A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  An elevation of emotion over reason and of the senses over the intellect.

  Introspection and a fascination with the self; a sort of heightened awareness of one’s own moods and thoughts.

  A fascination with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional personality, and particularly his inner struggles.

  A construction of the artist as a free creative spirit – whose expression of authentic personal emotion was more important than form.

  An emphasis upon imagination and spontaneity as a way to spiritual truth.

  The idea that children were born naturally free and even perfect – and that social life and its demands corrupted them. They came into the world ‘trailing clouds of glory’, but ‘shades of the prison house’ ensnared them all too fast.

  A heightened appreciation of the beauties of nature, particularly the sublime.

  The romantic genius or artist had somehow to escape the coils of social convention and slip back into primal innocence so that he would be able to access his deepest emotions. Obviously solitude and silence in nature proved useful here; as I have discovered, these do indeed intensify feelings and sensations. Untrammelled by the demands of social life, the genius will find his inner true authentic self, buried under the layers of false consciousness, and be free to express it.

  The ‘he’ and ‘his’ throughout this passage is not accidental; the original romantic hero-artist was definitely male. Although a woman, ideally in a doomed love relationship, could and ought to be his muse, she was more often his nemesis, demanding his return to the chains of conventional society.

  And so the romantics sought out solitude and silence in order to ‘find themselves’, just as the desert hermits sought out silence and solitude to ‘lose themselves’. It is not coincidental that while the hermits generally preferred the word ‘silence’, the romantics tended to use ‘solitude’; they certainly did not want to be silenced; they wanted to use silence as a way to finding their own individual voices. Periods of silence and solitude modelled on the idea of the religious ‘retreat’ were considered valuable for developing independence and authenticity, and for allowing an individual to stand outside the conforming pressures of ‘civilised’ life. They also talked about it a great deal.

  We must reserve a little back-shop all our own, entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.6

  No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.7

  Under all speech … lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as time.8

  When from our better selves we have too long

  Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,

  Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,

  How gracious, how benign is solitude.9

  Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on:

  Not to the sensual ear, but more endear’d

  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.10

  To be honest, I find it hard to suppress a certain sense of relief when I find George Eliot bringing her caustic scepticism to bear on all this:

  Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.11

  On my Galloway walks I took not The Sayings of the Desert Fathers but Wordsworth’s Prelude.

  Wordsworth wrote The Prelude in 1805, although he continued revising it and it was not published until after his death in 1850. Its title makes clear that it was intended to be an introduction to The Recluse – the great philosophical epic containing his views on ‘Man, Nature and Society’ that he never completed. He published the second of its three intended parts as The Excursion in 1814; and in the preface to that, he described his overall intention. The editor of the 1850 posthumous publication of The Prelude used that preface to The Excursion in his own introductory remarks.

  Several years ago, when the Author retired to his native mountains with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such an employment. As subsidiary to this preparation, he undertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them.

  That work … has been long finished; and the result of the investigation which gave rise to it, was a determination to compose a philosophical Poem … to be entitled the ‘Recluse’; as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement [my italics].12

  What Wordsworth does in the first and second books of The Prelude is describe and celebrate his rural childhood. This is no innocent autobiography, it is a treatise on the making of a genius, and in particular it lays out the relationship between the poet and the landscape – that is to say, the natural world imbued with long associations.

  In the opening passages of The Prelude the poet has first to gain his freedom, ‘dear Liberty’, by escaping from the city into the country:

  Whate’er its mission, the soft breeze can come

  To none more grateful than to me; escaped

  From the vast city, where I long had pined

  A discontented sojourner: now free …

  Once away from the pressures of society he can start to think again and have access to his own true feelings and ideas, which will manifest themselves as poetry:

  I breathe again!

  Trances of thought and mountings of the mind

  Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,

  That burthen of my own unnatural self,

  This moment of peace and quiet naturally turns his attention back to his childhood and the sublime beauties of the Lakes, which had given him:

  Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind

  A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm

  That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.

  … thus from my first dawn

  Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me

  The passions that build up our human soul;

  Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,

  But with high objects, with enduring things –

  With life and nature

  And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,

  The self-sufficing power of Solitude. [my italics throughout]

  I chose The Prelude because it was written explicitly to explore how solitude in nature influences creativity by strengthening the individual against the ‘mean and vulgar works of man’. Wordsworth is of course particularly concerned here about how childhood experiences of silence can develop these creative capacities, and also how language, specifically poetry, can represent them.

