A Book of Silence (25 page)
Authors: Sara Maitland
But during my time in Weardale I discovered a new way of reading. I read more slowly and therefore in a sense I read less, but I read more carefully and attentively. I felt less excited by plot, tension and pace, and more engaged with language and mood and place. I started reading more poetry and enjoying it more. I want to say that I learned to read more silently, but also I read with a sense of the mystery of what reading is and how deeply and silently it has shaped our sense of self.
1
Janet Batsleer, personal communication.
2
Genesis 1:1–3.
3
John 1:1.
4
Genesis 1:1–5.
5
John 1:1–3.
6
P. B. Shelley,
Prometheus Unbound
(1820).
7
In Greek there are two words that are translated by a single English word – time.
Kronos
means time in its literal and measured-out sense – as in chronology or chronometer.
Kairos
means time in the sense of ‘the right or opportune moment’, an undetermined period of time in which something takes place. Naming their ur-god Kronos (rather than Kairos) therefore has a metaphorical depth that is quite hard to express in English.
8
Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
9
Almost the only personification of silence I have seen is a picture of
her
in a nineteenth-century mural in the old British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
10
George Steiner,
Real Presence
(Faber & Faber, 1989).
11
OED
. Both these possibilities are mentioned, although they are rejected.
12
Figures comparing the 1991 with the 2001 census. The present population of the Scottish islands is now just under 100,000.
13
C. S. Lewis,
The Screwtape Letters
(Geoffrey Bles, 1942) reissued Fontana, 1973, p.114.
14
Ernest Gellner,
The Psychoanalytic Movement
(Paladin, 1985), p. 154.
15
Anthony Storr,
The School for Genius
(André Deutsch, 1988), p. xiii. This excellent book has been reissued in a revised edition with the simpler title
Solitude
(HarperCollins, 1994).
16
Revelation 8:1.
17
Philip Howard in
The Times
.
18
John 19:9
19
Attributed to Bodhidharma (fifth century
CE
) and first recorded in
Ts’u-
t’ing shih-yuan
(1108).
20
Douglas Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach
, (Harvester Press, 1979) p. 248.
21
Ibid., p. 251.
22
Ibid., p. 255.
23
Pierre Lacout, 1969 www.quaker.org. uk.
24
John Russell, personal letter.
25
Evelyn Underhill,
Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s
Spiritual Consciousness
(1911).
26
Jenny Uglow,
Nature’s Engraver
(Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 99.
27
Saint Augustine,
Confessions
, vi:3, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin, 1961).
28
The principal scholarly positions are laid out by Balogh in 1927 and Knox in 1968. In
A History of Reading
(Viking, 1996), Alberto Manguel lays out the case for the lay reader. In 2007 in the
Guardian
James Fenton challenged this, but I remain persuaded by Manguel.
29
1Timothy 2:11–14.
30
Adam Phillips,
Promises, Promises
(Faber & Faber, 2000), pp. 373–5.
31
William Dalrymple,
From the Holy Mountain
(HarperCollins, 1997), p. 290.
*
I think the change of preposition is fairer to the modern story: it is not a rerun, whatever some Christian apologists would like to think – it is a brand-new story. It just has some remarkably similar features …
*
Chthonic is a word that deserves wider use. It is derived from the Greek
khth
ō
n
(earth; pertaining to the Earth; earthy). It is one of several Greek words for ‘earth’; it typically refers to the interior of the soil, rather than the living surface of the land (Gaia) or the land as territory (
khora
). It is usually restricted to discussions of Greek religion, although Jung uses it in the sense that I am here. Essentially it carries a very similar meaning to ‘primitive’ but without any pejorative associations.
*
‘Logical’ derives from the Greek
logos
, which means ‘word’. Logical thinking means thinking amenable to the conscious processes of language.
*
There is an amusing irony here. When I first started meditating seriously I used to sit not on a
zafu
but on one volume of the Compact Edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
. Same colour, same height, but full of words!
S
o for the three years that followed my Skye adventure I was busy and engaged pursuing these ideas and experiences of silence. But simultaneously and woven into these various forays into the silence and lack of it out there in the world, something else began to happen to me; a more domestic and intimate kind of silence welled up in my consciousness and started to counterbalance this more intellectual research.
One of the things I discovered at this point was that there were bits and pieces of silence woven into the fabric of each day and I began to try to keep an eye out for them and move into them as swiftly and quietly as possible. Some of these moments I had to create for myself – unplug the phone, maintain a pattern of meditation, walk where or when there are least likely to be other people, say ‘no’ even to delightful invitations to work or social events – but some were just
there
, waiting for me as it were.
