Iyer, Pico – The Bell Bookshop

Learning from silence

Emma — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘Beautiful . . . Iyer masterfully and lyrically shows us how we may need to find a new home – one far more solemn, communal and silent than our present one – in order to return properly to ourselves’ Alain de Botton

‘I trust that reading this book may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind’ His Holiness the Dalai Lama

‘One of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time’ Maria Popova

‘An exquisite call to silence and the myriad connections it kindles’ Katherine May

From the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat

Over the past three decades, Pico Iyer has made more than a hundred journeys to a small hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian, nor a member of any religious group, and yet his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence.

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 non-monastics 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.

The Half Known Life

Emma — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

‘Nothing less than a guided tour of the human soul … A masterpiece’ Elizabeth Gilbert‘A work of spiritual evolution [and] inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors’ Washington PostOne of our most perceptive travel writers embarks on an exploration of the world’s holiest places and where we might find paradise on Earth.It’s so easy, I thought, to place Paradise in the past or the future – anywhere but here.After half a century of travel, Pico Iyer asks himself what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. In a spectacular journey, both inward and outward, he roams the globe from Jerusalem to Belfast to North Korea, from crowded mosques in Iran to a holy mountain in Japan. By the end, he has upended any of our expectations and dared to suggest that we can find paradise right in the heart of our angry and confused world.

The Half Known Life

Emma — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Half Known Life

Autumn Light: Japan’s Season of Fire and Farewells

Emma — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For decades now, Pico Iyer has been based for much of the year in Nara, Japan, where he and his Japanese wife, Hiroko, share a two-room apartment. But when his father-in-law dies suddenly, calling him back to Japan earlier than expected, Iyer begins to grapple with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love, even though we know that we and they are dying.In a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, this question has a special urgency and currency. Iyer leads us through the autumn following his father-in-law’s death, introducing us to the people who populate his days: his ailing mother-in-law, who often forgets that her husband has died; his absent brother-in-law, who severed ties with his family years ago but to whom Hiroko still writes letters; and the men and women in his ping-pong club, who, many years his senior, traverse their autumn years in different ways. And as the maple leaves begin to redden and the heat begins to soften, Iyer offers us a singular view of Japan, in the season that reminds us to take nothing for granted.