A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  Notes – 1 Growing up in a Noisy World

  1 Angela Carter in Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor (Pandora, 1985).

  2 Psalm 131:2 (interestingly, most modern translation omit the word ‘weaned’, returning us to the more sentimental/pious suckling image, but my experts assure me that weaned is the intended meaning – a child who is intimately with the mother, but without needing her for anything).

  3 Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women (Grune & Stratton, 1944), p. 477.

  4 Sara Maitland, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (Maia Press, 2003). I had the greatest difficulty getting this collection published – and even wonderful Maia Press drew the line at the original subtitle, ‘Role models for the menopausal woman’!

  5 One of the stories in On Becoming a Fairy Godmother, ‘Bird Woman Learns to Fly’, explores this lovely natural phenomenon in more detail.

  6 Dylan Thomas, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, 18 Poems (Fortune Press, 1934).

  7 Sara Maitland and Peter Matthews, Gardens of Illusion (Cassells, 2000). (We wanted to call the book ‘A Cunning Plot’ but the marketing people wouldn’t let us!)

  8 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 8.

  9 Janet Batsleer, personal communication.

  10 George Mallory became obsessed with climbing Mount Everest and in the end he died there, last seen ‘going strongly for the summit’. Legend claims that when asked why he wanted to climb it he replied, ‘Because it’s there.’ In fact, he never said this – the phrase, as an explanation of apparently senseless ambitions, appeared in a 1923 article about Mallory and other climbers, and was not even ascribed to him. However, it has become inextricably attached to Mallory.

  11 Henry Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854).

  12 Richard Byrd, Alone (Putnam 1938), pp. 3–7.

  13 The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Helen Waddell (Constable, 1936), p. 157.

  14 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Bury (London, 1898), vol V, p. 337.

  15 John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820).

  *An attempt to render this concept into standard English has muddled generations of children in the popular hymn ‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall’. Like many others, I wondered why any hill should have had a city wall – but what Mrs C. F. Alexander meant was ‘outwith a city wall’.

  Forty Days and Forty Nights

  The house in Weardale was wonderful. It was also slightly odd: it was perched very high, nearly 450 metres, on the summit of a bizarrely exposed ridge. It was isolated in one sense, but at the same time it was the middle house of a terrace of three cottages. When I first moved there both the other two houses were holiday homes, used only at weekends, so the neighbours created little disruption and, indeed, were immensely helpful as I struggled to learn how to live in such a cold, wind-driven location (drain your pipes before you leave home).

  From both the front and the back there were enormously long views. Because of the steep sides of the dale, Stanhope, three kilometres and nearly 250 metres below, was invisible; the view stretched straight over the valley to the moors the other side. At night there were pairs of sharp eyes looking at me – the headlights of cars six miles away, coming over from Teesdale, and shining clean across the valley and in through my bedroom window.

  But my house on the hill was not some shepherd’s cottage or ancient hermitage. It was part of a major industrial complex. From the earliest times Weardale has been a hive of industrial activity. One of the largest caches of Bronze Age artefacts in the UK was discovered beside the Heathery Burn, between my house and Stanhope. The Romans did not use the A68 (Dere Street), which still runs along the eastern edge of the Durham moors, solely to march troops up to Hadrian’s Wall, but also to take the lead and silver from the hill mines down to York. Lead, silver, feldspar, tin and coal were all mined up here, and during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Weardale became a crucial source of lead and feldspar, which were mined under extraordinarily exploitative and dangerous conditions. In 1834 a railway was opened to bring lead down from the scattered hill mines to the dale itself, then out to the factories on the coastal plain. The sides of the dale were too steep for the trains to climb and a double steam winch was installed to pull them up. The winch engines needed steam twenty-four hours a day, so a line of cottages was built for the winch engineers. Farm labourers’ cottages were exquisitely cantilevered in to the landscape to provide them with as much shelter as possible, but the engineers were ruthlessly exposed to the full effect of the elements, 425 metres above sea level, on the very crest of a hill. My house was an ex-winch engineer’s cottage.

  The ruin of the engine house itself stood derelict a hundred yards from the cottages. There is no winch, no railway and no mining now. The cement factory at Eastgate closed while I was there and the sand quarry beside the old railway line will no doubt follow it. There are no industrial jobs in Weardale, and the machinery and social life of the miners is silenced. But the views of apparently desolate and wild hills have been carved and shaped and constructed and formed by that industrial past. This is ‘Famous Five’ country1 because for every fog there is a mysterious mine shaft and for every bog a deserted railway line. The moors are a place of adventure.

  At the same time the area is rich in the artefacts of the hermit tradition of northern England – Durham itself, Hexham, Lindisfarne (Holy Island) and a scattering of stones that mark erstwhile chapels and hermitages. In fact, the radical politics of the north-east drew its inspiration from the great hermit Bishop Cuthbert. At the end of the eleventh century, the inhabitants of the north-east resisted William the Conqueror’s demands for feudal dues and Norman reorganisation. Their land, they claimed, was the patrimony of St Cuthbert, unalienable, freely given and held. The habit of stubborn resistance has marked most of English history.