Dawn became one of those occasions. I found myself waking earlier and earlier in the mornings. At sunrise, as at sunset, particularly in the summer months, the wind often drops, so that even in very exposed places there can be a period of great calm, especially if the weather is clear. I became attentive to those early mornings, which came so gradually. The stars would fade and the black sky turn indigo. The distance emerged, colourless out of the darkness. The sky would change colour: indigo, grey, cream. The view opened out and away mysteriously. The horizon line like a shadow separated the sky from the moor. The sky would go on changing: grey, cream, peach. Although the sun rose to
my left in the east, because of the conformation of the hills, the first sight of it was to my right; the western hills would catch fire first, the sunshine suddenly falling on them in a splash of brightness. The sky would still be changing: cream, peach, white, palest blue. On the moor there were very few songbirds, so this extraordinary silence was not broken by that joyful but insistent clamour, but occasionally there would be buzzards, hunting high, floating against the enormous blue. Sometimes the rising sun would catch them from below and the moth-markings of their under-wings would light up suddenly, tawny gold as they rode the bright air. On some lucky mornings there was an extra bonus: overnight the valley would have filled with a thick mist, which did not rise as high as the cottage, or as the moor the far side of the dale, so I could contemplate the glory of this making of the day, as though above and outside the world, looking out over a shimmering lake of mist, barely stirring in the dawn calm.
Perhaps it was because of thinking so much about creation and the land or perhaps it was simply that living in more silence deepens an engagement with topography and ecology, but in Weardale I found in myself a growing fascination with and love for natural history. There does seem to be a link between what is usually called Nature Writing – that genre of literature which developed in Europe in the late eighteenth century and has been particularly highly developed in the United States, which brings together scientific knowledge and intense careful personal observation and experience – and solitude. Gilbert White, a clergyman and significant naturalist, in Selborne, Hampshire and Thomas Bewick, the wood engraver who grew up in the dales where I now lived, were both fully aware that their habit of solitary walking in the countryside was the key to their powers of observation and their emotional response to what they saw. Henry Thoreau made the connection explicit early on, writing that it was practically impossible to love both company and nature.
In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean … But
alone
in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by
rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are [my italics].
1
A century later Thomas Merton experienced a similar development. Because of his extensive and continuous journal writing Merton is someone in whom it is possible to see an idea or imaginative commitment growing over a period of time – whereas with most writers we see only their reflections on that growth. As he moved further into his hermit lifestyle he became increasingly conscious of and engaged with the natural history of his silent habitat – the woods of Kentucky, within the grounds of his monastery. Being Merton, he helpfully, if laboriously, spelled it out:
Perhaps we [contemplative monks] have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, to know how the sky is grey, paler in the south, with patches of blue in the southwest, with snow on the ground, the thermometer at 18, and a cold wind making your ears ache. I have a real need to know these things because I am myself part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place, and a day in which I have not shared truly in all this is no day at all.
2
I now found that this was becoming true for me too; I wanted both to see better and to know more about what I was seeing. In some ways there was nothing new in this; although I had, like most British schoolchildren, alas, been educated within a system that maintained the rigorous division between arts and sciences, and I had most definitely been ‘arts’, during the 1990s I became profoundly interested in certain areas of science – particularly cosmology and astrophysics, palaeontology and some sorts of theoretical mathematics.
3
However, these had been quite abstract
ideas; no one gets to look inside a Black Hole slowly, carefully, quietly and then relate the experience of seeing and feeling it to the theoretical knowledge we have about it. This was a new desire – to learn to see what was really going on around me.
There was a more mundane reason for this new fascination. When I left Northamptonshire I had assumed that I would go on gardening, which had met so many of my longings for growth and beauty and knowledge and exercise. Alas, it turned out to be well-nigh impossible to make the sort of garden I wanted to make. This was partly because of the extreme weather conditions – the house was not called Weatherhill for no reason. There is a traditional gardening wisdom that claims you cannot make a proper garden over 250 metres above sea level in the UK and Weatherhill was a great deal higher that that. I am not actually convinced that this is true and I might have found some way of negotiating with the weather had it not been for the rabbits. As Peter Rabbit learned, it is not possible for rabbits and humans to share a garden. I find it hard to describe how many rabbits there were; I could look out of the window and count fifty at a time – they kept the grass beautifully mown, but they mowed everything else you might want to grow. (Except daffodils. Rabbits do not eat daffodils. In fact, there is a range of plants rabbits are said not to eat and I kept sending off for or downloading lists of them, but it was very discouraging. The rabbits and I seemed to have much the same tastes when it came to favourite plants and, moreover, I frequently found that the rabbits had not read the lists.) However, all my attempts to exclude them proved fatuous – the drystone wall surrounding the property was very old, it had fallen and been repaired too often and often not very well, so that its base was too spread out to put in effective fencing. (To exclude rabbits effectively you need to get your wire mesh well underground.) I invited youths with ferrets to come and hunt my rabbits; I invited youths with guns to come and practise on the rabbits. One afternoon we killed thirty-six rabbits and the next morning there were just as many in the so-called garden. I was defeated and gave up.
