where are you now? I'm in Santa Barbara where happily today it's quite calm, the winds are low, and we're feeling very lucky compared with our neighbors, two hours

to the south. Are you in the house that your mother had rebuilt after it burned to the ground? I have been staying there. The house lacked all electricity. There was no phone that was working, but that's where I've been staying the last four nights. They turn off the power as a precaution because the winds have been very high. So although there's no fire around us, I've been living by the light of a tiny lantern these last four days. Why do you think your mother and the monastery keeps rebuilding when they know they're in the path of wildfires? In the case of my mother, it's a matter of insurance policies. So when our house burnt to the ground, we received a settlement which is enough to rebuild the house that you previously had, but probably not enough to buy a new property elsewhere. So, almost logistically you have to go back to the place that you just left unless you want to radically

leave your home, your friends, your doctor and dentist and everything behind. In the case of the monks, they are making a commitment to living far from the world, at the grace of God, at the mercy of the heavens, not knowing what will come next. So there it's more a conscious decision to live on the edge of the world and in the middle of the wilderness. I remember there's a great Zen monk who says, a monk's duty is to live on the edge of the abyss. And that's what my Benedictine friends are doing in Big Sur.

So you are trapped with flames five stories high. I don't even know how they would get that high since you weren't living in an apartment building or anything. But it seems like so terrifying. And I just wonder what went through your mind when you didn't think you had a way out? And did images, almost like biblical images, or images of Hindu funeral pyres,

because your parents were from India, they're Hindu, did those kind of images flash before your eyes? I think it's one of those things that if you think about, or remember, or anticipate, is terrifying. But when you're in the middle of it, you're just acting. So I climbed up the stairs, I saw that we were encircled by flames, I literally didn't have time to pick up the passport that was two feet away, I just grabbed my mother's cat, raced into a car and drove down the driveway, not thinking that a car was probably the worst place to be. And I think actually having my

mother's aging panting cat in my lap for three hours as we were encircled by flames was a great help because it allowed me to concentrate on keeping the cat alive and not just to think how vulnerable I was feeling. And I think also it was much easier for me to go through that whole experience because I'd been in the midst of the fire. My poor mother at the end of that evening just received a phone call from me because she was away in Florida saying, you've lost everything in the world. Your whole 60 years has been wiped out. And of course, she felt powerless in a way that I didn't because I felt so close to losing

my life that at the end of that evening, losing all my possessions wasn't the end of the world. So you managed to get out of the house, but you were surrounded by flames in your car. Yes, and for 45 minutes we were actually right underneath the house, so I could see the flames systematically making their way through our living room. And then moving down to my bedroom, where all my childhood mementos and photos and toys were. And then going onto my office and then really reducing my next eight years of writing, my next three books were all in handwritten notes to ash. And again, probably it was a good thing that I could witness that and to realize that it was inescapable. There's nothing I or anyone could have done to prevent the force of that fury.

How were you changed after the fire? You'd lost all your possessions. You probably lost your manuscripts, your books, things that were really precious to you, probably photos, all kinds of things. You cared for your mother. She was in great distress. But you probably had a new outlook on being alive. How are you changed? And is it the fire that led you to seek out monastic retreats?

In a very practical way, it was the fire that moved me to seek out monastic retreats because I was sleeping on a friend's floor for many months as my mother and I slowly reconstructed our lives and another friend came in and he saw me there and said Pico you can do better than this and he told me about this Benedictine monastery three and a half hours up the coast and he said well if nothing else you'll have a bed to sleep in there you'll have a big desk you'll have a beautiful walled private garden overlooking the Pacific Ocean hot showers, food, all for $30 a night. And so it was the fact of being stripped down to nothing that made

a Catholic monastery seductive to me, or the notion of any bed to sleep in appealing to me. But in a deeper way, when I think back on it, I remember that as soon as a fire truck finally got to us and told me that it was safe to drive downtown, I went straight to a supermarket and I bought a toothbrush and that toothbrush was literally the only thing I had in the world. And then I went to a friend's house to sleep on the floor. But before I went to sleep, I went to her computer and because my job in those days was to be a columnist for Time Magazine, writing the back page essays. I just had this eyewitness view on the worst fire in Californian history.