  There are not many places you can live within such a long history and still have the huge silences and beauty of it all. The dales are full of stories and the vanished silent ghosts of other lives lived very differently in the same place. The emptiness of these moors is not the desolate tragedy of the Western Highlands, where the keening of the dispossessed can still be heard in the silence that followed the Clearances. It is something more dynamic.

  I settled in very smoothly, once I had learned how to manage my coal-fired back boiler – my only source not merely of heat but of hot water as well. I started to walk a good deal. Moors are excellent for elementary walkers, especially those who smoke, because once you are above the valleys there are miles and miles of long views, often down on to woods and rivers, but the terrain itself is flat, without steep climbs. There is always something to see but you have to look for it. I felt increasingly pared down, lean, fit and quiet, shacked up, as it were, with the wind and the silence and the cold.

  I also found that the landscape worked in a kind of harmony with my prayers. The ruined signs of previous inhabitants reminded me that ‘here we have no abiding city’. But the horizon line of the hills abided. It was uncluttered by trees or houses. I could see it out of every window. Wherever I sat to meditate, there was the clear, clean line that divides earth and sky and also unites them. That line was constant. It emerged out of the dark in the first dawn light and was swallowed back into the dark at nightfall. Above the line, infinity; below the line, mortality. But the line itself was both and held them both, and the wind blew along it, fresh and free like the passage of the spirit.

  However, I also began to realise that Richard Byrd had been right when he speculated that ‘no man can hope to be completely free who lingers within reach of familiar habits and urgencies’.2 In the contemporary Western world it is very difficult to be silent for very long in the place where you live – people phone, they come to visit, to canvass your vote; the postman needs a signature, Jehovah’s Witnesses knock politely, someone has to read
the meter; you run out of milk and have to go and buy some more, and the woman in the village shop starts to chat. In fact, it is impossible. Moreover, there are what Byrd calls ‘urgencies’ – the economic urgency of work, of making a living, and the emotional urgency of love and friendship. I was living more silently than before, but I still was only dabbling on the margins of that deep ocean I sensed was there.

  Fascinated by silence, drawn joyfully into the void, I wanted to experience a total version; I wanted to know what it was that I was trying to build into my life before the habits of the quotidian asserted themselves. The nearest analogy I can think of is that of a honeymoon. When this post-wedding holiday started it was in a society in which the newly wed couple had probably not spent more than a couple of hours at a time together, and even less time alone together. Rather than start immediately on the business of building a shared working life, they would spend a period of intense time together away from their normal daily concerns, where they had nothing to do but focus on and learn about each other. Similarly monks and nuns in even the most silent of religious orders take ‘retreats’, periods of time when they are separate from their community and relieved of all the burdens of work for an intense period of concentration on God. I decided that I would go away and spend some time doing nothing except being silent and thinking about and experiencing it. I decided that forty days would be a suitable amount of time. Obviously this was not a randomly chosen period – but it seemed to be possible but substantial, as well as iconic.

  The most straightforward way for someone like me to manage this sort of time and space would have been to spend these six weeks in a religious community where I would have been freed from all the hassles and would have had gatekeepers against any interruptions. But at this point I wanted to separate prayer from silence. My imagination is so ‘Christianised’ that I felt those sorts of ideas could have overridden other feelings in a monastic context with holy pictures (mostly bad ones!) on every wall. I did not want to go on a ‘retreat’. I wanted to explore what this profound pull towards silence might be about. I wanted to examine my conviction that silence was something positive, not just an abstraction or absence. I wanted to know what would happen.

  In the end I rented a self-catering holiday cottage on Skye, more because I found a house there that met my slightly off-centre requirements than for any particular engagement with the island. I needed a small house that was genuinely isolated, and had a deep freeze and no TV – and in which I could smoke. My care in checking all these details in advance was rewarded, or else I was lucky – Allt Dearg3 might have been designed for my purposes.

  In all events in late October, my car fully laden with books, notebooks, pens, reading matter, foul-weather gear and six weeks’ worth of food and other supplies, I left my sister’s lovely and luxurious house near St Andrew’s and drove east to west the whole way across Scotland. It was a long, tiring and stunningly beautiful drive, in and out of sunshine and rain, and all the time I had a growing sense of moving away – the roads getting narrower, the houses less frequent, the towns more like villages and the villages tiny. I had forgotten that the ferry crossing from Kyle of Lochalsh over to Skye has been replaced by the muscular sweep of the new bridge and for a moment I missed that sense of being somewhere else, in a new and different place, that the ferry provided. But once on the island the bilingual road signs, in both Gaelic and English, provided a strong sense of strangeness. In Gaelic, which about half the population speaks, the island is called An t-Eilean Sgitheanach (The Winged Isle), which refers both to its curious shape and to the wild empty freedom of its terrain.

  The Cuillin, the mountains of central Skye, are perhaps the toughest range in Britain, naked jagged rock rising abruptly from the sea, several soaring to some 900 metres. In the shadow and shelter of these mountains, facing west towards the mainland, was Allt Dearg, once a shepherd’s croft.

