A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  One reason for my sympathy is perhaps that I feel my own trajectory into silence is quite close to McCandless’s in some particular ways. He, too, clearly started by simply enjoying the sense of being alone and free of family and other responsibilities. He was intensely idealistic; he gave his life savings, nearly £12,000, to Oxfam before setting off, and was strongly motivated by contempt for contemporary Western culture (something I strongly shared at his age and have not entirely grown out of yet) and also by authors like Tolstoy and Thoreau, who offer a free-ranging and ecstatic view of both ‘nature’ and personal renunciation. Like me he decided to go off somewhere desolate, isolated and extreme, and explore his own identity in silence. He kept it up a good deal longer than I did – 113 days of similar highs and lows to mine – but it was clear that he did not mean to stay for ever and also that, given his lack of equipment and experience, he managed surprisingly well for quite a long time. As Krakauer tracks down the last two years of McCandless’s life I can see an individual pushed by a particular and contemporary constellation of ideals further and further towards the challenge of absolute silence.

  There are differences, though, and I expect the most important one was quite simply age; and the experience and sense (or fear) that go with it. I have learned to respect, rather than despise, my own limitations. With an almost staggering stupidity or arrogance or both, McCandless went into the Alaskan outback without a map. (Had he had one, he could very easily have seen that there were other ways out from where he was than the track he came in by, which was closed by a flooding river, and that he was a mere six miles from safety.) I not only had a large-scale Ordnance Survey map – I also, perhaps more crucially, had interior maps and compass. I had a solid, deeply enjoyable life to want to come back to. Another difference is that I am neither male nor American – and so not acculturated within that extraordinary wilderness mythology about courage, masculinity and the frontier. I also believe that my religious conviction – a steady, reasoned, critical faith – may help to make someone safer in silence.

  No one will ever know what happened to Chris McCandless or what he thought he was doing. But there is one detailed personal account of a fatal silence, which we can follow to the sorry end. This brings me back again to the Golden Globe race in 1968.

  Donald Crowhurst did not survive, but he kept up his ‘ship’s log’ until some very last moment and we know in great detail what was happening to him, even if it is hard to make sense of. It is a strange story. Donald Crowhurst, an electrical engineer and ‘inventor’, entered the Golden Globe race with a newly built, radically designed multihull, Teignmouth Electron, which it transpired was not fit for purpose and which Crowhurst could not in fact sail. Because of delays in building her, Teignmouth Electron had no sea trials. Crowhurst left Devon on the last day permissible under the race rules – 31 October 1968. Within a fortnight he was recording in his log that the situation was desperate, nothing on the boat worked properly and that he ought to retire. At this point he seemed entirely rational. He recognised that although retiring would almost certainly mean bankruptcy, he ‘would have Clare [his wife] and the children still’, and he comforted and encouraged himself with snippets from Kipling’s poem ‘If’.

  Some time in the first week of December, however, he cooked up a bizarre plan. On 6 December he started keeping two different logs – a true one of his increasingly passive drift around the western Atlantic and a fake one that showed him whizzing at ever more exciting speeds (breaking the world record at times) south and east and round the Cape of Good Hope. As this got more untenable he cut off radio contact altogether and disappeared for eleven weeks. It seems clear that he was planning to pretend to have sailed round the world. He would work his way to the south Atlantic, then reopen radio contact and sail home as though he had completed the circumnavigation. When he reopened radio contact he learned that Robin Knox-Johnston had arrived back in Falmouth on 23 April – the first non-stop solo circumnavigation of the world had been achieved. He also learned that Nigel Tetley was pushing up the Atlantic well placed to win the ‘fastest time’ prize. Crowhurst must have felt that he had a good chance of getting away with his deception. He could come in behind Tetley, with his reputation intact and his obligations towards his sponsors met, although he must have been aware that there might be some awkward questions asked.

  At this point an ironic tragedy occurred. Tetley, in the now badly damaged Victresse, learned in his turn that Crowhurst was still in the race. Had he not believed that Crowhurst was close behind him and making apparently extraordinary speed, he could probably have nursed Victresse home for the fastest-time prize; as it was he felt obliged to push on harder than his damaged little boat could bear and on 23 May Victresse literally broke up in the water a scant 1,000 miles from Britain. Tetley was rescued, but when Crowhurst heard the news on his newly established radio connection, the full implications of what he was doing crashed home on him: he was going to win the race, and this would lead to a highly undesirable level of attention and examination, and his deception would almost certainly be exposed. After 23 May he stopped sailing anywhere; Teignmouth Electron was allowed to drift. In early June his radio genuinely failed. Although he repaired it and made connection again on 22 June, it was too late: all the communications coming to him from his publicist were exultant plans for his ‘victory’. After that Crowhurst stopped communicating with anyone and sank into his own silence. His logbooks changed: in eight days he wrote 25,000 words of incomprehensible delirious rambling, in which he debated with Einstein, prophesied the end of the world and offered magical insights into the universe. Like most psychotic discourse there was a coherent central image – the coming superman (himself) could, by will alone, free himself from the limitations of the physical world.