I wrote an account then and there, the evening I lost everything. To speak specifically to your question, when the insurance company offered to replace my possessions, I realized I could live without 90% of the books and clothes and furniture that I'd accumulated. In some ways I could live much closer to the life I'd always lived, an uncluttered life. And having lost all my notes, I realized now I'm going to have to write for memory and emotion and imagination, which are really much deeper places. So as the months unfolded, for all the sorrow and shock of that loss, I realized that maybe it was opening certain doors as well.

Did you ask for everything to be replaced? No, I replaced very, very little. And my mother and I were living in a temporary apartment for three and a half years, so in any case, there wasn't much room. But I realized actually how little one needs to survive and that luxury is not really a matter of how much you have, but how much you don't need. And suddenly I awoke to the sense I didn't need a huge amount. I wonder if things are really different for people who were parents. You weren't a parent at the time.

Yes. And also I should say that my mother was 59 at the time and I was 33 and so the notion of starting again was not something she could entertain. It was as if her whole past had been wiped to the ground and there was very little to look forward to. And in my case, my past had been wiped to the ground and my future as I'd anticipated it had been eliminated, but at 33, of course, it's much easier to start afresh. And so I was fortunate in my circumstances. And as you say, so many people are not, and

my heart goes out to them. So at the Benedictine monastery, where you took refuge after the fire, they practiced silence there. And you practiced silence with intervals of talk as well. What did you find appealing about silence? Is that something you'd ever sought out before? It is something I'd sought out, and I probably have a kind of temperamental inclination towards monasteries. Even as a little boy, if I stepped into a convent or monastery, I felt a sudden longing, the way other people may feel when they see a strawberry cheesecake or whatever. It spoke to something inside me. But I think the particular beauty of this silence is that it's not an absence of noise.

It's almost a presence, as if years of prayer and meditation, not just in this monastery, but in every convent and monastery, have created these transparent walls where suddenly the world comes to you with greater immediacy. And so the curious thing was, as I drove up to the monastery, as usual, I was conducting arguments in my head and fretting about deadlines and worried about my tax return and concerned about my aging mother. And I stepped into the silence and all of that fell away. It was as if little Pico and his tiny thoughts were left down on the highway.

And instead, I was in the midst of this beautiful scene above a radiant coastline. And I was in some ways released from myself, I felt, and released from my endless chatter. It's funny, speaking for myself, sometimes when I'm really alone for an extended period of time, my mind is quieter, but other times the chatter gets louder because there's nothing to drown it out. There's no outside world or outside, outside of maybe like the TV or books or whatever, but

there's nothing to drown out the chatter or to distract. Did you experience that too at any point? Well, as a writer, of course, I spend much of my day alone, and when I'm at my desk, the chatter is sometimes deafening. But what I experienced with the silence in the monastery was something very different. I was just thinking as I was walking down to talk to you that it's as if suddenly in the monastery I realized I wasn't the center of the world.

And the sort of me part disappeared and the world part became very strong. Thomas Merton, the great Trappist monk who lived with silence for 27 years, wrote, when your mind is completely silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real. And I think that's what I found. So although sometimes I've been there during storms and at very scary and uncertain times, my mind at least is quiet in a way that it isn't when I'm by myself

elsewhere. Would you describe the Benedictine order, whose monastery you've been going on retreats to for decades? Yes, so this is the Commaldolese congregation, which is a thousand years old. It's the most contemplative community within the Benedictine and within the Catholic Church. And it's actually been given dispensation with the Vatican to engage with every other faith tradition, you know, in the spirit of Vatican II, which said nothing that is true or holy in any tradition is alien to us. And so I think one of the blessings of arriving there was to rid myself of all my stereotypes or preconceptions about monks. For the first, to begin with, they opened their hearts and they opened their doors to

people like myself, who's not a Christian, and I think many of the people who stay there probably have no religion. And secondly, they're eager to learn from everybody. So the recent prior would go and give talks at the Zen monastery over the hills, and the Kamaldalis actually maintain a Catholic Hindu ashram in southern India where their priest dresses in a dhoti and sleeps on the floor and eats with his hands. And in that ashram their motto is, we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness. And so really they're about dissolving divisions and reminding us of what we have in common