  Wordsworth, and the Romantic Movement more widely, put a new emphasis on the experiences of childhood and its effect in later life. It was Wordsworth who coined the phrase, ‘the child is father to the man’, in his 1802 poem, ‘The Rainbow’.* Since he believed that children were uncontaminated by society, and therefore spontaneously both wise and creative, returning to the scenes of his childhood, alone and in silence, allowed him to access this primal innocence and with it his own poetic voice.

  One afternoon, sitting in thin sunshine under the shelter of a drystone wall and looking down on the forestry plantations around the Clatteringshaws reservoir, I suddenly and vividly remembered something that I had forgotten for years. For her fourth-birthday treat my youngest sister had decided she wanted to climb the Merrick – it is a big walk for such a small child, but she did it. She was jollied but not carried. What I experienced was a whole, rounded memory – the kind that is entirely visualised but has nothing outside its own frame. I don’t remember why we decided to do this, but remembered vividly the doing of it
, the breaking out of the pine trees into the huge upper air, her determined sturdy walking in little red wellington boots, the enormous sense of victory that we all had at the top – and the huge view from the ridge.

  This made me notice something interesting: this silent walking seemed to improve my memory. Increasingly, throughout the week, I had a very sharp recall of episodes, events, even emotions. Not just of ‘significant moments’ but of small things like walking up the Merrick for Maggie’s birthday. Things from far back in childhood. They felt at least like ‘true’ memories and were quite detailed, and usually came as whole, nicely shaped stories. At first I thought this was about coming back to the terrain of my childhood. But soon I realised that it was not just memories of childhood but of later events, which had nothing at all to do with south-west Scotland. One of the things I gained during this week, in this specific silence, was a much stronger narrative of my own life. It was not until after I went home that I became aware of how much – how many anecdotes – I had added to my conscious memory bank. The effort to eliminate ego and silence the mind, heart and imagination destroys a clear sense of time and therefore of narrative, but the attempt to use silence deliberately to stimulate internal states of imagination has exactly the opposite effect. I’m guessing, of course, that this is related to silence – it could just be chance, or menopause or something, but I really do not think so.

  One reason that I do not think so is because it seems to have been the experience of more individuals than just me. You go out into the wild and you ‘discover who you are’, you ‘establish your individual voice’, or ‘your authentic identity’. One of the definitions of identity or selfhood being explored at present in both philosophy and psychiatry is the idea that the ability to construct a coherent narrative of one’s own life circumscribes identity – to be an individual is to own a narrative self. Choosing to be alone, solitary, particularly in a place that is ‘sublime’, is one way of establishing contact with such a narrative, unmediated by other people’s interpretation. I came to feel that it really is about going down (or in/up/through/over) a level internally – and there are memory gobbets just lying about down there. Silence firstly puts one in that ‘other’ place and secondly gives one an opportunity, without interruptions or comments, to retrieve and shape those memories. This gives a poignant sensitivity to Storr’s observation, ‘I regret that the average mental hospital can make little provision for those patients who want to be alone and would benefit from it.’13

  This confirmed for me a validity in the romantic claims for silence as a deep well of creativity, provided, of course, that you accept the underlying premises – that our ‘inner’ self is more ‘true’ and more ‘real’ than the socially constructed persona (mask) that we put on in social circumstances, and that great art is the exploration and exposure of that hidden self.

  This time in the hills made me happy. My body liked being fit and tired. The walks themselves created a shape and narrative for each day. It was all extremely simple and pure. And one night I had an adventure that encapsulated and expanded the whole experience. I had decided there were two walks I wanted to take in the most northerly part of the region; to save time I decided I would sleep in my car up in the hills rather than go back down to the coast.

  The first of the two days was lovely, bright and clear, but the walking was strenuous and I got back to the car weary. I snuggled down into my sleeping bag and was asleep before it was fully dark. At about 3 a.m. the stars woke me. I did not immediately know that. I woke up quite gently and lay there, half awake. Then I blinked my eyes open – and STARS. I have never seen stars like that night, not even in Sinai. There were so many that they lit up the sky; ‘starlight’ took on a specific meaning like sunlight and moonlight. I was hurtled from my bed by them – driven or called, or both, to pull on my jacket and shoes and be outside. It was completely calm and silent. The sky was perfectly clear across the zenith, although there were low, darker bands of clouds north and east. The hills bulked up, clear blacker outlines below the black sky, but high above me was a fabulously dense Milky Way – ‘The White Lady’s pathway’ and ‘the Goddess’s milk’ as it has also been called. There were so many stars it was impossible for me to pick out the constellations that I did know. It was not ‘flat’. I had a real sense of the three-dimensionality of the sky. Did the ancients really see it as a flat ‘dome’ or single layer? I was breathless with awe and excitement. Eventually I found the Pleiades and with the help of binoculars I could distinctly see each of the Seven Sisters, including the fainter Merope, and a dusting of tinier stars within the cluster, like icing sugar on a cake. I had never before really managed to see their different colours – blue, yellow and a brilliantly pure white. As I grew used to the panoply I identified Orion, and picked out the stars of Ursa Major from among the hundreds that seemed to obscure the pattern. There was no moon but there were shooting stars, random, sporadic, but frequent, and some with long flaming tails like the great dragon of the apocalypse.

