Along with its wrath, the Coronavirus's lockdown has given us more gifts than we suspect. In the lockdown months, I have been drawn to the writings of Pico Iyer, brilliant travel writer and author. His 13 books include my favourite, The Lady and The Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, and in recent years, he has become an eloquent expert on the art of stillness. He has written a book, The Art of Stillness, and many essays on it, and done TED Talks on the subject. In 1990, a wildfire burnt his family home in California, and everything he owned, to ashes. Reflecting on it much later, he wrote, "My house burns down before my eyes, and I feel liberated as much as oppressed."

Some months after the fire, Iyer spent time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, a three-hour drive from his home. He described acutely sensing that everything was alive around him—the grass, the clouds, the sea, the wind. "All around me were dry, golden hills, climbing up to a depthless blue sky, and far below, stretching in every direction, the still blue plate of the Pacific. The world was closer to me than I was to myself," he wrote in an essay, Out of the Cell, in granta.com. "I was inside a silence that was not an absence of noise so much as the living presence of everything I habitually walked—or sleep-walked—past. When I stepped into the little cell where I was to sleep, I was brought to such a state of attention that the flutter of a blue jay's wings in the garden outside my window stirred me more deeply than a lover's touch." He has returned, he added, "to that silence, and to a solitude so encompassing, it felt like companionship of the rarest kind..."