rather than what splits us apart. And many years after hearing that wonderful motto, I found it's actually from the Vietnamese Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh. So these Benedictine monks are actually happy to take their wisdom from a contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. So these Benedictine monks are actually happy to take their wisdom from a contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist. Can you physically describe the monastery? Well, Big Sur already is the place where the calendar falls away and the outside world

feels very distant. And you're on this 60-mile stretch of coastline in central California where humans feel very tiny because you're just in the presence of tall redwoods, the huge expanse of the uninterrupted ocean, the cliffs, and the sky. And then right perched at the top of a hill there is this 900 acres of dry golden hills, pampas grass, and a cluster of little huts where the monks stay and where their 15 or so visitors stay. So it's already one of the most beautiful sites on earth. In 1996, because I travel a lot, National Geographic magazine very kindly came to me and they said, we'll send you anywhere in the world on our dime to write a piece about a special place. And I'm sure they were thinking I would write about Tibet or Ethiopia or Antarctica. And I said, the only place I can think of is Big Sur. And so I just drove

three and a half hours up the coast again, because that is as unworldly a location as I know. It is such a beautiful place. I don't mean the monastery itself, but Big Sur. And so I'm kind of wondering if going very lucky that I can summon up the time and resources to go on retreats there every season, sometimes for as long as two weeks and three weeks. And one of the things that so disarms me is that the monks ask for so little, but still there is a voluntary donation involved. So I am keenly aware that many people in the world don't have that opportunity, but I do concentrate on silence because that is available to anybody and somebody who can't go on retreat can still go on a walk, can still turn off the lights and listen to music,

can still try to free herself from the clamor of the world. And in order to, just as you say, bring yourself back to a sort of deeper reality that too often we forget. I think T.S. Eliot once wrote about the life we have lost in living, and I think many of us are crying out to find that life, but we're in such a rush, and the world is so distracted these days. We don't know how to put our hands on it.

And I loved what you said in your introduction about how this isn't about getting away from the world but actually getting deeper into it. And in what ways do you feel like you get deeper into it when you're there? Because it's uncluttered and undistracted and it's like having the most intimate conversation with the natural world. Again, as I'm talking to you here in Santa Barbara, my mind is too likely filled with the email I just answered, the latest CNN update, the latest notification from United Airlines. As soon as I go there, where there is no cell phone connection, no internet, no television, I'm freed of all that clutter. And suddenly, as if I've come awake to the beauty of the ocean,

I'm suddenly fascinated by the rabbit that's standing on the splintered fence in my garden. I'm suddenly watching the moon rise, which I could be doing at home, but as soon as I am tempted to do it at home, I hear the phone ring, or I think of the hundred emails I have to answer. I take walks along the road under this great overturned salt shaker of stars, and suddenly I'm noticing everything around me, which sadly I don't do enough in the rest of my life. How do you spend your day at the monastery?

Well that's the beauty, because again, the monks have no rules, and they really don't ask you to attend services, though there are five services a day. You can seek out counsel from them, which some people do, but really they're just freeing you to do nothing at all, which is really the hardest thing in the world. And it took me a while to realize it was only by doing nothing at all I could begin to do anything.

So the beauty of being there is that unlike every other day of my life, I have no plans. I couldn't tell you what I'm going to do the next day I'm there. I wake up and I have no plans. I couldn't tell you what I'm going to do the next day I'm there. I wake up and I follow instinct. Maybe I'll take a walk. Maybe I'll read a book.

Maybe I'll just sit out in my chair in my garden and look out at the sea. And I never allow myself that kind of latitude in my day-to-day life. And so every day really lasts a thousand hours. And one of the curiosities of it is that I feel I'm on the ultimate holiday, or holy day. I feel as if I'm really doing nothing at all, and then when I return after three days, I open my suitcase and I find my heavens.

I've written 40 pages, and I've read six books while as far as I was concerned, I was just doing nothing. while as far as I was concerned, I was just doing nothing. If you're just joining us, my guest is Pico Eyre. His new memoir reflecting on his retreats in a Benedictine monastery and on the wildfire flames that have threatened the monastery and burned down his family home is called A Flame Learning from Silence. We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terri Gross and this is Fresh Air. Usher, Yo-Yo Ma, Boy Genius, Shaka Khan, Billie Eilish, Weird Al, one thing all these big stars have in common, they've all played behind NPR's Tiny Desk. And if you enter NPR's Tiny Desk Contest between now and February 10th, you could be next.

