A Time to Every Purpose

Friday, February 8, 2008

BOOK REVIEW

A Time to Keep Silence
Patrick Leigh Fermor
NYRB Classics, 2007

By Emily Ghods

Do not speak unless you can improve the silence.
—Proverbs

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of God.
—Emerson

Two weeks ago, The Dartmouth Mirror released an issue about the neuroticism, perfectionism, and compulsion of Dartmouth students. At about the same time, I began reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence, with the thought that I might review it in The Dartmouth Review: A perfect coincidence. Yes, I’ll concede the Mirror’s point that many Dartmouth students are perfectionists—a phenomenon that may not be unique to Dartmouth kids specifically, but to upper-middle class ivy-urchins, New England gangstas, and the like, generally—but I want to up the ante a little bit and say that their compulsion extends beyond the straight-As, leafy meals washed down with Red-bull, and size two J-brand jeans: such neuroticism informs our so-called gift for gab. Some of us, regrettably, don’t know how to shut up, and some of us don’t want to. Worse, our social development, such as it is, doesn’t allow for a dimes worth of difference between being graceful and socially domineering. And of course, those drunk on their own gift for gab have many of us running for cover to the refuge of say the Tower Room, the quietest place on campus, or other safe harbors.

And this is why Fermor’s book, though such an inspirational gem, will be understood as little more than tossing pearls before swine at a place like Dartmouth. Fermor, born in 1915, was the unacclaimed English-Irish Marco Polo of his generation. During his teen-years and early adulthood, he traveled across Europe, from Paris to Constantinople, to the Greek Islands and archaic Crete. He wrote about his travels in several books, and one of his travelogues is the tiny book A Time to Keep Silence, which was originally published fifty years ago, and has been republished recently to great acclaim. His book is the edited version of letters he wrote to the woman who would later become his wife, and it details his travails across four of the greatest monasteries of Europe: the Abbey of St. Wandrille, Solesman, La Grande Trappe, and Cappadocia.

Fermor’s book is more than a mere travelogue, however. It is a very personal journey, an inward turn; he discovers and revels in the awesome mysteries of silence—now, so conspicuously missing from our lives in the secular modern world. Fermor’s original purpose in seeking out these monasteries, the first three in France and the last one in Turkey, was to locate himself in the undisturbed, the axis mundi of learning wherein he could finish another one of his books. Rather than sequester himself off from the monks and their daily rituals, however, Fermor was completely consumed by the monastic way of life, and encountered truths about his life that have remained with him since. The path he takes, both inward and outward, is a beautiful one, and its beauty is only underlined by Fermor’s clear and crystal prose, “in the seclusion of a cell—an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual and long solitary walks in the woods—the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.”

But the journey was not easy. Transitioning from the bustling and libertine vibe of Paris, where he was living beforehand, to the quiet but benevolent spirit of his first stop, the Benedictine monastery of St. Wandrille’s, was a difficult change indeed. The history of St. Wandrille’s Abbey began in the 7th century, and proceeded in such a way that made the Abbey one of the foremost centers of religious learning and theological scholarship. As a Benedictine order, the monastery held prayer, work and reflection as its ultimate tenets, with those three principles directing a monk through the sublime power of the sacred.

Initially, Fermor was overwhelmed by the archaic splendor of it all: “The place had an aura of immense antiquity. Grey stone walls soared to a Gothic timber roof, and, above the Abbot’s table, a giant crucifix was suspended. As the monks tucked their napkins into their collars with a simultaneous and uniform gesture, an unearthly voice began to speak in Latin from the shadows overhead and, peering towards it, I caught sight, at the far end of the refectory, of a pillared bay twenty feet up which projected like a martin’s nest, accessible only by some hidden stairway.” He’s not in Paris anymore, that’s for sure. The monks themselves wore indistinguishable garb and the veil of equanimity in their visage. “No seismic shock of hilarity or hanger or fear could ever, I felt, have disturbed the tranquil geography of those monastic features.” In a time when people fret about their identities and identity crises, these monks offer the nirvana of anonymity and the effacement of the struggle of the self.

