Aflame: Learning from Silence

by Pico Iyer. Book 113/200 on the Mandorla 200.

The Mandorla 200 is a reading-writing-community-gratitude project I started on Instagram in 2018, “micro-distillations of 200 necessary books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times. 200 words or less.”

Here’s #113, Aflame: Learning from Silence, by the great Pico Iyer. This is the author’s second appearance, his first being #94, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise.

The fire grows. Gains on you. Licks your cheek. Flames leave their amulets of vacancy, charred grief-scars sooted in something once built, once self-stable, something you used to hold onto now gone. How might we face this oncoming wall of fire? Do we quench our inner heat and join the chaos, or does a true warrior first empty in such times, listening in stillness and solitude, defending a circumference of quiet to see with exacting clarity the dazzle-baffle-destruction-machine for what it is, then act in self-immolating solidarity for all that is fleeting and all who are endangered? Perhaps the task is to see as fire sees, to combust towards our deepest longings with ferocious radiance. Perhaps to be aflame is to sing alongside these pyro gods an incantation of renewal as our tangled mind-fuel grows to a burn, scorching us toward clarity, a clearing, that unwounded meadow we’ve never actually left. True firefighters stay calm amid such polyblaze. They defend temples of clear vision to meet agents of chaos with an inner warmth that sees fire as allies of emergence, invitations to grow through loss and uncertainty, to become aflame and anew, again and again and again.

• The Book: Aflame (2025)

• The Author: Pico Iyer

• The Publisher: Riverhead Books

• The Tip: New York Times Book Review Podcast