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Every weekday, Up First gives you the news you need to start your day. On the Sunday story from Up First, we slow down. We bring you the best reporting from NPR journalists around the world, all in one major story, 30 minutes or less. Join me every Sunday on the Up First podcast to sit down with the biggest stories from NPR. Pico, somebody said to you, a friend I think, is it selfish when you have other people depending on you to take retreats in a monastery? And you're now married, you have two children. Your answer was not if it makes you less selfish.

So my question is, how does being in the monastery make you less selfish when you end the retreat and go back into the world? Yes, I was very determined to include that sentence in the book because I realized that that's, for me, the whole point of going on retreat, which is to say that when I first went there, I didn't realize that solitude was a gateway to compassion. You know, I'm an only child, I spend much of my time alone at my desk. I love being alone, and what's not to love about being alone in Radiant Big Sur? But the more times I stayed there, the more I realized, first, that I was never alone,

because my friends and my loved ones lived more powerfully inside me in that cell than they do when they're in the same room or when I'm driving down the freeway with a thousand things on my mind. But also, that the only point of being there was to be a better friend to them. And that's where witnessing the sense of community and the compassion that the monks exemplify really made a difference. And so I was thinking recently after writing the book that one thing I never could have guessed and that amuses me is that I'm a solitary soul and I assumed I was never going to get married and it was only by going to sit in the solitude of the soul that I decided

to get married. At one point, I think my second year in the monastery, I was there staying in a beautiful trailer for three weeks, and I drove down to the payphone at the bottom of the hill and called my then-girlfriend in Japan. And the blue-green waters were at my feet and the slopes were flooded with orange golden poppies and lupins. It was a brilliant spring afternoon. And she could hear the light in my voice. And finally she said, you know, I'm never worried about losing you to another woman. I can be more, more excellent,

but how can I compete with a temple? And that sentence went so deeply through me that a few weeks later I did move across the world and to the tiny two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere she was sharing with her two children, now my children, and made this commitment for life. And oddly, when I think back on it, and I was slow to get married, as I say, I don't think I could have made that leap towards living with other people and trying to give myself as much as possible to them had I not had that very special kind of silence and witnessed how the monks were living. Because, as you said earlier, they're

not living with silence and solitude, but the opposite, with constant busyness and community. Something I'd like to hear more about, you write in the book that you, at the monastery, are glad to be away from the self that you are with other people, how do those two selves compare? The self that you're listening to now is chattering. I don't think it's just chatter. I think it's more than chatter. You're talking.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Our talking selves are our social selves, and they're very different from our silent selves. And of course, when I'm sitting here in Santa Barbara, part of me is in the world, and I want to have a nice conversation with Terry, and I'm concerned about my book that's just coming out, and all of that falls away. And when I'm in my silent self, I'm in somewhere where there's no self, essentially. It's some mysterious space where there's no thought of little. It's some mysterious space where there's no thought of little Pico and his many concerns.

And there's just this wide openness to everything around me, which is always going to be more sustaining and more interesting than I am. And I found that that's one of the ways in which it's a great consolation. There was a time early on when I was staying in the monastery when suddenly my father was rushed into the hospital at quite an early age and died.

And it was the most busy time in my life because as you said earlier, I had to look after my mother, I had to organize a memorial and the obituaries, I had to receive the condolence calls and then form the family. But one day, when I made sure that my mother was looked after for the day, I thought the best thing I can do

is drive three and a half hours north along this winding road and just sit on a monastery bench for two hours and be reminded of everything that's not so mortal, the huge ocean, the tolling bells in the distance, tolling as they've been tolling for a thousand years, the cliffs behind me, even the mountain lions, this landscape that's much larger than the human. I'm not

going to be here forever. This landscape is going to be enduring for a long, long time. And when we deal with impermanence and losing people and things that we love, being reminded of what outlasts our hopes and our lives somehow was very consoling. And so it was right that just being in the presence of that much larger landscape for two hours was the best medicine I could think of when dealing with the busy time of my father's death. And I think that part of us that listens is much deeper and more interesting than that part of us that speaks. Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Pico Eyre, his new memoir is called A Flame, Learning from Silence.

