The obvious choice, for anyone who is seeking such silence on these terms, would be the Lake District, Wordsworth’s own country, but unfortunately the Lakes are now so popular and crowded that they cannot represent silence or solitude for me. The success of the idea that wild nature is somehow ‘good for us’ is reflected in the recent proliferation of long-distance walks throughout Britain. There are several wonderful trails now – but for various reasons they did not feel right. The Pennine Way was too near home; the West Highland Way too closely associated with Skye. St Cuthbert’s Way, particularly the bold clean hillsides over the northern shoulder of the Cheviots and coming down to Lindisfarne, held an enormous attraction for me, but planning this trip, it seemed too closely associated with the eremitical silence of the desert. I am fully aware that the Border Hills do not look in the least like the Sinai Desert, but I know I read all landscapes with a pre-formed imagination; try as I will, there is no pure unmediated seeing for me. Cuthbert had been trained at Melrose in the Irish tradition, with its complex association with Sinai itself and with the hermits. Moreover, it was not coasts I wanted this time but mountains, harsh rock faces, hideous slides of scree, waterfalls, rainbows and long views obscured by moving cloud and mist. The odd storm would be an additional benefit – but even in my most romantic moods I know that I cannot summon the lightning or call up the thunder.
In the end I followed Wordsworth biographically rather than geographically. The Lake District was where Wordsworth had grown up. Like him I went ‘home’, to walk in the mountains and hills of my childhood in Galloway. Galloway – the old County of Wigtown and Stewartry of Kirkcudbright* – is strangely, though fortunately, unknown. The area has the second-lowest population density in Britain (only Caithness, now part of Highlands and Islands Region, is less inhabited) and that population is very predominantly located on the coastal plain. This leaves a large wilderness, without roads, houses or much else, between the coast and Ayrshire, including a number of significantly large hills, with the Merrick, the highest point on the Range of the Awful Hand, at 843 metres the highest mountain between Scafell Pike in the Lake District and the Highlands. (This in itself is a blessing – another mere 70 metres and the Merrick would become a Munro – one of the 284 mountains in Scotland over 914.4 metres, or 3,000 feet when the list was made in 1891. Munros lure walkers and break up silences.) The Southern Upland Way crosses the southern edge of both the Merrick and the Rhinns of Kells, between Newton Stewart and St John’s Town of Dalry, then passes below the Black Shoulder of Cairnsmore of Carsphairn, but most of this part of the route is through forestry plantations, cunningly hiding the mountain wilderness beyond. This is as near as we can get, I believe, in the UK today, to the romantic wilderness scenery that the Lake District offered Wordsworth 200 years ago. It has everything I needed for the expedition I was planning – high hills with enormous views, rough walking, waterfalls and tiny lochs, roofless castles and abandoned farmsteads. Unlike the Lake District, northern Galloway is more desolate than it was in 1800 because the population has declined. As a bonus it is scattered with prehistoric sites – standing stones and barrows – often miles from any road, which stand as gaunt reminders of a culture entirely silenced and, to fuel a sense of freedom and fervour, it is also the setting for Robert the Bruce’s early guerrilla campaigns against English imperialism.
There were other, less high-minded reasons for choosing south-west Scotland. One of the problems with walking alone in areas without much public transport is that you have to walk in circles, or carry too much heavy baggage. In Galloway this was not a problem – someone, usually my mother – would come and pick me up at a pre-appointed rendezvous; and this meant that I could walk further and cover more territory. A final factor was cost: at this time my mother had furnished a redundant farmhouse, about a mile from her house, specifically for her daughters and their families and friends. It felt worth sacrificing some silence in exchange for free board and lodging, and a chauffeur.
So I went to Galloway and walked for ten days, on the high, windswept hills, seeking that release of expressive imagination that Wordsworth calls the ‘bliss of solitude’. It was rough and wild and silent and beautiful – and there are few physical sensations as profoundly pleasing as the tiredness at the end of a long day’s walk.
The silence on a high hillside is aurally very different from the silence of the desert. In the first place it is nothing like as silent – there is always the wind moving through, across or over things. The wind is like a cellist’s bow – it itself is silent but it draws sound out of things in a surprising and rich range of tones, wind in grass, wind in reeds, wind in heather, wind on water, wind squeezed between rocks. The wind driving rain against a waxed jacket makes a different sound from the wind driving rain against a cagoule. There is also the ‘sound of many waters’. Linguists, rather sadly, now teach that the claim that Inuit languages have all those words for snow is a myth; but it is a credible myth to me because of how many words English has for the sounds of running water: babble, bubble, burble, ripple, splash, gush, cascade, run, rush, spout, spurt, dribble, drip, drizzle, trickle, flow, ooze, roar … and a day spent walking in these sorts of hills will reveal most of them, usually overlaying each other and creating a kind of orchestral effect. Presumably, high up above the snow line these sounds would vanish as the water no longer runs.
