Pico Iyer’s latest novel Aflame is a memoir about his experiences with fire, silence, solitude and spirituality
By Rajesh C. Oza
Carefree
For my 65th birthday, my son, Siddhartha, planned a reading, writing, and relaxing trip to a wellness retreat in Arizona’s desert. It was a celebration of my retirement from consulting and entrance into a deeper commitment to writing. My son-in-law, Maneesh, also joined us to experience Spring Training baseball games before the release of my debut novel.
Unlike the raucous ballpark, the retreat in Carefree – yes, that’s the actual name of the town – was a place of silence and fire. Being a Gandhian minimalist—a generous way of saying I’m frugal to a fault—at check-in I complained, “I’m not a luxury retreat kind of guy.” Maneesh waved toward Siddhartha and said, “That’s okay, the two of us are staying here.” Siddhartha laughed while pointing at me. “Don’t worry, you’re staying at the Motel 6.”
It was good to be known. Give me light to read by, a good book, and a pen for marginalia, and I’m happy almost anywhere.
Maneesh knew I grew up loving the Chicago Cubs and, though he’s a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, he understood that even though it was only Spring Training, I’d be rooting for my Cubs over his Dodgers. All three of us cheered for the San Francisco Giants over the Cincinnati Reds; but really, we just enjoyed walking around the ballpark, in community with the other fans.
Besides the ballgames, the retreat afforded the three of us time for a hike among the saguaro which have stood silent in the desert, some for hundreds of years with their arms held to the sky (a saguaro takes over a century to grow its succulent stems).
I also attended an “Intention Burning Ceremony.” The meditation guide said, “Breathe in and out and write down what you want to release and embrace. One by one, approach the water bowl and lighter in the center of the circle. If you like, share your intention before burning the paper into the bowl.”
Held by love
One day, Maneesh, Siddhartha, and I went to the pool with our books. Before diving into the pages, we jumped into the pool. I took a gulp of the water, came up for air, and said, “Ew. This water tastes salty.” Siddhartha groaned. “Papa! Places like this don’t use chlorine. The salt makes the water buoyant. Like the ocean. Better for your skin.” Without further chatter, he asked me to stretch my body and relax on his hands turned up just slightly under the water’s surface.
It was good to be held by love. My son enabled me to float in the desert.
Aflame
The book I read on this retreat into semi-retirement was Pico Iyer’s Aflame. Quite fitting since it is about fire, silence, and finding clarity by being “cleansed of all chatter.” More than three decades ago, after what was then the worst fire in California’s history, a fire that destroyed Iyer’s childhood Santa Barbara home, he retreated into the monastic silence of the New Camaldoli Hermitage near Big Sur.
Given the inferno that engulfed Altadena and the Palisades earlier this year, it was eerie reading these words from Pico to his mother: “It’s gone, all gone. Everything we owned is ash.” At the time, Iyer was a columnist for Time. He closed a back-page essay for the magazine with Basho’s poem that sets the contemplative tone for this hopeful, cup-half-full book:
My house burned down
I can now see better
The rising moon.
There are books of the moment; there are books that are timeless; and then there is Aflame, a meditation published days after the 2025 fire in Southern California. Iyer opens his book in the 1990s as he listens in on two Camaldoli monks: one of them has the voice of an over-eager novelist; the other sounds like, well, a monk attuned to silence.
“That fire last October,” says one, young and slim, his eyes burning under his shaven head, ”it came within three miles of us. At one point our road got blocked and there was no way out. It was radiant.”
His older monastic brother says nothing.
“For three days and nights,” Cyprian goes on, “the sky was black. Like sooty fog all the time. I went down to the last bench and the whole ocean was bloodred. Plumes of smoke were rising from the hills; I heard trees exploding. It was incandescent.”
Reading prose as poetry
Upon reading this exchange, I thought Aflame might be a modern version of Norman Maclean’s prose masterpiece Young Men and Fire. But as I progressed into Iyer’s “Silence,” “World,” “Heart,” “Boiler Room,” and “Mystery” (all chapter titles beginning with “Into the …,” as in “Into the Silence”), I learned to read Aflame not as prose but as poetry.
Imagine coming to a fork in the literary road and reading Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as a short story rather than a poem. It can be done because as writer and teacher Stephen Koch has suggested, both have a character, a narrative, a setting, a conflict. But a poem’s expressive language and rhythm are different from that of prose.
Similarly, reading Aflame as empathetic prose akin to Maclean’s work (or even as a spiritual memoir like Augustine’s Confessions is possible, but it might be a shallow read. Reading Iyer’s prose like one might Henry David Thoreau’s Walden changes the tide. (Try reading this line from Walden as poetry: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately … and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived.”)
About a third of the way through Aflame, I began to read it as a poetic spiritual quest in the deeper end of the pool. Here’s an example of adding line breaks where Iyer had none:
I make out a woman,
Through the gathering fog,
Kneeling on the tarmac
As she walks
Along the monastery
Past the chapel.
One evening later,
Father Robert is washing
The feet of his brothers,
A reminder that
He’s as much their servant
As they are his.
Reading prose as poetry changed my relationship with this book. I read it slowly, floating along the surface of its words and the depth of its feeling. It is a book about the fire of family (Iyer’s mother—Nandini— and wife—Hiroko) and the quietude of friends at the hermitage who become family (Hiroko tells her husband, “For thirty years I thought you were an only child. Now I see you have all these brothers.”).
I feel held by Pico Iyer and his Aflame.
Dr. Raj Oza’s novel, Double Play on the Red Line, sits at several intersections: wrongful convictions and riding Chicago’s “L,”, the national pastime and the Negro Leagues, caste and class, emigration and immigration, and friendship and family. It will be published in 2025 by Chicago’s Third World Press.
Read: Book Review: ‘Broken Mirror’
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Dr. Oza is a management consultant and facilitates the interpersonal dynamics of MBAs at Stanford University.
Courtesy: India Currents (Posted on March 30, 2025)