We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. For every headline, there's also another story about the people living those headlines. On weekdays, Up First brings you the day's biggest news. On Sundays, we bring you closer with a single story about the people, places, and moments reshaping our world. Your news made personal. Every Sunday on the Up First podcast from NPR. The monastery that you go on retreats to, it's a Christian monastery, part of the Benedictine

order. You are secular. You know, your parents are Hindu, they're from India. You went to a boarding school in England where your parents moved to study before moving to the US, and it was a Christian boarding school, so you had to go to chapel like two times a day. You are very secular even though you do your retreats at a Catholic monastery. What keeps you secular surrounded by the monks? Such a good question, Terri. And again, you know, I've often felt guilty about presuming upon their hospitality as somebody who doesn't share their faith and embarrassed that I haven't

made a commitment. And although I never made a full-time Commitment of the extraordinary kind they have I think as I say watching their example was what moved me to make a commitment in the world to my wife and my kids and Although I am a secular person. I feel that the most important thing in life is one's inner life. You know, no good having a car if there isn't an engine. And 600 years ago, Meister Eckhart, the wise German mystic said, as long as the inner work is strong, the outer will never be puny. As long as you take care of the inner landscape, your relationships, your career, your understanding of yourself will take care of themselves. And so even though I am secular, I'm happy to dissolve distinctions between what is sacred

and secular, because I think all of us crave an inner life, wisdom, depth, intimacy. And some people find it through their devotion to a particular divinity or a particular faith. Some of us find it in other ways, but the important thing is to find it and not to get lost in the swirl of our accelerated world where we're just racing from thing to thing and never can really have access to the larger picture. And I think that's where fires sometimes

come into the picture because they humble us, like earthquakes and flash floods and typhoons, and remind us how tiny we are, and in some ways how powerless we are. My Benedictine friends would say, that's an act of God. That's reminding us that we are tiny mortals in the hand of a divinity. But even those who don't use that language would say, it just reminds us that there are all these forces that are much huger than we are and humanity is not the center of the picture or the end of the story. Well right now humanity seems to be a major part of the picture

because if for instance the wildfires that, you seems so different than when it ravages forests, because it's a little more expected and we know that eventually forests can replenish themselves, things can grow back. I suppose, you know, homes can be rebuilt, but there's something so unnatural about it. You know what I'm saying. I do, I especially feel the sense that I and my neighbors are living where humans were never meant to live.

And what you quickly learn in a landscape such as ours is that the landscape can't flourish without fire. It needs fire as a kind of replenishing, regenerating agent. The Californian hills couldn't survive without fire. So our question as humans is how are we going to survive with fire? And I loved what you said. I mean humans are responsible for the climate crisis but I think that's because we assume and have assumed we're larger than nature and nature is reminding us that we're not and that it is much more powerful than we are and that if we don't kneel before

or defer to some extent to it or think anew about our responsibilities to it, we will be the victims. Nature is going to continue long after we do. And it's our folly and our hubris to assume we can control it. The happy part of that solution is that, or the happy part of that idea is that insofar as humans are the cause of the climate crisis, we should be the solution too if it's not too late. But I think the climate crisis comes out of our assuming

that we can have our way with the elements and the elements are reminding us again and again that we can't. And as you say about ravaging urban landscapes, actually the fire that took down my house, this is 34 years ago, went all the way into the town of Santa Barbara, jumped the six lanes of the intercontinental freeway that stretches from Mexico almost all the way into the town of Santa Barbara, jumped the six lanes of the intercontinental freeway that stretches from Mexico almost all the way to Canada and came very close even back then to wiping out the whole town. So it's not as if we we haven't had warnings, it's as if the natural world is constantly sending us messages and we just send them to voicemail? My question about how all these fires are likely in

part attributed to man-made climate change and extreme weather that that we are collectively responsible for and I don't say that to blame the victims of the fire I say that in part to blame myself because I know I have not been doing what I should be doing. I'm using things, I'm throwing things out into the trash that I shouldn't be. So, I mean that to accept some of the blame, not to blame the victims. So, I just want to be clear about that, because I felt a little bad about how I stated the question. One of the questions your mother asked you when you told her about the monastery and your retreats was, you're not gonna convert, are you?