I am not enough of a physicist to know whether hot air carries sound waves differently from cold air, or dry air from wet air, but it certainly feels as though this were true. Hillwalking is bracing – you do not sit mute and still in a cleft in the rocks while the sun dries you out and empties your head. The reverse happens. It is not necessarily cold in the hills (though it often is) but what makes you warm is the expenditure of your own energy – you make your own heat actively, rather than absorbing the sun’s passively. There is more external stimulus – you have to look where you are going and there is a lot else to look at too. The view changes quickly, the weather changes quickly – the clouds shift and there is the summit of the Merrick like a hooked beak above you; or Loch Enoch shining like a coin framed by its unexpected white beaches, a hundred metres below you. You can’t help looking: was that a deer, or even a wild goat? There are golden eagles in these hills, though I have never seen one; it is hard not to look speculatively, hopefully, at every large bird in the distance. Views like this make you look outwards rather than inwards as you do in the desert.
One lunchtime I found myself eating a hard-boiled egg sitting on a stone on the ridge beyond Benyallery. This ridge, called the Nieve of the Spit locally, affords enormous views both east and west. It was stunning countryside, with the Merrick big and grey in front of me and a ‘vast vacuity’ below; huge empty distances and golden grass blowing, and here and there patches of bright green sward – very closely sheep cropped. And nothing: miles and miles of nothing and no one. The clouds in procession bore down towards me from the north with the sun dodging them almost playfully. More hills for ever away into a blue mist and the wind, coming and going with moments of real calm. I felt strong and free, and the world seemed holy and whole. I thought, ‘Earth hath not anything to show more fair.’ It was one of those memorably happy moments. I thought, too, that perhaps the effort, the sheer hard work of getting up there from Loch Trool, somehow added to the pleasure – a bonus sense of achievement.
I walked high and hard, and was exhausted every evening. I tried to contrast this experience with sitting in a nook of the desert rocks and trying to empty my mind and my heart of everything; and I also tried to think about authenticity and ‘coming to voice’ out of the silence around me. I learned some things.
I had loved and felt deeply drawn to the silence of the desert hermits – who chose, so strenuously, to empty their minds and hearts. But I was also aware that this concept is profoundly alien in our culture. I started to think about why this should be so and what had changed.
In Europe until well into the seventeenth century most seri
ous-minded people would have accepted the hermits’ underlying motivation as a normal and healthy one, even though some of the more extreme forms in which this was expressed raised a few eyebrows. The sensible person practised disciplines, like an athlete in training, in pursuit of the radical freedom to choose the good, unhampered by the pressures of the ego and the weakness of the flesh. Above all, pride, any sense of self-sufficiency or autonomy, and particularly self-love, needed to be wrestled with and overcome: low self-esteem was considered a moral good. Now there is something outrageous and wrong in the very idea. This is made more complicated because of the accompanying emulsion of self-abnegation and joy, almost like salad dressing – the emollient of sweet oil and the sharp acidity of vinegar shaken together. This is now hard to understand. The post-Enlightenment, post-Freudian mind cannot find bliss in self-abnegation and if or when someone does, this is swiftly pathologised as self-hatred, repressed guilt or masochism.
Gradually I came to see the movement as historical and that at the Enlightenment a very profound change in how we understand identity itself occurred. Every definition of the Enlightenment ends up proving unsatisfactory, but here I am using it fairly loosely: by the Enlightenment, I mean that shift which surfaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by which individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority and tradition as core European values. The Enlightenment was optimistic, secular and rationalist, and developed an ethical language of natural law, inherent freedoms and self-determination.
Inevitably Enlightenment thinking moved towards a greater respect for the autonomy of the individual and for the positive nature of desire. Romanticism, critical of the excessive civility of the eighteenth century,* focused on the emotional and subjective experience of the individual. Under the pressure of this shift certain relevant words began to change their meaning. Etymologically it is much less common for words to ‘improve’ their standing than for them to decline in status – villain, gossip and spinster show a typical progression from something positive or neutral to something pejorative. So when I noticed a whole group of words becoming less negative in their connotations I got curious. What is going on when words like imagination, self-esteem and above all pride simultaneously move from being negative moral terms to being virtues or positive attributes?
For instance, the word ‘genius’ changed meaning at this time. Today, as the OED recognises, it almost exclusively refers to a person endowed with:
native intellectual power of an exalted type, such as is attributed to those who are esteemed greatest in any department of art, speculation or practice; the instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imaginative creation, invention or discovery. Often contrasted with talent.
This sense of the word does not seem to have existed before the mid eighteenth century. Prior to that the word, derived from Latin, had only its classical meaning of the ‘tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to people at their births – to govern their fortunes, determine their characters and finally to conduct them out of this world’. Places and institutions had similar spirits. A Christianised version of this story allowed people two ‘geniuses’ – a good and a bad one, who were often identified as angels; and the phrase someone’s ‘evil genius’ is a throwback to this original usage. From here the word developed to mean characteristic disposition or turn of mind, and thence a ‘natural ability or capacity’.