  I didn’t know it at the time that it was the peak night for the Orionids – one of the regular meteor showers. So the dragon metaphor was better than I meant; meteor showers are caused by the discarded dust fragments of comets’ tails burning up as they encounter our atmosphere. And the whole sky was twinkling, dancing, singing silently. It was gratuitous, that extraordinary sense that it was somehow alive, not flat and dead and distant, but immensely present and vital. Eventually some clouds drifted up or I got tired and the intensity faded. Half exalted, half exhausted, I climbed back into my sleeping bag and drew breath.

  Two breaths.

  The first breath was for the enormity of the silence.

  The silence of the stars is unthinkable. They burn and burn at unimaginably high temperatures for unaccountably long aeons. They blaze and blast and spark, and they do it all in silence. The explosions of their births and deaths go unheard throughout the whole cosmos. Sound waves, unlike light waves and radio waves, cannot carry through a vacuum; space itself is silent. Out there, beyond the atmospheric blanket, is an immeasurable vast and everlasting silence, ‘the vast vacuity’ through which Milton’s Satan fell. No wonder the devil likes noise.

  The scale of it all is outrageous. There are about the same number of stars in the Milky Way, our own galaxy, as there are cells in my body and there are at least 125 million other galaxies. The numbers themselves lose meaning; there have not been a million earth days since the birth of Christ, but when I try to talk about astronomy I start treating ‘millions’ casually because there is no other way to speak. Between each of the stars is an enormous distance – our nearest star, alpha proxima, is about five light years away from the sun.* Between each star is silence. According to the Yale Bright Star Catalog there are 9,110 stars with a magnitude of 6.5 or brighter, that is to say visible to the naked eye (assuming ideal conditions and good eyesight). Because space stretches out in every direction you will never be able to see this many at once – only half of them could possibly be visible in each of the hemispheres; nor will you see that many at any one time because the earth spins them into view throughout the night. Nonetheless 4,500 stars is generous enough.

  But wait. Pick up a reasonably good pair of binoculars, the same ones you use for birdwatching, and you multiply the number of cosmic bonfires you can see by about ten. So now, if you have a very clear night and a high place to view from, you can see 45,000 stars.

  Get a telescope and … the present ‘best estimate’ of observable stars using available telescopes is seventy sextillion (seventy thousand million million million). That is more than all the grains of sand on all the beaches and in all the deserts on this planet, but it is not all the stars; it is only the number within the range of our technology.

  Standing there in the cold night, I made an effort not to think about antimatter. Cosmologists are currently saying there is not enough matter, enough material objects, molecules or atoms, out there to allow the cosmos to function. There has to
be some dark material, invisible, immeasurable, but somehow there. They do not know what it is or how to find it. I can be overwhelmed by the idea that antimatter is all the concentrated silence of space. Silence so dense and heavy that it takes on materiality.

  The second breath was a sharper intake, more of a gasp. I realised that almost the first thing I had done, confronted with that enormous brightness, was look for patterns, for stories. I had instinctively and very swiftly groped about for something I knew a story for. The Pleiades, for example, are named after the immortal sisters, daughters of Atlas, who were placed in the heavens because of their beauty. One of the seven stars is fainter than the others and called Merope because she alone married a mortal while the other six took gods as lovers. The visible astronomical objects are not named randomly: Mercury was the messenger of the gods with winged heels, and the planet Mercury moves faster than any other, whizzing round the sun at high speed. Venus, named after the goddess of love, appears in the evening and the morning, serene and beautiful. Mars looks red in the night sky, red was the colour of war and Mars was the god of war, hence the term ‘martial arts’. Jupiter was the king of the gods and is the largest planet; it is surrounded by an exceptionally large number of moons, each named after one of his exceptionally large number of lovers.