Why was she so concerned about that? Well, she saw me in this infatuated state as if I'd suddenly fallen in love, and many a parent knows when their child returns starry-eyed there could be problems on the way. But now, 34 years later, I've not converted of course, I've learned that conversion for the monks means constant renewal. It doesn't mean just a sudden change of heart like falling in love with somebody overnight. It means constantly remaking yourself and

re-understanding your relation to something outside yourself. But I think the best thing of all is that I grew up in Anglican schools. So for 15 years in England, I had chapel every morning, chapel every evening. We had to read the Lord's Prayer in Latin on Sundays, or recite, we had to recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday. We had to read the Lord's Prayer in Latin on Sundays or recite, we had to recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday. We had to read the Gospel according to Matthew in Greek in the daytime. And so when I emerged from that, I thought I've had enough of this tradition. And I was much more interested in exploring Buddhism and Sufism and things related to the other side of the world. And although I haven't converted, I'm so grateful to

my Benedictine friends for reminding me of the treasure in And although I haven't converted, I'm so grateful to my Benedictine friends for reminding me of the treasure in my backyard and all around me. So I assumed, oh, I know everything about Christianity because I grew up in the Judeo-Christian culture, and I didn't know the first thing. And so over my years, I've been very glad to be brought into the company of Meister Eckhart and the Cloud of Unknowing and Thomas Merton, all this rich, rich material, which I'd written off before because it seemed too familiar or it was too close to home and I assumed wisdom had to lie on the other side of the earth.

You write briefly about a dilemma that you face that so many people have faced in their own way. So your wife is Japanese and you move to Japan to be with her and her two children who are now your children. But at the same time, your mother was sick. You know, once you were living in Japan, when your mother was sick, you wanted to be with her. You wanted to be with your wife and children. She needed full time care, but you couldn't be with her because you needed to be in Japan with your family and you needed to make enough money in order to pay the bills for her health care needs.

So, so many people have experienced some version of that, whether it's taking care of their children or taking care of their mother or something else and then, you know, needing to do your job so you could pay for everything you need to pay for. How did you resolve that or balance that? I never did. I can't be in two places at the same time. Funnily enough I'm just completing a book about that essentially about the last seasons of my mother's life and all the conundrums it confronted me with and the main one as you say was that in order to support her healthcare bills, which were huge, in order to keep her in her home with 24-hour care, I would have to do every

kind of work possible, and most of that work would take me out of the house. So how can I go and earn a living while still being in the same house and tending to my mother on an hourly basis. I never could come to a good resolution. I just had to assume that I would come up with the best bad resolution. What was your mother's attitude to you having to be not only away but so far away in Japan? My mother was so generous-hearted that it made me want to spend more and more time with her. And in fact, I and my wife would come and spend three to five months with her every summer,

precisely because she never put any pressure on us or never asked of us anything. She never once in the, let's see it, she was alive for 26 years after my father died and and I was spending much of that time in Japan. And she never once said, wouldn't it be better if you could be here? And because she never said that, I tried hard to be there a lot of the time. But to this day, my wife says, I can't believe that your mother was so kind

and that she never tried to guilt trip you or to put any pressure on you. It's a rare blessing. Well let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Pico Eyre. His new memoir is called A Flame Learning from Silence. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. You became good friends with Leonard Cohen and you met him through a magazine assignment where you were sent to find out more about why he left his life as a music star to live in a Zen monastery in California

and kind of remove himself from that whole world that he was such a star in. And you didn't even recognize him when you first saw him, because he was wearing, like, tattered robe, I think, and kind of bent over a little. So you got to know him well. You met him multiple times in the monastery, if I'm not mistaken. How would you compare the monastery, the Zen monastery where he lived, to the Benedictine monastery that you've gone on so many retreats to? Well, I think the reason I include him a lot in this book is that I think both of them