  When he came to himself on 30 June all his clocks had stopped and he knew neither where he was nor what time or even what day it was. For any deep-water sailor this is the ultimate disaster. He attempted to calculate both time and position from the sun, and came up with an answer that was palpably absurd. Increasingly desperate and aware that time itself was dissolving for him, he went back to writing his bizarre ship’s log. Between 10.03 (if that is what the time really was) and 11.17 he continued writing – now marking the minutes, and towards the end even the seconds in a final attempt to control them. At 10.29 he wrote:

  I will only resign this game

  if you will agree that this

  game is played it will be played

  according to the

  rules that are devised by my great god who has

  revealed at last to his son

  not only the exact nature

  of the reason for games but

  has also revealed the truth of

  the way of the ending of the next game that

  It is finished

  – It is finished

  IT IS THE MERCY20

  At 11.20 he stopped writing mid sentence (but at the bottom of a page).

  It is unclear, of course, what happened immediately after that. On 10 July Teignmouth Electron was found unmanned and drifting. The weather had been so calm that on the cabin table a soldering iron was still balanced neatly on a milk tin. Crowhurst was not there – nor, oddly enough, was the brass chronometer from the bulkhead, which had been unscrewed and was not on board. Crowhurst had tried to take time with him when he travelled into the final silence.

  It could be argued that both Chris McCandless and Donald Crowhurst chose their danger and isolation; it was not involuntary or compulsory. Nonetheless it seems to me significant that it was precisely at the point when they felt they could not escape that things started to go wrong for them. McCandless survived very well and his journals seem reasonably sane up until the point he discovered that the track back to civilisation was flooded and inaccessible. Given that he did not know (even though he should have) that there were other ways out, he must have felt imprisoned. Likewise with Crowhurst – it was only when he realised that
Teignmouth Electron was completely unmanageable, that his own skills were inadequate to the task in hand, and that his own fantasies and deceptions had in effect imprisoned him, that his grip on sanity began to slip.

  What bound me into all these stories is how closely many of them matched my own experience of the dark side of silence when I was briefly snowed in, just as I had found that sets of responses to ‘good silence’ seemed remarkably consistent when I was in Skye. Indeed I have, as I have suggested, come to believe they are the shadow side of the positive responses.

  So, once the road was finally cleared and the late spring lengthened the days and greened the trees, I was glad to have gone through this brief imprisonment. I knew retrospectively that it had given me some real understanding and also a deep sense of security – there was nothing in my own freely chosen silence that I needed to be frightened of. I turned my attention joyfully to the task of discovering how much of the intense joy and excitement I had found in Skye could be built into my daily life.

  Or so I thought. Later that summer I encountered a rather different negative effect of silence. I had an attack of accidie.

  Accidie is a state of mind that is so deeply associated with silence that the OED defines it ‘the mental prostration of recluses induced by fasting and other physical causes’, although none of the desert hermits or their commentators made any connection between accidie and asceticism. It occurs in so many accounts of silence that are not associated with other ascetic practices like fasting that this definition smacks to me of nineteenth-century rationalist scientism. The ‘recluses’ themselves saw it as a sin and later it became the theological term for the fourth deadly sin – sloth or laziness – but originally it had a very specific meaning related to silence. Accidie is a form of torpor or, to translate the original Greek word more literally, a ‘not-caring-state’ (a = ‘not’ + kedos = ‘care’). Rather pleasingly, the medieval spiritual writers, whose Greek was less sound than after the Renaissance, mis-derived it from the Latin acidum – sour or bitter (the same source, obviously, as ‘acid’ and with a similar corroding power). It certainly turned the joys of silence sour for me.

  It is very difficult to describe the effects of accidie, because its predominant feature is a lack of affect, an overwhelming sense of blankness and an odd restless and dissatisfied boredom. I would get up in the morning, make earnest resolutions about work or prayer or exercise, all things that I knew would make me feel better if I did them, but I would in fact find, in the evening, that I had spent the whole day rereading detective novels or playing patience, despite the fact that these activities felt boring even while I was doing them. For me, and for others, one very marked ‘symptom’ was an enormous difficulty in moving from one activity to another – just one more chapter, one more game of sudoku, one more embroidery thread and then I will go for a walk.

