A Fire Took Pico Iyer’s Home. 30 Years Later, He Explores the Grief, Lessons, and Surprises of It All
It's incredible how divine, unexpected connections between art and life arise. An oceanic painting finds your eyes just as you crave serenity. A heroic novel is published when the world needs its message most. Such is the case with Pico Iyer's new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence . On its pages, Iyer shares wisdom from his three decades of visiting a small monastery in California and embracing silence. "Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter," he writes.
You could say any of Iyer's 15 books falls into readers' hands serendipitously. The longtime journalist has an endless capacity for documenting humanity and emotional nuance. But Aflame is particularly poignant given that fire is an anchor of the book. In June 1990, Iyer's home burned down in what was then one of California's worst blazes. He recounts being trapped for several hours, just he and his mother's cat, until a good Samaritan with a hose came along. He later called his mother, who was away at the time, to inform her that the home she'd lived in for 59 years was gone. "Everything we owned is ash," he told her.
Now, 30 years later, Iyer tells of the many truths revealed from that fire. It was "a dramatic event" of loss and pain, he tells us over Zoom, and also “one that opened doors as much as it closed them." He lost many things, including the notes to the book he was working on at the time. But the flames never took what was inside him—his love, memories, ideas, and more. In fact, it opened his mind even wider to consider what truly matters.
We contemplate all of this and more with Iyer. As his words reveal, Aflame mirrors the gravity many people in Los Angeles are experiencing, and it also illustrates portals of beauty and clarity worth considering.
A CONVERSATION WITH PICO IYER
You write vividly about the fire that took your home. "One minute we had been sitting in our family home, the next we were surrounded by walls of flame five stories high." What does this memory bring up for you now, 30 years later?
It brings up the fact that it's very hard to assess whether any event is good or bad for a long time. Of course, that evening was a great shock to me, my mother, and many neighbors who lost their homes. But as the months went on, I found it wasn't only a loss. In certain ways, it was a liberation. And it reminded me of what I still had; that my home was not where I lived, but what lived inside me, which was my mother and my wife-to-be, and my favorite song and book. I still had all of that. I still had my voice and my words. I still had my memories. And, of course, as we began slowly to put our lives together again and replace the things we lost, we found we didn't need to replace most of them. We were happy with less. Now, half a lifetime later, I see the fire as a dramatic event, but one that opened doors as much as it closed them.
Thinking back on that evening, as my mother's aging, panting cat and I were caught in the middle of the flames for three hours, it was almost a miracle that we escaped with our lives when finally a fire truck could get to us. Afterward, I bought a toothbrush, the only thing I had, and then I slept on a friend's floor. But before I went to sleep that evening, I wrote an account of the day. My job in those days was as a columnist, writing the back page essay for Time Magazine. I ended my piece with a poem from the 17th century that I had picked up in Japan:
My house burnt down
I can now see better
The rising moon
So, the very evening of the fire, something in me intuited that this wasn't only a loss. I started to see what I really cared about, and it reminded me of my priorities and of all the things I hadn't lost and to not take them for granted.
As you've been talking about this, it conjures up another line from your book: "Look at the suffering you're causing, too, in yourself and others, always more important than the suffering you're enduring." This makes me wonder, do we cause suffering by clinging to things? Our homes and keepsakes are meaningful, but the world is filled with immeasurable forces, like fires, that can take them away at any moment.
The Sufi say, "Only that which cannot be lost in a shipwreck is yours." I'm so glad you highlighted that sentence because it was important for me to include. I always feel that so many of the things that I go through, and all of us go through, are what insurance policies call 'acts of God,' which are, as you said, from forces much larger than we are, whether it's a fire or a bad diagnosis or an earthquake or hurricane. But the suffering we're causing is much more in our control. I feel there aren't many ways to protect myself against fire. We rebuilt our house much sturdier with every precaution, but I realize there's no precaution against the reality and the force of nature. There's not a huge amount I can do about that, but there is a huge amount I can do about the suffering I cause, and that's where I need to turn my attention.
