Sara Maitland doesn’t grow her own vegetables; she doesn’t knit; she wouldn’t want to do without central heating. She smokes. She spent all her life to the age of 50 talking, first as a member of a large and noisy family, then as a writer, lecturer, and activist living in London. She’s not the sort of person you’d expect to go in for radical solitude.
But to Maitland, as she explains in her intelligent and engaging “A Book of Silence,” solitude is not primarily an escape from the hectic pace of modern life. It’s an adventure and a challenge: how far can she go? “It was not peace and contentment that I craved,” she writes. Instead, she was after “that awed response to certain phenomena of the ‘natural’ world in which words, and even normal emotional reactions, fail or rather step away from the experience and there is a silence that is powerful, harsh and essentially inhumane. […] I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime.”
Maitland (1950) is a well-known British writer whose books include novels, short stories, an oral history of the 1960s, and works of feminist theology. Born into a wealthy family and raised in London and Scotland, she studied at Oxford, where one of her fellow students, the later American president Bill Clinton, introduced her to feminism when he took her to hear Germaine Greer. She married an Anglican vicar and had two children.
In the early 1990s, Maitland’s life began to change. Her children left home. Her marriage broke up. She began having trouble writing fiction. She moved from London to a village in the country; she converted to Catholicism. Living alone for the first time, she found herself becoming more interested in the act of prayer. She began to perform a kind of contemplative meditation that she saw as a way of “trying to empty one’s mind of its egotistical concerns in an attempt to align oneself with reality.” She felt that silence was helping her to see things as they were.
Being alone was such a revelation to her that she decided to see what would happen if she spent less time with other people, unplugged the phone and Internet connection (at least a day or two a week), and began actively to seek solitude. A friend, playing devil’s advocate, wrote her that silence is “the place of death, of nothingness. […] All silence is waiting to be broken.” But Maitland did not experience silence as a negative condition. Instead, she discovered “a stillness of heart and mind which is not a void but a rich space.”
She decided to try spending a longer period of time on her own. She rented a cottage on the Isle of Skye and spent 40 days and 40 nights there alone, walking, reading, writing and listening for the silence. She found that her senses became intensified, her emotions more powerful. She thought she heard people singing in the sound of the wind. She felt joy, exultation, contentment, and sometimes an “exhilarating sense of peril” that had to do with being close to the emotional edge.
Later, in her own house, she had an enforced experience with silence when a March snowstorm took the phone lines down and trapped her indoors for ten days. Aside from fearing that she would run out of cigarettes, she found herself unnerved. She feared that “the silence was hollowing me out and leaving me empty and naked.” She devotes one chapter in “A Book of Silence” to the dangers of solitude, which include madness and suicide. She reminds us that solitary confinement is also a form of torture.
The book is not all about Maitland’s own experience: she prefers to study other people’s writing on silence, and to offer her erudite observations on various aspects of solitude. She cites polar explorers, solo round-the-world sailors, and idealistic young Chris McCandless, who went alone into the Alaskan wilderness and died. She writes about the Christian hermits who lived on isolated Irish islands in the seventh and eighth centuries. She spares a thought for the loneliness of lighthouse keepers.
She discusses Genesis, in which God creates by speaking, and questions this view of “silence as a lack, something that needs to be broken in order to let in life and meaning.” And why do we call it the “Big Bang,” she wonders, when there was nothing to make a sound?
Eventually, because the asceticism of the early Christian hermits was so important to the development of the Church, she tries spending a week in the Sinai Desert. The trip is surprisingly easy to arrange: she just books a desert meditation package tour. But she’s too much a northerner: the desert is just not her landscape. Nor does she take to Zen meditation or the Quaker custom of silent worship. Instead her search leads her to everyday sorts of contemplation, like birdwatching, which she describes as “paying attention to nothing in the hope that it would at any moment become a bird.”
One disadvantage of silence is that it’s bad for Maitland’s fiction: she can’t pray and come up with stories at the same time. She notes that there’s another kind of silence, too, one embraced by the English Romantic poets: a solitude whose aim was not losing oneself but expressing oneself, strengthening one’s creative individuality. When the two kinds of silence come into conflict, Maitland can’t choose. Nor does she choose complete stillness. At the book’s end, she moves to a lonely house in Scotland, but one with room for guests.
What’s interesting in all these accounts of silence, positive and negative, is how hard it is for humans to go for long periods without speaking to each other. Apparently our brains are built for interaction with others of our species, so much so that only unusual people, under special circumstances, can stand to be alone for any length of time. Maitland doesn’t manage to convince me that the lonely wilderness would be my cup of tea. Still, I enjoyed her dryly humorous description of her attempts at expanding the mind through solitude. “A Book of Silence” is like travel writing for the mental landscape: you can read it with pleasure and interest even if you never plan to visit the country it describes.
Monks, Explorers, and Solo Sailors
“A Book of Silence” mentions a number of people who have spent long periods of time in silence. They include:
Saint Anthony, third-century founder of Christian monasticism, famous for his long isolation in the desert and temptation by demons, often in the form of sexy dancing girls.
Saint Cuthbert, seventh-century English monk who used to “pray all night standing up to his neck in the frigid waters of the North Sea.” When he emerged, “otters would come and warm him with their tongues and fur.”
Thomas Merton, American Trappist, theologian, writer and poet who found in silence a “happiness that is so pure because it is simply not of one’s own making but sheer mercy and gift.”
Augustine Courtauld, a wealthy British adventurer who spent six months in a tent on Greenland in 1930-31.
Bernard Moitessier, French solo sailor who was on course to win a round-the-world competition in 1969 but enjoyed the peace of the sea so much that he gave up the race. Another racer was driven by the solitude to commit suicide.
Tenzin Palmo, a British Buddhist nun who spent three years in silence in the Himalayas. Her only comment was, “Well, it wasn’t boring.”
Trouw, 20 March 2010.