The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer [Iyer, Pico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Sometimes, in the sunlit silence of my room in the Austrian Hospice, I thought of the Benedictine hermitage in California that had been my secret home for almost seventeen years. As soon as I stepped into my simple room there, something in me grew quiet. The arguments, the anxieties of the long drive up disappeared. In the ringing silence—no telephones, no internet, no television—my attention was brought to a point. All I could see was the great blue plate of the Pacific Ocean stretching below me in every direction, the Steller’s jays alighting on a splintered wooden fence.

Days, sometimes weeks, in the silence had given me a taste of what lies on the far side of our thoughts. Who we become—cease to become—when we put all ideas and theories behind us. I went often through pages of Thomas Merton there, but they seemed to belong to the cacophony below the stillness; the golden pampas grass in front of me, the dry hills beyond, the fleecy clouds stealing up the hillside—not what I thought about them—were the truth.

The monastery far above the ocean had given me a rich sense of community because everyone I met there had come in search of the same silence and clarity; we were bound together by what was deepest in us. It didn’t matter if the person I passed along the monastery road was Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist; we were all walking in the same direction.

One day, as I’d been sauntering along the silent path, gazing out at the blue-green sea pooling around rocks far below, a young man with dark hair and burning eyes called out a hello. His name was Jonathan, he said, and he’d been living with the monks inside their enclosure for two years. They’d given him permission to stay with them, observing the Sabbath in his kippah and drawing from their air of worship and collectedness, and he in return did some baking in the kitchen, odd jobs around the property.

He looked out across the wide blue horizons as we spoke. There were only two places he’d found that brought him to a deeper life, he said: this elemental coastline, whose sovereign presences were rock and tree and ocean and sky, and Jerusalem. Years later, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Jonathan had followed his instinct back to that ancestral home, and one afternoon I arranged to meet him in the Old City, near where he was studying to be a rabbi.

Around us, at the entrance to the tunnels at the Western Wall, disappointed visitors were cursing and pushing at the middle-aged cashier who barred their entrance—she unhesitatingly pushed them back—while out in the streets of West Jerusalem, I might have been back at an American college town on a Saturday night: “See, that’s cool. Because when my dad got into new music it was, like, Shakira. And I was, like, What’s with that?”

“Two thousand years of exile and we end up with this?” asked Jonathan, in one of Jerusalem’s distinctive, and irresistible, voices.

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