I live in Japan, and I'm always struck by people's first thoughts are for everybody else. There was that terrible tsunami [in 2011] that swept 18,500 people to their death. The following day, the TV [showed] long lines of Japanese standing silently without complaints as they waited for food and shelter. What struck me was that everyone was going through terrible suffering, but they knew that each person around them had been through as much. So, they felt that they didn't want to increase the suffering of everyone around them by just giving voice to all that they lost. They saw it as an opportunity for community in that they're closer to the people around them because they've all been through this same thing.
You've also written about how living in Japan has shown you how their definition of life is about joyful participation in a world of sorrows.
Yes, and just that notion that sorrow and challenge are not incompatible with joy and gratitude. That one has always been very essential to me. When you asked me about how the fire seems to me all these years later, it brought a lot of sorrow and a lot of shock to all of us, but that doesn't preclude or deny the fact that it brought a lot of opportunity to us. The loss was mostly in the past, and the opportunity was mostly in the future. So, I felt after the fire that I have a choice to regret the things I've lost, which sadly, I can't do anything about, or to take this as a chance to remake my life much closer to how I've always wanted it to be. It is very hard for any of us to come to that, but it is probably more conducive to the health of the person who's been through a loss and to the health of the community to try to think in those ways.
I went up to the tsunami area with the Dalai Lama a few months after the tsunami had reduced a fishing village to nothing. As he stepped out of his car and spoke to the hundreds of people who had assembled on the road, there was a tear in his eye as he told them to please be worthy of the people they've lost and to look forward and recreate their community. In other words, think of what practical things you can do now, rather than of all the things sadly you can't affect.
From all your times going up to the monastery in Big Sur, you recount how the monks and nuns taught you how to love and hold hope in the face of loss and death and the importance of recollection. Will you talk about what this means to you and how you incorporate it into your life?
Listening to you now, in this very moment, recollection means to me gathering all the scattered pieces of myself and trying to be as whole as possible, which monks and nuns exemplify beautifully. When you talk to the Dalai Lama or my Benedictine monk friends, they're 100 percent there. They've chosen to try to live with as little distraction as possible and with as much concern as possible. It's almost like an emergency room doctor: you go into this very crowded, noisy place, and you've got a very serious concern, and ideally, that person brings all her or his attention to you. That's what monastics do for us in the course of their lives. My definition of happiness is absolute absorption—when we completely forget the time and lose ourselves: when we're in love with somebody, when we're at a concert, when we're in a moment of wonder. Those are the times when we're happiest; when we're least thinking of ourselves. So, I think recollection is another word for absorption or concentration or just presentness. Whenever I'm absent-minded, I'm no use to anyone, and least of all to myself. And whenever I can bring all myself in one piece, to the situation in front of me, I'm fulfilled.
And, of course, there's the other important meaning of recollection, which I've learned by spending time with the monks, and that it's remembering some essential part of yourself and some forgotten truth in the world that we misplace in the busyness of our lives. That's what I try to recover when I go on retreat. I just step into this silence, which is a positive, active presence, and suddenly, my cares fall away, and I remember the people I care about, and I'm in touch with something that has always been inside me. It's like a jewel that is under 100 pieces of paper on my desk. There's so much clutter there, I can't put my hand on the jewel. My greatest joy in life is going on retreat, and the pieces of paper disappear, and suddenly, I'm reminded of the jewel, and that tells me how I want to live and what I'm living for. We all have that jewel.
The Dalai Lama has probably suffered more than anyone I know, but all he does is radiate joy. The same goes for my Benedictine monk friends in Big Sur, who are always in the line of fire because of their remote wilderness. But they never lose confidence and faith. I wanted to highlight them in this book because I think that's all we're longing for. How do we stay calm in the midst of uncertainty, and how do we stay hopeful in the midst of impermanence? In California and all around the world, we are aware more than ever before of how little we can anticipate tomorrow. A virus could come. Further floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. We can't count on anything, but we can't allow that to take away our sense of hope and possibility. The monastics, nuns, and monks keep that flame burning amid very difficult circumstances.
Pico Iyer is the author of 15 books, and has been a constant contributor for more than 30 years to Time, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His new book is Aflame: Learning from Silence. Learn more at www.picoiyerjourneys.com.
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