A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  One day, driving fretfully home from inspecting yet another impossible house, I had a sharp consoling memory. Once, years before, on holiday in Italy with my family, we had had lunch near Arezzo and in the afternoon had walked up a steep path in the Apennines, through pine trees dappled in sunshine, and had come out of the woods to the monastery at Camadoli. The Camadolese Fathers, founded by St Romauld at the very end of the first millennium, was the order that Merton thought he might join when he found that the Trappists could not offer him the solitude that he craved. The Camadolese monks live as hermits – each monk has his own hermitage separate from the others. Their Rule instructs them to:

  sit in your cell as in paradise … watch your thoughts as a skilled fisherman watches for fish … remember always that you are in the presence of God … Abandon everything and wait, dependent on the grace of God, like the fledgling who eats only what its mother brings it.5

  Each hermit-monk has two rooms – a room for living in, for praying, studying, eating and everything else, and a bedroom – and, opening directly off the cell, he has his own little walled garden, sheltered and completely hidden. (The monks do not need a kitchen because the meals are prepared separately – by the non-hermits in the order, often novices who are awaiting their opportunity to become hermits – and brought to the cell ready cooked, where they are ‘posted’ through a hatch in their front door.) I recalled it with vivid precision, the sunshine, the scent of pine trees, the walk from cell to church, the children’s fascination and the great quiet. That, that was what I wanted – except I would need a kitchen and a bathroom. My would-be asceticism does not run to cold-water strip downs in the washing-up bowl, even in my most self-inflated fantasies. Nor, I suspect, would Planning or Health and Safety regulations permit it.

  Somewhere in all this I began to think about self-building. It is a dream that a lot of people seem to share – to make our own house. The popularity of television programmes about doing just this suggests that it catches at a very specific desire. My friends Will Anderson and Ford Hickson were doing it in south London – building their lovely house, based on their passionate eco-aesthetic.6 This was encouraging. Discouraging, on the other hand, was the non-silence that would be involved; the very proper difficulty of getting planning permission to build on a green site; and the cost, which rumour warned would be astronomical.

  I was mulling this over when something that retrospectively feels magical, even graced, happened. I had been to look at a (totally unsuitable) house in the Machars, the more easterly of the two Galloway peninsulas that stick down into the Irish Sea towards the Isle of Man, and later in the day had an appointment to view another (also, it turned out, totally unsuitable) house near Girvan in southern Ayrshire. It is hard to imagine any other pair of locations that would have caused me to notice that on the map there was a tiny little road that ran north from the A75 to Barrhill. I thought it would be a short cut through pleasant rural countryside, pretty and convenient. So I headed up the Luce valley. North of the village of New Luce I entered a new world, one that I had not known existed, a swath of moorland and, moreover, one that had not been taken over by modern forestry plantings. Here the high hills only a few miles further east, which I had walked in two years before, were ground down by the glaciers of the last Ice Age, leaving the undulating peat and granite moors of my dreams stretching empty for miles. The land here is so infertile that it was left alone in the nineteenth century and is still liberally scattered with Bronze Age remains, which elsewhere were obliterated by enclosures and agricultural improvements. The road, single track with passing places, wound its way up over singularly decrepit cattle grids and little bridges; the upper reaches of the Cross Water of Luce, somewhere between river and stream, bubbling over stones or lying in still long pools, wound serpentine down the shallow valley. And there was the huge nothing.

  Here, here was where I wanted to live. Like Anthony, here was the place that fed my ‘appetite for the absolute’,7 that would place me, as his wood and pond had placed Thoreau, in a ‘naked condition in front of the universe’ and in front of God as well. But when I got home and started asking around it became clear that the chances of my finding a place to live up on that moor were effectively non-existent. There were very few houses in any case, and almost all of them were tenanted farmhouses and the Stair Estate, which owned it all, had a policy of not selling land – they preferred levelling unused homesteads and expanding the few remaining hill farms. I tried to shrug my shoulders and I went on looking.

  Just over a month later, for reasons that the local population still do not understand, the Estate put two sites on the market. One was a substantial old farmhouse and the other was its derelict little shepherd’s house nearly a mile away. In the days when hill farming was profitable, most of the old farms had a farmer and probably a couple of workers, but also a shepherd, who lived further up, where the sheep roamed freely. It gives me a special joy that the last person to shepherd here was Jock Welsh, the international sheepdog trial champion and judge. The house was collapsing even when he was an apprentice, and when he got married he and his wife Christine moved first into a caravan behind the house and later off site, but it seems a noble heritage and gives me encouragement in my rather different ‘trials’.

  Of course I bought it. The house had been empty for nearly half a century. It had no roof, no working water supply; it had two feet of cow and sheep manure on all the floors and a tree growing out of the front wall. This was not a conversion job; the works were done as ‘new build’ but it was enough of a house not to run into trouble with green-site building restrictions. It was sufficiently derelict for me to do whatever I wanted; its situation and the long view down the valley were the landscape I craved, and it even had an attached barn, roofless but with its old stone walls intact that would be my Camadolesian walled garden.

