A book of silence
Out of this world
Nov 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The transcendental effects of silence
SARA MAITLAND’S book is not about peace and quiet. It is about silence as a practice, a discipline, a way of life. A cottage in the country will not do. It is more a matter of desert caves and open oceans, or, in her case, wild Scottish moorland. It’s the real deal.
How Ms Maitland gets to that point is a long story;a hunt for greater solitude and further remoteness along the length of Britain, with a detour to the Sinai desert, which she describes with a disarming sense of being thought mad. Her friends tell her she is, and she realises that the modern world has little room for serious silence seekers. It is not just that blasting radios, mobile phones, traffic and aeroplanes can be a source of despair. It is also the assumption that communication and relationships are central to all human life.（这句话没读懂）Ms Maitland knows this because she has been there. Brought up in a large, articulate family, she was nourished on argument. Her politics, her feminism and her religion all fed on talk. In such a context, silence becomes an absence, a mark of intellectual abdication, a rejection of humanity. Ms Maitland is a Roman Catholic convert and she is frank about her desire “to explore my own spirituality and deepen my growing sense of the reality of God”. But “A Book of Silence” is not primarily a work of theology. What interests the author is silence itself, wherever it leads. In the face of hostility and suspicion she wants to rehabilitate it, to discover its history, to call on witnesses from every tradition and every kind of circumstance—from early Christian hermits to the Romantic poets to single-handed sailors and mountaineers. It is both an analytical, theoretical fascination and a personal one, her reading and her experience locked together, each testing and illuminating the other. （这句也不懂）
So what is silence like? Ms Maitland does not pull her punches. At various times she has heard choirs singing in Latin from the bedroom. She has been spooked and sapped of energy. She has lost track of time, felt her identity dissolving, lost her inhibitions, forgotten to wash. She is not alone in this. Some of it appears in the literature on sensory deprivation. But it also appears in the literature of transcendence. Transcendent silence comes in many colors—and little of it is exactly silent. Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, shrieks with birds; the moors and mountains howl with wind and rain. Only the desert achieves it, but at a price. It was there, reading the sayings of the desert fathers and Athanasius’s “Life of St Anthony”, that Ms Maitland found herself most strangely moved. The hermits’ fierce self-abnegation, their holy selfemptying seemed to her thrilling. She wanted to be like them; she was transported. And yet. Readers will know Ms Maitland as a novelist and short-story writer. The silence of the desert has its uses for the mystic, but what she experienced as a writer was that it destroys not only the sense of self, but also the foundation of narrative art—a sense of time and memory.
In the end, it was on the moors of Galloway, her birthplace, and in the spirit of the Romantic poets that Ms Maitland was able to unite transcendence with a heightened rather than a diminished sense of individuality. She walked the hills like Dorothy Wordsworth and, like William Wordsworth, paddled a boat among the reflections of the stars, the dragonflies “coming up from the depths to meet the real dragonflies as they skim down onto the surface, which is the skin between the two worlds of air and water”.（这句也是看的我晕头转向）
There are several such passages of vivid recollection: the sudden feeling once, on some mountainside, of being physically connected to everything; waking on a night of swarming stars; watching the desert dawn; being transfixed by Mark Rothko’s paintings: “dense pools of silent energy”. One could wish for more. If there is one criticism of this book, it is that there is an occasional sense of strain, of intellectual contrivance. Ms Maitland’s own experience is sometimes drowned in commentary, as though she were unsure of her audience. She can afford to relax. Many of her readers, religious or not, will be more than halfway with her.（这一段也看的不是很明白）
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