Learning from Silence: Read an exclusive excerpt from Pico Iyer’s new book
How does a monk with a Type A personality cope with the problem of leisure and the problem of loneliness? An excerpt...
When I hear the rap on the pillar at the edge of my deck, I know it’s the warm monk to whom I’ve grown so close. In his hand is his mug, two tea bags and a box of Walkers shortbread. We sit in comfort in the sunlight, a pot of tea between us, and he tells me how he knew, when he was eight years old, that this should be his life. He’d served in the army briefly— not a bad preparation— and then he’d ended up on what he calls “the apostolic path,” taking his teachings from door to door, sometimes listening to confessions for six hours at a stretch.
Yet all along something deeper was calling him to solitude.
“My two biggest problems here,” he says right out, “are the problem with leisure and the problem with loneliness. I’m a type A personality. I’m used to doing things all the time. It can be hard just to sit still and do nothing.”
“Don’t they say that acedia, the noonday demon, is the monk’s biggest threat?”
“That’s right! And with loneliness there are several different levels. The Catholic Church has always told us that the body is ugly. That the spirit wants to escape from the body. And if you ask me, that— ardon the expression— s bullshit. You can’t just wipe out the body. I used to see these guys who’d been raised in the old system, and they’d never had a human touch. Something in them was dead.”
His smile shines electric in his tanned face. “Some days I go barefoot in my cell. I need to feel the ground underneath my feet. Sometimes, if it’s nice, I’ll bar my door and take off all my clothes!”
His form of worship, he says, is waking up at 4:10 with a cup of tea. Sometimes to see the morning star, sometimes the day come to life. “And at night I like to pour myself a nice glass of wine and read a novel.
His form of worship, he says, is waking up at 4:10 with a cup of tea. Sometimes to see the morning star, sometimes the day come to life. “And at night I like to pour myself a nice glass of wine and read a novel.
“Romuald deliberately softened the Rule. He built his monasteries in the mountains, among the poor. At a time when most monasteries were great centers of power. He always stressed they should be simple, unadorned.
“Really, I just want to commune with God, which is myself by another name. Loneliness is about the journey towards the self. Some of the guys come here to run away. From something in their past, from their own sexuality. And what they find is that they come right up against that in the silence.”
(Excerpted with permission from Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer, published by Penguin Random HouseIndia; 2025)
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