  Building a house is not a silent activity – the pause in my silence seeking extended itself for another eighteen months, during which I experienced some of the highest levels of anxiety that I have ever had to endure; more meetings and conversations and negotiating with strangers than I could have imagined; and a very great deal of fretful activity. But always, running like a thread through the difficulties and complications and delays and expense, and the unnerving awareness that a great many people – from my brothers to the surveyor – clearly thought I was slightly deranged, was a strand of absolute certainty. This was my house, my hermitage, my home.

  I built my house as I wanted my house to be. I wanted it to sit in its landscape as it has always sat, four-square, solid, like a child’s drawing of a house, two windows with a front door between them and a chimney pot at either end. Driving up the road from New Luce you can see the house from over two miles away; I wanted nothing in that seeing to change and it makes me happy when people tell me how lovely it is ‘to see lights in Dirniemow again’ as they had stopped hoping they ever would. Neither the inhabitants nor the landscape itself would have welcomed a contemporary design. But inside there is one big room that is kitchen and study and eating place and sitting room, open plan, and behind it there is one bedroom. The bedroom has french windows, which open directly on to my walled garden – which at the moment I confess is still two feet deep in cow shit awaiting ‘development’. Visitors can sleep in the attic – this is illegal and none too comfortable, but it suits me – and, yes, there is a bathroom. There is a proper cold larder too and an open fire and underfloor central heating.

  I was impatient to get settled. I finally moved in on 16 February 2007, although at that point there was no kitchen sink and no bath; I still had to balance up a plank to get through the front door; the Internet connection did not connect; and I was broke. It took the rest of the spring and summer to get the work finished. It was not a peaceful or a silent time.

  But I had learned a lot in the previous decade.

  After her twelve years in the Tibetan mountains Tenzin Palmo, the British Buddhist nun, commented:

&nb
sp; There are many approaches, many ways. What is unrealistic, however, is to become a mother or a businesswoman and at the same time expect to be able to do the same kind of practices designed for hermits … Whether one is a monk, a nun, a hermit or a businesswoman, at one level it’s irrelevant. The practice of being in the moment, of opening the heart, can be done wherever we are … It’s just that it’s easier to do in a conducive environment away from external and internal distractions … The advantage of going to a cave is that it gives you time and space to be able to concentrate totally. The practices are complicated [and] require much time and isolation. Going into retreat gives the opportunity for the food to cook. You have to put all the ingredients into a pot and stew it up. And you have to have a constant heat. If you keep turning the heat on and off it is never going to be done. Retreat is like living in a pressure cooker. Everything gets cooked much quicker.8

  I want that ‘pressure cooker’ and that means that I need to look at the practicalities with a certain caustic realism.

  I am learning not to be too sentimental about silence. The glorious intensity of those six weeks in Skye is not, in the long term, sustainable. You can, of course, get more silence than I have, but only at the price of less solitude. In any case you can do a surprising number of things without speaking; one of the seldom mentioned advantages of supermarkets is that you can shop without exchanging a word, smiling at the staff ’s mechanical greetings and fixing your eyes on your list in order to avoid eye contact with anyone. But for me, in the end there is something bogus about that, and rude. I am walking, say, alone and high on a narrow track, the day has been silent except for the sound of streams and a distant caw from a crow – and lo and behold, coming towards me is a group of cheerful walkers. I know they will say ‘hello’ and what do I do? Duck behind a rock, although I know they will have seen me? Pass by on the other side, with a haughty expression? Increase my pace and smile swiftly as I pass? It is less ‘noisy’ and more rational to say ‘hello’ back.

  The reality is that it is impossible to live in complete silence for very long in the developed world in the twenty-first century without various and extensive negotiations, in part with oneself.* And particularly if you need to earn a living.

  I used to worry about this, or even feel that when people asked me how I manage that I was being accused somehow of cheating. I kept telling myself that if only I were better organised, more disciplined, stronger willed, I would have to speak less but, reading and thinking about silence, I came to realise just how much talk there was inside even the great famous silences. Everything we know about the early Christian hermits, many of whom could not read or write and most of whom chose not to, we know from the conversations they had: the contemporary records of their lives and spiritual adventures are called The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Almost all the solitaries – even the anchorites like Julian of Norwich – had servants or disciples who negotiated the outside world for them. Thomas Merton tells us about the deep silence of Gethsemane and then – in a casual aside – mentions that he was ‘helping the abbot with translating for foreign visitors’. And where there is pure silence, it is always serviced by someone else who is not silent. Even Tenzin Palmo, in her three years of complete silence high in Himalayas, had someone who, although he did not speak or break her retreat, nonetheless brought her, by pre-arrangement, necessary survival supplies. I have come to the decision, for both economic and ideological reasons, that I will be my own servant, service my own silence and accept the technical breaches of silence that this entails.

  So the questions have really become about how much silence I can create, and how much of the intensity and beauty of Skye I can bring into dailiness, into a continuing life that is both rich and sustainable.