  It was lovely. As I drove up the quarter-mile of rough track through yet another smatter of rain, I saw in the wing mirror of my car an extremely vivid rainbow, all seven colours in wide bands. It seemed a good omen.

  Allt Dearg sat small, white and welcoming. Although it is nestled under the mountains there is nothing human above it, and below the land drops away to a long narrow bay with steep sides. I could not see the road or any buildings. Close beside the cottage is a burn that leaps and rushes, and makes a good deal of noise. Inside it is compact and tidy. I lived throughout the time I was there entirely on the ground floor, where a tiny bedroom opened off the kitchen-living room, so that I had a strong sense of containment inside despite the wildness outside. Outside, even in the evening light, the colours were extraordinary. Higher above me the mountains were grey; they were like teeth – craggy, broken, fierce. Behind the house is a croft field, still reasonably green, but everything else below those iron heights is gold, gold-bronze, punctuated by very white lichen on stones.

  In the fitful sunshine driving across I had thought the colour was sun-on-dead-grass; now I learned it was the grass itself, and dead was not a good word for it. The wind moved fast across it, flapping it like flags. When it reached darker clumps of heather or bog myrtle the rhythm of the movement changed. I kept thinking I’d seen ‘something’, something alive, moving like an animal running for cover – but no, it was just the wind somehow haunting and energising.

  I was exhausted by the time I had explored the house and the immediate surroundings, unpacked the car and settled in, but I also had a powerful sense of excitement and optimism, I was at the beginning of an adventure. I felt oddly foxy – I’d slipped my leash and got away. I felt open to whatever might happen and hungry for the silence.

  At one level Allt Dearg was never completely silent. The wind roared down from the mountains more or less incessantly throughout the whole time I was there. There was also the ‘voice of many waters’.4 When it rained, which it did a very great deal, I could hear it lashing on the roof-light windows upstairs; all the old windows of the house, hunching its back against the predominant wind, faced westwards; the modern desire for light has dominated over the older longing for protection. Even when the wind and rain paused the burn did not. Just behind the house it descended sharply in a series of small waterfalls and they sounded like distant aeroplane engines. Nearer to the house the sound of the burn was not dissimilar, in both volume and tone, to the lorries coming up the hill from Stanhope, except that it was continual. Yet my sense was that none of these noises mattered; they did not break up the silence, which I could listen for and hear behind them. I thought a lot about whether it was the constant background nature of these sounds or the fact that they were natural rather than human-made noises that meant they did not disrupt my personal sense of silence.

  For the first few days I wallowed in the pure pleasure of freedom: no phone calls, no emails, no neighbours. I snuggled into the private silence of the house and walked out to see the fitful sun on the grass and on the sea, to watch the sharp mountain peaks punctuated by cloud, and to let the wind blow through me. To settle into the silence and somehow lower my own expectations – to plan, scheme, rule, manage the days as little as possible. To experience, sense, live, be as much as possible. The experience of most people who voluntarily take themselves off into silence is that it takes a while to settle into it. Of course, it does not grow more silent as time passes, but you do become more attuned to the silence. Unlike sound, which crashes against your ears, silence is subtle. The more and the longer you are silent the more you hear the tiny noises within the silence, so that silence itself is always slipping away like a timid wild animal. You have to be very still and lure it. This is hard; one has only to try to quieten one’s mind or body to discover just how turbulent they are. But gradually I discovered a shape for each day and the silence took over.

  I was intensely curious to discover what might happen. There are a good number of published accounts of experiences of silence, which could have told me, but I decided not to read any while I was on
Skye as I thought it might influence my own experiences excessively; I wanted to discover for myself. However, since then I have read extensively about other people’s accounts of it in tandem with my own journal and I have come to believe that there are indeed quite specific things that happen to people who are silent for a prolonged period of time. But it is complicated.

  In the first place I had chosen this silence and prepared myself for it; I wanted to do it. Moreover, I enjoyed it. Silence can be terrible and even lethal, most usually when it is enforced or imposed. This is not an absolute rule – Donald Crowhurst chose to enter the Golden Globe race in 1968, and the silence drove him mad and finally killed him. On the other hand Boethius, in the sixth century, and John Bunyan, in the seventeenth, had no choice at all about their isolation and imprisonment, and both found positive and creative resources in the silence. However, in terms of matching my Skye experiences to those of other people I have concentrated on chosen silence.

  Another problem I encountered is that most of the accounts that we have of chosen silence are religious. Before the mid eighteenth century I can find no detailed reports of voluntary silence whatsoever that are not directed by a religious impulse; even when Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, based on the real experience of Alexander Selkirk, he took a totally secular event and turned it into a religious work. All the early accounts share a set of particular expectations, rewards and goals, which are bound to slew both the experience itself and the way it is reported.

  There are inevitably biases. For instance, Tibetan Buddhists may not take a permanent vow of silence on the grounds that if they were to achieve enlightenment they would have an obligation to teach: finding that silence was a permanent personal need and a primary source of delight would involve admitting (however subconsciously) that one’s own silence had ‘failed’, that it had not brought you to a state of enlightenment.