are living in the place beyond divisions. So I think one reason Leonard and I got on so well was that he appreciated that my spending all the time in the Benedictine monastery was not so different from his full-time engagement in his Zen monastery for five and a half years. And I think one of the things that always moved me was I remember the first time I went to have lunch with him in his home in LA, he was living in a very modest duplex

in a really rough, unfashionable part of Los Angeles with his daughter. We sat down, we had lunch, and as you know, I think he was the most spellbinding, articulate writer I've ever met. And he could, he was a wizard with words, and he would talk about literature and the great religious traditions of the world and politics and his time in Cuba and it's captivating. But when lunch was concluded, he picked up two folding chairs and he took them out to his front lawn, which is very small, looking out on this quiet residential street in front of a small bed of flowers. And he sat down and he invited me to sit down next to him, and I sat down next to him, nothing, more nothing, more nothing,

nothing said. So finally I thought, oh, this is a gentle hint. So I said to him, oh, you must be busy, I should let you go. And he looked at me beseechingly and he said, please, don't go. And what touched me so much was that the most eloquent master of words I had ever met realized that the best thing he could share with a visitor was silence. And I gather many people who had come to his house, he invited just to sit with him in silence. And indeed the name that he received, his monastic name from his wise Japanese friend, that he received his monastic name from his wise Japanese friend, Jikan, means the silence between two thoughts. And so, it was very humbling to see a man who tasted all the pleasures of the world,

who could be doing anything he wanted at the age of 61, putting himself through this backbreaking monastic discipline. But it was also very humbling to see this beautifully articulate person so ready to share no words at all. You're a writer. You're all about words. You're a writer. You're a public speaker. Is it hard for you to share no words at all and to be silent for stretches of time? To me, it's the great luxury and indulgence. I share a lot of silence with my wife and my wife and I have been together 37 years. Her English

is quite limited, my Japanese is more limited. We've never had communications problems but we have learned how to share silence and I think anybody listening to this knows that the time they share with a loved one often is silent, and that can be the richest, deepest time. I think as a writer whose life depends on words, it's shown me how inadequate words are. It's made me distrust words, and made me see how we can use words

as weapons and shields and defenses. And so I most trust, as I was saying before, the person who lives on the far side of words. I'm more trustworthy when I'm saying nothing at all than when I'm speaking. And I think Leonard felt that, and I think that's one reason that he became such a connoisseur of silence. He said at one point, or maybe several points to interviewers, that he had a facility for charming people and for golden words. And that's why he wanted to leave words behind and leave charm behind. Pico, before you go, you should choose a Leonard Cohen song to end this. And the last time you were on our show, you chose If It Be Your Will. So let's go with another one that still means a lot to you.

How interesting. I was about to choose the same one, but now I will choose You Got Me Singing, the unexpectedly cheerful, bright, and reviving song he wrote in late old age. I don't think I know that one. Oh, it's an important one, and it even incites his hallelujah song. Yes, oh, if you don't know it, I'm even happier I chose it, because it's very bright and jaunty. Well, me too. Yeah, it's going to make everyone happy, and maybe that's what they need right now. Oh, wonderful, beautiful. I look forward to hearing it. Thank you so much. What a real delight, Terry. Thank you for the show. Thank me to be on it and I really enjoyed talking to you. Pico Ayers' new memoir is called A Flame, Learning from Silence. You got me singing, even though the news is bad. You got me singing, the only song I ever had

You got me singing, ever since the river died You got me thinking, all the places we could hide You got me singing, even though the world is gone. You got me thinking, that I'd like to carry on. You got me singing, even though it all looks grim. You got me singing. Hallelujah Him. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, the secret history of the rape kit.

For years it was thought that a Chicago police sergeant created the rape kit, a tool for investigating sexual assault and rape that has been instrumental in getting justice for victims. Investigative reporter Pagan Kennedy will tell us about the real creator, an activist who worked with runaway youth in the 70s. I hope you'll join us. Teresa Madden directed today's show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. You got me singing Sing along Like a prisoner in a jail You got me singing

Sing along Like my apartment's in the mail You got me wishing Wishing that Our little love would last You got me thinking Like those people of the past. You got me singing.

Even though the world is gone, you got me thinking. I'd like to carry on. You got me singing.