  I have inevitably given a good deal of attention to the practical problems of living in silence. The whole business of how I actually manage my life is something that interests people very much. In my experience silent housekeeping requires a high level of commitment and a hefty dose of good administration; the latter is not something that comes very easily to me.

  At a very basic level, for example, it is important to eat properly and this requires shopping. However, I live nearly fifteen miles from any proper food shops. I do go to church every Sunday, but on Sundays the only shop that is open is the supermarket. How should I balance the ecological and neighbourly imperatives to use local shops and local produce against the carbon damage of taking the car out during the week and the loss of silence and stillness that this entails? Now I try to do a big shop once every four weeks – and do without whatever I fail to remember to buy. On Sundays after Mass I buy milk and sometimes fruit and vegetables and I collect free-range eggs from a farm on the way home. I try to think about it – to pay precisely enough attention to eating and house-cleaning and the rest of the administration of my home and life so that it takes up the least possible time. Mostly I do not succeed.

  At the moment I am aiming for 80 per cent silence on the grounds that it is good to have a target. Two days a week I unplug the phone and with it the Internet and email; I would really like a third day and am working on that, but it takes a good deal of efficient time management and forethought. I try to limit all social activities to a maximum of six days a month, but it can be tricky, because unexpected things happen and people other than I have needs and desires too. I comfort myself with one of my favourite stories from the desert hermits:

  A brother came to a certain solitary, who gave him a meal and ate and talked with him. When he was leaving, he said, ‘Forgive me, father, for I have made thee break thy rule.’ He answered and said, ‘My rule is to receive thee with hospitality and send thee away in peace.’9

  I pray for about three hours a day; for much of this time, when I can, I try to hold that apophatic imageless silence, that complete emptiness, but often I need to ground myself in biblical meditation, in other sorts of imagery and in the discipline of the psalms or other texts. I do it for myself, in truth, but I also pray for others and pray that my silence may be useful somehow in the noisy world.

  I earn my keep, I walk, I read, I do my sewing. I think about silence. I am extremely happy in my little house. But although I am happy and hopeful, or perhaps because I am happy and hopeful, I still find silence deeply mysterious.

  Over and over again, for nearly ten years now, I go back to Janet Batsleer’s letter and wrestle with it: ‘Silence is the place of death, of nothingness … All silence is waiting to be broken.’

  Silence is a lack, an absence, a void – silence is the negation of speech, and therefore of meaning and freedom. In the beginning was the word. I go on being certain that this is wrong, but I cannot pin down quite why it is wrong. I have been collecting and experiencing so many strongly positive instances of silence, moments in human experience where there is no speech, no noise, but clearly no sense of loss or deficiency. I don’t mean just my own ‘happy moments’ of silence, but more widely acknowledged cultural moments.

  There is the exquisite intimacy between mother and infant at the end of the night feed, when the baby is contented, on the edge of sleep, and you are there with it and with yourself.

  There are those awed responses to certain demonstrations of the ‘natural’ world, in which words, and even normal emotional reactions, fail or rather step back from the experience. Some natural phenomena, even though silent in themselves, tend to bring on sensations of peace or contentment, rather than awe and ineffability. For the full effect of the sublime to work there has to be an element of power and of something essentially inhumane. Different phenomena do it for different individuals: mountain ranges, meteor showers, large waterfalls and long views from high cliffs are examples of the kind of silencing events I am thinking of here.

  There is the positive psychoanalytic silence that seems to allow a new kind of self-knowing and recreation of the wholeness and integrity of an individual.

  There is the aftermath of seriously good sex, when you are with
the other person without demand or need. In fact, there is a silence around sex, which is quite other than the silence of shame. There is something about sexual passion that language cannot comprehend or represent and at its best there is no reason to try.

  There is the silence of mystical experience, in which the silence becomes the content as well as the context and which is felt to be ineffable, somehow impossible to pull into language.

  There is the silent, even ecstatic, euphoria which so frequently precedes psychotic, and indeed epileptic, episodes. I feel that perhaps this is the same silence as mystical silence, but contemporary culture has rigorously separated them.

  There is the particular silence in some sorts of reading where a balanced communication is created and the generous-hearted writer opens the silent space for the attentive reader and the two of them work (or perhaps play) at meaning-making together.

  There is the silence in listening to music – especially instrumental music (as opposed to the human voice). Music is complicated in this context. If music is an aural language ‘intelligible but not translatable’ as Anthony Storr has called it, or even more crudely a set of sounds, in what sense can it be called ‘silent’? This is why I have emphasised listening to music, rather than the music itself. A silencing of the heart and mind, and an inability to speak about its meaning, emotional or intellectual, while being very clear that it has an important meaning, is a common response to certain kinds of music, and it is one of the cultural experiences that people come up with frequently if you ask them about positive experiences of silence. Sometimes I think that music mediates between silence and language; sometimes I see it as a particular language of its own – like BSL (the most common hand/eye, as opposed to mouth/ear, language of the British deaf community) or mathematics.