A Time to Keep Silence

A Time to Keep Silence  – Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor ranks with Rebecca West and Robert Byron as one of the best English travel writers who wrote between the wars. As a teenager Leigh Fermor walked across Europe  and chronicled that sojourn from Holland to Turkey in two famous books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He spent WWII on Crete fighting with the partisans. After the war, in the middle 1950s, he visited Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France.

As the title implies, the writer values quiet and rest. This is about his arrival at Abbey of St. Wadrille de Fontanelle, not far from Rouen:

To begin with, I slept badly at night and fell asleep during the day, felt restless alone in my cell and depressed by the lack of alcohol, the disappearance of which had caused a sudden halt in the customary monsoon.  The most remarkable preliminary symptoms were the variations of my need of sleep.  After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug.  For two days, meals and the offices in the church--Mass, Vespers and Compline--were almost my most lucid moments.  Then began an extraordinary transformation: this extreme lassitude dwindled to nothing; night shrank to five hours of light, dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy and limpid freshness.  The explanation is simple enough: the desire for talk, movement and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment.  Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything.  No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.

Sleep deprivation is in fact “the common property of all our contemporaries.” I get exhausted just thinking how resignedly I – and most people I know - slog through “the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.”

The second monastery he stayed in La Grande Trappe, the Cistercian monastery in southern Normandy. The Trappist discipline was harsh, so much that he humbly concluded, “I was not in possession of any mental instrument with which to gauge and record my findings.”

The silence must have been hard for Leigh Fermor, considering that historian Max Hastings described him as “possibly the most brilliant conversationalist of his time, wearing his literacy light as wings, brimming over with laughter.” But it is in silence that we can finally encounter transcendence and we realize words can do only so much and no more. Every mystical tradition advocates silence as a path to the ineffable. Cultivating silence is difficult given a religious inclination toward making a joyful noise and a secular habit of gabbing to maintain relationships and flooding our skulls with digital input.

Having a tacked on feeling is the shortest third section, which is about the rock-cut monasteries in Cappadocia (Turkey). This cavil aside, I think that readers who are interested in the monastic experience would enjoy this. So would readers who get enthusiastic over a graceful style, if at times florid.