It is, perhaps, fitting that after the brassy clamour of
Christmas with its flashy lights and shiny baubles, its carols and jangly
Christmas songs and the inevitable dearth of (frankly dreadful) perfume adverts,
that my first book of the New Year was the meditative A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland. It is a book which has been
sitting on my bedside table for, oh, probably around three years waiting for me
to get around to reading it. It is a shame it has taken me so long to get to
it.
Part meditation, part journey of discovery, part love affair,
A Book of Silence follows Sara Maitland’s long and, sometimes, difficult
journey into a more hermetic kind of life. The book begins where the story
ends, on completion of her new home in the wilds of Scotland where her life of
(semi) silence is to begin. Here Maitland describes her new home:
“It is early morning.
It is a morning of extraordinary radiance – and unusually up here there is
practically no wind. It is almost perfectly silent: some small birds are
chirping occasionally and a little while ago a pair of crows flapped past
making their raucous cough noises. It is the first day of October so the curlew
and the oystercatchers have gone down to the seashore. In a little while one
particular noise will happen – the two-carriage Glasgow-to-Stranraer train will
bump by on the other side of the valley; and a second one may happen – Neil may
rumble past on his quad bike after seeing to his sheep on the hill above the
house; if he does he will wave and I will wave back. That is more or less it.”
Through the book Maitland describes her boisterous
background; coming from a large family in which silence was discouraged, to
boarding school, to a marriage and family life spent in noisy vicarages. It was
only following the end of her marriage that Maitland began to explore the pull
of a quieter kind of life. Not surprisingly, she met with some resistance from
family and friends, and the words of one friend in particular pivot through the
book. She refers to a letter from Janet
Batsleer received at the beginning of her journey which reads:
“Silence is the place
of death, of nothingness. In fact there is no silence without speech. There is
no silence without the act of silencing, someone having been shut up, put bang
to rights, gagged, told to hold their tongue, had their tongue cut out, had the
cat get their tongue, lost their voice. Silence is oppression and speech,
language, spoken or written is freedom.[...]
[...] That silence is
a place of non-being, a place of control, from which all our yearning is to
escape. All the social movements of repressed people in the second part of the
twentieth century have claimed ‘coming to language’ and ‘coming to voice’ as
necessary to their politics...In the beginning was the Word...Silence is
oppression. It is ‘the word’ that is the beginning of freedom.
All silence is waiting
to be broken.”
There is truth in those words, and yet Maitland felt there
was something missing from the story. Why is it in Western culture that the
idea of silence is considered such a negative, an absence, an abnegation
whereas there are so many stories from history, particularly those from explorers
or adventurers, those living hermetical lives, or the more meditative approach
of Buddhists, or even the ‘art in the silence of nature’ views of the Romantic
movement which suggest otherwise. Through reading, through experimentation,
through making changes to her own life, Maitland comes to explore the uncharted
domain which is silence. What she discovers is that there are many forms of
silence, that it is true that silence, when imposed, is a form of torture or
control but when freely chosen can be a source of great joy. There is the
silence of the desert which is vast and open and self-dissolving. There is the
silence of the solitary walker which is strengthening, and the silence of the
solitary adventurer which has the power to transform or to destroy.
It is a fascinating book, full of curiosity and honesty and
reverence. I think it is the reverence that comes over the most strongly.
Maitland is a confirmed Catholic, and this pervades the book without
overwhelming it. I think she is able to balance her personal faith against a
more (if not entirely) scientific examination of the experience and scope of
silence.
What has surprised me the most is how reading this relatively
short and slightly meandering book has given me cause for a great deal of
thought. It has also led me to conduct my own experiment in silence, one in
which I will try to live more quietly. I have observed, on more than one occasion,
that those evenings spent in companionable silence are some of the most
restorative and enjoyable though I rarely create the space to exploit them in
my ever-so-busy life. I expect it will not be easy, but I do think it will be
enriching. I cannot retreat to a hermit’s hut on the Scottish moors, but I don’t
think (however desirable it may seem) that such extreme measures are necessary.
However, I intend to try to speak less, to listen more, to be in the world more. I am only hoping I can keep hold of this
feeling long enough to make it a habit. It has already given me a sense of considerable peace.
What the book has also helped me to uncover is some thoughts
I’ve been having, generally, about speaking and language (though the two are
not the same thing, I know. Bear with me). Too often, I think, people speak
because what they are really seeking is to be listened to. I know I have done
this (and will do this) myself, I know many people do. I would not, and do not,
criticise people for doing so. How else are we to reach out to others if not
through speech? At the same time the very act of speaking negates the idea of
listening, of receiving. It is an outward reaching activity. Rarely, too, do
people say what they mean. Too often conversation involves sharing of
insignificant facts: what someone had for dinner, what they watched on TV. What
they really mean is listen to me, care
about me. In this long, lonely existence in which we are trapped inside our
own minds, there is a kind of desperation for connection, for validation.
Sometimes I think I speak because of a terrible fear that unless I speak,
unless I make that momentary connection with somebody, I don’t exist. But at
the same time the act of speaking interferes with my experience of being in the
world. In the act of speaking, I cease to be.
A large part of this, I think, is down to the fact that
language is an inadequate vehicle for expressing the experience of our
existence, of the world. I think that language is a cage with which we try to
imprison our experience, define it, set it down in measurable and repeatable
formulas. It is a means of control. But it is also a lie. It is not a cage made
of steel but of smoke. I say to someone I
have a black cat and in the saying there is an intellectual leap, that the
other person will understand what is meant by I and cat and have and black and yet there is nothing to say that my perception of what
constitutes a cat is the same as the next person’s or the next. I say I love you and I already know even whilst saying it that love comes in many forms and shades, yet the same simple phrase, somehow, covers them all. It is an
illusion. It is also the best we have, but then I think of all the experiences
for which there are no words, for which the words that are available to me are
mere shadows of what I think or feel or experience. I think of all those times
of meaningful silence, moments of unspoken (but felt) love, or awe or confusion.
I think this is part of why people turn to poetry, because poetry is language
stretched to its limits, stretched beyond the mere meaning of the words into
something closer to the intangible truth of what we feel or experience.
Similarly music occupies this space; music is beyond words and yet somehow can
come closest to expressing the breadth of what words cannot express.
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