In the early eighteenth century this sense came to be applied with increasing frequency to the kind of intellectual power particular to poets and painters – and given the way artists were making increasingly grandiose claims for themselves, it is not altogether surprising that the word began to denote:
That particular kind of intellectual power which has the appearance of proceeding from a supernatural inspiration or possession and which seems to arrive at its results in an inexplicable and miraculous manner.
Although this use of the word ‘genius’ originated in English, it was taken up enthusiastically by the German Romantic Movement, to such an extent that their literary and artistic revival is often known as the Genieperiode. The major influence of German writers on early English romantics meant the term was reimported with particular overtones.
(I strongly suspect that the word ‘genius’ was given added ameliorative impetus by the enthusiasm at the time for Arabian and Persian culture – for example, in the growing popularity of The Thousand and One Nights. The word ‘djinn’ was translated as ‘genie’, with the plural ‘genii’, which is the same word as the plural of the Latin genius. This placed the powerful magic spirits very close to the ‘genius’ of the classical world, but with an added frisson of exoticism.)
But for me the most important of these upwardly mobile words was ‘individual’ itself. It has acquired a totally new meaning over the last two centuries.
It is fairly obvious that ‘individual’ has its roots in ‘that which cannot be divided’. And in fact until the late seventeenth century, it meant very much the same as ‘indivisible’: different parts that cannot be broken down into smaller units. Before about 1650 the most common English usage was theological, specifically as a way of describing the Holy Trinity: ‘To the glorie … of the hie and indyvyduall Trinitie’ (1425) is the first example in the OED: the Trinity is made up of three ‘bits’, which cannot be divided, which cannot be made sense of except in an indivisible unity. It also referred to married, or conspicuously loving, couples. Shakespeare, in Timon of Athens, can talk of ‘individual’ mates, or Adam can address Eve, in Paradise Lost,
… to have thee by my side
Henceforth an individual solace dear,
Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half.1
In the eighteenth century the word began to shift. First it became a zoological term meaning a single example of a whole species. Its move from adjective to noun is, I think, as indicative as its change in meaning. Interestingly, it was one of the earliest words to make this grammatical shift – to be swiftly followed by terms like homosexual, feminist, lunatic and so on, words that may well have required the present understanding of ‘individual’ to achieve their contemporary noun status. William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft’s partner and a leading radical philosopher, seems to be the first person to use ‘individual’ in our contemporary sense. It was not until the early nineteenth century that human beings’ individuality was deemed not to extend beyond the boundaries of their own skin. That which was not breakable down, divisible into further constituent parts, was the self – the individual in whom innate human rights and self-authenticating emotions could reside.
Through the twentieth century the word ‘individual’ increasingly developed positive moral connotations – it is now a good thing to be individual, unique and separate. Its ascent is still in process: my 1933 edition of the OED has not yet quite caught up with contemporary ‘individualism’ and still describes it in negative moral language as ‘self-centred conduct or feeling; egoism’. In current usage, though, I think it has transcended this obloquy and now means something nearer to ‘original’, ‘independent’, or ‘well-integrated’.
For many of the intellectuals of the early classicist phase of the Enlightenment the very notion of a hermit was repellent to a civilised person:
There is perhaps no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, distorted and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, spending his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato.2
And, most famously, Edward Gibbon, with what Helen Waddell was to call his ‘slow-dropping malice’, wrote:
The ascetics who obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the Gospel were inspired by the savage enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal and God as a ty
rant. They seriously renounced the business and the pleasures of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh and of marriage; chastised their body, mortified their affections and embraced a life of misery.3
In the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon also wrote the much-quoted line: ‘Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school for genius.’4 He clearly felt then that there were two different sorts of solitude – the ‘genius’ post-Enlightenment kind and the ‘savage’ solitude of asceticism.
This view remained in currency into the nineteenth century, when James Wilson, on tour in the Scottish Highlands, wrote:
On Eilan-na-Killy are the remains of some ancient habitation, the supposed dwelling of an ascetic monk, or ‘self-secluded’ man, possibly a sulky egotistical fellow, who could not accommodate himself to the customs of his fellow creatures. Such beings do very well to write sonnets about now that they are (as we sincerely trust) all dead and buried, but the reader may depend upon it they were a vile pack.5
I suspect it is a view that many people would fundamentally agree with now.
But by the end of the eighteenth century the idea that the individual was of supreme importance launched a movement that saw itself as being in total opposition to the values of the civilised (‘city based’) rationalism of the early Enlightenment, although ideologically it drew on the same concept of the autonomous individual. To the idea that an ‘individual’ was a single unique person, indivisibly contained within a single body, the Romantic Movement attached quite a specific package of philosophical attitudes. Among the most relevant of these are:
A Book of Silence Page 27