First day. What a bang. Almost 50 outside. No snow visible. Long walk on bum left foot. Baked pumpkin pie. Waiting for the turkey. Printed out vegan recipes from the Times. Watched tv. Unpacked rowing machine box.
most emailed pieces in the Times today—finding Quiet by Pico Iyer and science of weight loss (not very encouraging).
Iyer quotes all the usual suspects, especially Merton and Steindl-Rast–haven’t seen his name in a good while –
of course Iyer had a year full of big trips too. But then so did we. So here is the paragraph that catches me most—
“None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
this is the best moment in the column—
the other key passages—can’t help but think that Iyer has these on a convenient file like an old Rolodex for churning out an article such as this one, on command as it were, for either Times—or both—or just an easy google search—
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
“None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
“Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.
“most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less
that doesn’t depend on what happens.
oh dear, that is indeed my hardest addiction to imagine giving up or trying to give up, get free of—and yet— the selfish joy of utter absorption in one-ness is really it, isn’t it.
“ Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music.
I would not have guessed that Iyer is already 55. Still—this piece seems so typical of him. He advertises his semi-celebrity life-style, his moving to northern Japan to escape the noise and demands of manhattan and the marvelous big trips he takes in one year
“I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai.
and he makes frequent trips to New Carmoldi, the Big Sur Benedictine monastery where of course he is recognized by some producer from mtv — hippest benedictine place in the States. I visited Santo Domingo de Silos, though, in late July of this year. Also Benedictine, also packed with tourists, also hip. We were only there for a few rushed moments though. See all my snaps posted on Flickr of the famous beautiful sculptures and carvings from the 14th? C. Our private guide took us as well to the 12th C hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga—the one that had its magnificent frescoes stolen and sold eventually to the Cloisters, back in the 1920s.
in other words, as a celebrity piece, it is a flawless piece of self-congratulation—
great interview quote about French designer Philippe Starck—a name I first took cognizance of last June when we were trying to figure out how to use the restuarant bathrooms in the newly renovated Musée des Arts Decoratives, at one end of the Louvre. The restrooms, including the big square ultra looking water closets. were, it was noted, the design of Philippe Starck. Since then I’ve been on the lookout for his name, and it is everywhere.
“designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”
he notes “hyperbolically” to show he’s no fool —
there’s the fault-line in Iyer’s whole approach to all this joyful silence. He urges himself and us to it not for its own sake so much as the ultimate one-up-manship way to “remain so consistently ahead of the curve.” As he demonstrates in this very piece in the Times on the first day of the new year. (well, it was first published on the 29th of the previous)
Iyer seems in Merton’s mold indeed. Cistercian monastery, sure, and then reams of publications about the virtues of the silent life for the next twenty years as the superstar writer of spiritual silence ministering to the terrible, noisy modern world “out there.”
In contrast? Robert Lax, Merton’s old friend from Columbia. He went to live in Greece, few have ever heard of him, he did not become a superstar writer. Nor did he travel famously to important and importantly forgotten places in order to keep writing books about each move. See my new book about him on Amazon. Well, it is an old chapbook which I just re-published.
Now I am at the crossroads. Should I post all of this on my blog? or should I keep it quiet here in the silence of my laptop? Or has the internet not given us the third way—I’ll post it and then a tiny handful of web surfers might scan it for ten seconds and move on.
“most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less
If I don’t toot my own horn, who else will? Pico Iyer sure won’t, but here I’ve gone and added to his darned fame for the moment. Oh well, anything to protect my own tranquil privacy.
Historian John Lukacs told us fifty years ago in his european history class that in the future the true aristocrats would be those people who knew how to guard their privacy.
Why do I feel that I have just failed the test as successfully as has Iyer?