But Fermor is dismayed by the monastic lifestyle, “I had asked for quiet and solitude and peace, and here it was; all I had to do now was to write. But an hour passed, and nothing happened. It began to rain over the woods outside, and a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke.” His depression, compounded by insomnia, would persist for several more days until finally he fell into a sleep so deep that, when he woke up, he felt a new life dawning before him—a sort of baptism, or resurrection. He was able to look past the smoky anxiety of desire, the banal vice of which accompanies the modern-life lived, “the automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.”

He was now aware of a freedom just past the chaos of mental cravings. What Fermor quickly discovered was that monasteries are not merely old, but that their history connects them to worlds beyond that of the Cloister walls and courtyards. Initially, Fermor mistook this feeling for an all-encompassing sense of death. “My first feelings in the monastery changed: I lost the sensation of circumambient and impending death, of being by mistake locked up in a catacomb...the Abbey became the reverse of a tomb.” That is, in silence and reflection, Fermor discovered being and life. In ceasing to resist the world, he found eternity.

Of all of the monasteries he visited, in his epilogue, Fermor admits that his experience at Wandrille was by far the most arousing, staying with him forever after. Life, with a capital L he discovered, reached its apotheosis not in Paris or London or New York, but in the vast emptiness of a monastery. The monks weren’t running from life, therefore—on the contrary, it was rather the busy minds of those unable to endure the silence and the ceter of life and therefore created the noise of anxious thoughts and fidgety hands that flee the center. (I’m reminded of a line from T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, Four Quartets: “human kind / cannot bear much reality.” In fact, the entire first cut of Eliot’s Four Quartets, subtitled Burnt Norton, is a meditation on what I imagine monastic life to be, now that I’ve read Fermor’s book and am better informed on the subject.) Fermor writes, “At St. Wandrille I was inhabiting at last a tower of solid ivory, and I, not the monks, was the escapist. For my hosts, the Abbey was a springboard into eternity; for me, a retiring place to write a book and spring more effectively back into the maelstrom. Strange that the same habitat should prove favourable to ambitions so glaringly opposed.”

Most of the monasteries in Europe remain silent even today, but for reasons different than those discussed above. After the protestant reformation and persecution, the ideological war of the Jacobins, and the more modern influence of Marxism and communism, many of the monasteries were laid waste physically and philosophically: some never recovered, others did. The result has been that sorrow and emptiness sometimes peep into cloistered courtyards, replacing what should be the eternal center of being and stillness, the axis mundi of existence. Fermor writes, “something of this elegiac sadness overhangs the rock-monasteries of Cappadocia.” Embedded in Cappadocia, in Turkey, is the historical locus of early Christendom: in that wilderness, St. Paul, St. Anthony, St. Jerome and others, found their still and mysterious sanctum sanctorum as they lay the foundation for Christianity. Now it is a shadow of what it was and mosque and minaret add an exotic element to the aesthetic and history of the landscape. Fermor’s concluding words bespeak the awful beauty of so many of the medieval mystics, “the air was vitreous, intractable, crystalline. The whole world seemed inside-out.”

And yet, even now, having fallen on hard times, many of the monks remain benevolent and happy. When Fermor asked a monk what living in a monastery was like; the monk paused to think for a moment, and then asked Fermor, “have you ever been in love?” Fermor said yes and then described “a large Fernandel smile spread across his face. ‘Eh bien,’ he said, ‘c’est exactement pareil...’” Living in a monastery is exactly like being in love.

Fermor’s postscript, written when he is living back in England, contemplates and speculates over the monasteries that once were part of his island’s religious flavor, having long since passed into history. Though physically gone, their wisdom remains and reminds us of their “message of tranquility to quieten the mind and compose the spirit.” This wisdom, though undermined by centuries of bloodshed war and conflict, transcends the mendacity of life—with its wars of mind and body—and offers a peace, and a solace to our busy time. n

A Time to Every Purpose

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