After decades as a travel writer, Pico Iyer has fallen in love with being still. His new book, “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere,’’ is a bustling paean to the stationary life. His reflections on the value of the meditative mind are quite global, leaping from the novels of Marcel Proust to the songs of Leonard Cohen, from a remote mountaintop in California to the back streets of Kyoto.
More essay than book in length, the work’s brevity seems designed to accommodate the very busyness Iyer decries. But he embraces this irony: “It’s deliberately short, so you can read it in one sitting and quickly return to your busy (perhaps overbusy) life.” After all, there is no inherent reason a book praising inner quiet must be a voluminous tome; the fact that you can absorb his message on a short plane trip increases its odds of reaching a broader audience.