The Art of Stillness paints a picture of why so many-from Marcel Proust to Mahatma Gandhi to Emily Dickinson-have found richness in stillness. Growing trends like observing an “Internet Sabbath”-turning off online connections from Friday night to Monday morning-highlight how increasingly desperate many of us are to unplug and bring stillness into our lives.
These aren't New Age fads so much as ways to rediscover the wisdom of an earlier age.
He reflects that this is perhaps the reason why many people-even those with no religious commitment-seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or seeking silent retreats. Iyer also draws on his own experiences as a travel writer to explore why advances in technology are making us more likely to retreat. In The Art of Stillness-a TED Books release-Iyer investigate the lives of people who have made a life seeking stillness: from Matthieu Ricard, a Frenchman with a PhD in molecular biology who left a promising scientific career to become a Tibetan monk, to revered singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who traded the pleasures of the senses for several years of living the near-silent life of meditation as a Zen monk. There’s never been a greater need to slow down, tune out and give ourselves permission to be still. Why might a lifelong traveler like Pico Iyer, who has journeyed from Easter Island to Ethiopia, Cuba to Kathmandu, think that sitting quietly in a room might be the ultimate adventure? Because in our madly accelerating world, our lives are crowded, chaotic and noisy. Plunging effortlessly beneath platitudes, this wafer-thin volume reminds us of what might just be the greatest paradox of travel - after all our road running, after all our flights of fancy to the farthest corners of the globe, after all our touring, our seeking and questing, perhaps, just perhaps, fellow travelers, there really is no place like home.A follow up to Pico Iyer’s essay “The Joy of Quiet,” The Art of Stillness considers the unexpected adventure of staying put and reveals a counterintuitive truth: The more ways we have to connect, the more we seem desperate to unplug. The fact that he has traveled to some of the world’s most obscure corners only strengthens his credibility as a defender of stillness." And further, from The New York Times Book Review: "In lesser hands this tiny volume might be a throwaway of glib, 'new age' comfort-speak, but like Henry David Thoreau's equally brief classic on another seemingly mundane exercise - walking - Iyer's thoughtful nature leads him to peel back layer upon layer, nodding toward the infinite. Iyer uses a fluid blend of argument and anecdote to make a persuasive and eloquent case that contemplating internal landscapes can be just as rich an experience as traveling through external ones. Iyer’s argument is an engaging amalgam of memoir, reportage, and literary essay.
And thus his book, "The Art of Stillness" is, as the Boston Globe has noted, "a bustling paean to the stationary life. Indeed, as he notes on our show today, traveling might well provide the wallpaper and decorations of the house that is his life, but stillness is the foundation.
"Don't just do something," goes an old saying that's sometimes attributed to the Buddha, "sit there." On this installment of ST, we speak with the widely acclaimed travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer, whose newest book is called "The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere." It may seem odd to find one of contemporary literature's best travel writers composing a book-lenth essay about not traveling, but Iyer begs to differ.
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