  In the early fifth century CE John Cassian wrote an account of accidie, which seems close to the mark still. He had been an ascetic in the Egyptian desert as a young man, but left as a missionary for southern Gaul, where he founded monasteries and spread the desert tradition. Although he sensibly advised his French monks to moderate the rule of the desert because of the colder climate, he nonetheless harked back to his youth and described the lives of the earlier saints with affectionate detail. His voice is an unexpectedly modern one because, as Helen Waddell puts it,

  His ironic human perception makes intelligible the more alien experience of the desert, its concentration within the four walls of one’s cell. To read Cassian on accidie is to recognize the ‘white melancholy’ of Gray in Pembroke and the sullen lethargy that is the sterile curse of the scholar and the artist.21

  Cassian wrote a specific passage on accidie and how to ‘contend’ with it:

  Accidie, which we may describe as tedium or perturbation of heart. It is akin to dejection, and especially felt by solitaries, a persistent and obnoxious enemy to such as dwell in the desert, disturbing the monk especially about midday … When this besieges the unhappy mind it begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren. Also toward any work that may be done within the enclosure of our own lair, we become listless and inert. It will not suffer us to stay in our cell, or to attend to our reading … It produces such lassitude of body and craving for food as one might feel after the exhaustion of a long journey and hard toil; one is for ever in and out of one’s cell, gazing at the sun as though it were tarrying to its setting; one’s mind is in an irrational confusion, like the earth befogged in a mist, one is slothful and vacant in every spiritual activity.22

  The early hermits were very much aware of this affliction, but it does not seem to be a consequence of the ascetic life per se, but rather a result of silence. The same thing is reported over and over again from people whose silence, for one reason or another, did not involve any ‘mortifications of the flesh’ or harsh physical discipline in the sense that Cassian understood that. On the other hand it does not seem to be a problem for elite athletes, whose physical disciplines and renunciations are every bit as rigorous as those of the hermits. There is a very similar and powerful description of this torpor in Hostage in Peking, Anthony Grey’s account of his two-year imprisonment in 1968:

  I want to record my complete feeling of emptiness at the moment. Often in my prayers I ask to be delivered from this ‘vacuum of hell’. I have somehow developed a dead feeling, which makes it hard for me to make up my mind to do anything active. In some moments I am seized with despair but most of the time I can contemplate long weeks ahead as empty as this without any feeling. … It is becoming increasingly difficult to remain enthusiastic about Yoga or anything else for that matter. My life seems becalmed on a flat sea never to become mobile again.23

  Christiane Ritter, in more poetic language, seems to be wrestling with a similar condition when she writes:

  For humans this stillness is horrible. It is days since I have been outside the hut. Gradually I have become fearful of seeing the deadness of the land. I sit in the hut and tire myself out with sewing. It makes no difference whether the work is finished today or tomorrow, but I know what I am up to. I do not want to have my mind free for a moment to think, a moment in which to become aware of the nothingness outside … I know with certainty that it was this nothingness, which over the past centuries has been responsible for the death of some hundreds of men here in Spitzbergen … There is no longer even a glimmer of day, not even at noon. I take it particularly badly and the hunters maintain that I am moonstruck. What I would like best of all is to stand all day on the shore where in the water the rocking ice-floes catch and break the light and throw it back at the moon. But the men are very strict with me and often keep me under house arrest.24

  Accidie feels rather different from the other negative effects of silence because it is not the shadow side, or the subjectively warped expression of any positive feeling at all that I have been able to locate. I have tried to see it as the reverse side of the sense of ‘givenness’ that I have described: if everything is a gift from outside one’s own ego, then one may well experience an unnerving sense of passivity – that no action or decision is worth taking for oneself, that no act of the will can have any results, so why bother? However, that is not what it felt like. It felt like a thing in itself, quite separate from any of the other states I have described.

  It is particularly hard to work out what is going on in attacks of accidie because of our modern understanding of depression, and especially the contemporary notion that depression is a physical illness which, like a broken leg, exists completely outside our will. It is now more or less normative to reduce every negative experience we have to some neural malfunction or imbalance. Early theologians and the medieval Church, however, ascribed accidie to sin. The very gentle and sane writer of the Ancren Riwle, the early thirteenth-century handbook for anchoresses (solitaries whose cells were attached to parish churches, like Julian of Norwich) is very blunt and writes sternly
of accidie, urging his anchoresses to cast it aside with prayer and determination.

  There is a lovely and relevant demonstration of this confusion between depression and accidie: the Desert Fathers, as Cassian reiterates, associated accidie with the ‘demon’ in Psalm 91:

  You will not fear the terror of the night,

  Nor the arrow that flies by day,

  Nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness

  Nor the demon that lays waste at noonday.25

  In 2002 Andrew Solomon published an excellent comprehensive account of depression and he called the book The Noonday Demon.

  I think it is possible that depression and accidie are just different words for the same condition, but as someone who has suffered from both I think there are real differences; at the simplest level accidie was perceived as connected with silence (not simply with ascetic hermits, but with the excessive confinement of scholars, and with prolonged isolation in convalescence for the ill) and there is no suggestion that depression is. In fact, if depression were directly affected by silence we would be seeing less and less of it in a society where there is an ever-decreasing amount of silence. All the evidence – for example, the number of people using anti-depressants or the number of working days lost to depression – suggests that this illness is reaching epidemic proportions.