A Book of Silence (17 page)

As soon as he found the camp and his companions the
voice
disappeared, leaving him a sobbing, collapsed wreck.

In one sense this was a short ‘involuntary silence’ but the intensity of the experience – the altitude, the bizarre circumstances, the
extreme emotional trauma, the absolute uncertainty and above all the physical pain seem to have forced a high-speed version of the psychological effects of enforced silence on Simpson – and his book is by far the most distressing account of such an experience I know. It contains, in an intensified form, many of the effects of negative silence: as well as the voice hearing, he fell into confused ritualistic patterns of behaviour; he lost a normal sense of time; he experienced wild mood swings and an increasing loss of mind control.

Anthony Grey survived. He was a Reuters journalist in Peking at the height of the Cultural Revolution. In 1967 a ‘frenzied’ group of politicised Red Guards invaded his house at midnight, tortured and hanged his cat in front of him, daubed him with black paint and then kept him in isolation in his own basement, which the Chinese government described as a ‘restriction of movement’, for over two years. Essentially he was a political hostage – and at one level a well-chosen one because he was not a diplomat. His ‘solitary confinement’ was a peculiar sort of silence because at one level it was not silent at all. Grey set himself in the later stages of his ordeal to learn Chinese, but until then he had to listen endlessly to his guards talking together, singing and chanting the aphorisms from Mao’s
Little Red Book
, but no one spoke to him, he could not understand what they were saying and apart from two half-hour consular visits he spoke to no one during this time. In his account of the episode he speaks very movingly of the additional pressure that the constant noise, supervision and uncertainty imposed on him, while he himself was silenced. But, despite the differences, his account of his own emotions is surprisingly similar to Steele’s account of Selkirk’s. He describes a practical phase where you deal with the physical realities of your situation and test their boundaries, followed by an escalating inertia, overwhelming depression and a mounting sense of claustrophobia, paranoia, terror and fantasy, and an increasing dependence on ritual – in his case daily prayers and yoga (interestingly, much the same routine as Moitessier seems to have adopted in his joyful and free isolation) as well as a strange, almost Gnostic ritual numbering and naming of days.

In these particular cases not only did the individuals survive, but so did their stories. Simpson and Grey are both writers; Selkirk and Marguerite de la Rocque encountered writers who had an interest in their stories and the ability to tell them. There are other examples, too, that we know about, and innumerable ones that we cannot know or tell.

Obviously there are far fewer stories from those who went into a silent place or a silent period and did not survive.

Chris McCandless did not survive. A young American from a prosperous east-coast American family, McCandless ‘dropped out’ after graduating from college in 1990 and two years later was found dead in the Alaskan outback – the autopsy gave starvation as the most probable cause of death. He had been living ‘in retreat’, alone and in silence in a derelict bus, endeavouring to live ‘off the land’ in an extreme terrain, for four months before his death. In
Into the Wild
¹⁹
Jon Krakauer has made a bold attempt to explore those final months.
Into the Wild
is an extraordinary meditation on solitude, the call of the wild and particularly the seductive thrill of peril, adversity, and what he calls ‘Tolstoyan’ asceticism and renunciation. Krakauer, a journalist of extreme adventure, incorporates into his book detail of his own experiences and those of other modern ‘wandering hermits’, and despite the different context and intention that he and his characters had from mine, I find this book both moving and helpful.

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:

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.