A Book of Silence (42 page)

It is also surprisingly complicated to try to buy a house based on its topography. Despite the anxieties about Britain being overcrowded, there are in fact a substantial number of places in which it is possible to find the long views and austere lonely spaces that I craved. Indeed, in theory there was no reason why I had to stay in Britain at all. I could go anywhere in the world. In
Silent Dwellers
, her book about being a contemporary solitary, Barbara Erakko
Taylor tells a very funny story about her search for the perfect hermitage:

I did not want that level of complexity – I wanted to get a move on. Although I indulged in fantasies about Greece, about Morocco and even about New Zealand, I knew that was what they were. I decided to limit my choices and soon afterwards to limit them to Scotland. It was partly sensible, because property prices are lower, because I knew how things worked there and I would not be a ‘foreigner’. It was partly aesthetic – there is more of the sort of countryside I wanted there than anywhere else – and it was partly sentimental – I wanted to go home.

Of course it all got complicated. The problems co-ordinating selling a house in England and buying one in Scotland, where the system is different, are convoluted and anxiety-inducing. By the time I did finally sell Weatherhill it was midwinter; not the best time to find and buy an isolated rural property at the colder end of the country. As a temporary expedient I rented the lodge at the bottom of my mother’s drive. The idea originally was that I would just stay for a few months while I found myself the home I wanted, but in the end I stayed for over two years. It was a strange sort of regression,
really, back in the cosy, noisy embrace of my childhood family, and made more complicated by the fact that my mother was clearly beginning to fail. She had had major surgery the year before and was simply not getting better; she was increasingly dependent and demanding in ways that I had not anticipated. She had no intention whatsoever of going ‘gentle into that good night’. And why, indeed, should she? She had little interest in or respect for silence and she seriously disrupted mine.

There were two unqualified good things about living in the North Lodge. One was that it was genuinely small, and this gave me an opportunity to explore how much space and how much stuff I really did need to live happily.

I had now been through over a decade of getting rid of things. There is nothing like moving house frequently to make you address this. ‘Is this worth putting in yet another packing case?’ sharpens the moment of decision. In ten years I have shed over thirty yards of books and can honestly say I have seldom missed any of them.

I tend to be rather sceptical about an aesthetic of ‘simplicity’. Often those pure white loft spaces and their tasteful minimalism are not merely uncomfortable, they are expensive and time-consuming to maintain. They need more heating, more tidying, more cleaning. They are also noisier as there are fewer soft surfaces to absorb the natural echoes of normal living. Nonetheless, I began to recognise that silence and simplicity do have a connection. I found myself immensely encouraged and influenced by Henry Thoreau. As well as his best-known work,
Walden, or Life in the Woods
(1854), he also wrote with a sort of eccentric independence on various subjects, including abolitionism and civil disobedience. But one thing I found particularly helpful, and have increasingly adopted, is his economic theory. Thoreau argued that we should not calculate our wealth by how much we had or owned, but by how much free time we have. How much time there is left over when our needs have been met is the best measure of wealth. This means, of course, that the less you need the richer you are. Thoreau became a master of his own philosophy, and ended up needing only to do a couple of weeks of
physical labour a year in order to sustain his chosen lifestyle – he was in the millionaire category. I was beginning to learn that a life of silence and prayer is immensely time-demanding – and no one was going to pay me for that time. So, in Thoreau’s terms, the fewer things I felt I needed the richer I would be. I started asking myself about everything I thought about buying not, ‘Can I afford this?’ but, ‘Am I prepared to spend X hours working at something less interesting than silence in order to have it?’ It was amazing how often the answer was ‘no’.

At first this paring down of possessions was about silence in the simplest sense – I got rid of things that made noises. As I’ve explained, I never had a mobile phone to get rid of, but the television went very early on, before I even left Northamptonshire. Next I shed the radio and the speakers, and all the sound-generating programmes on the computer. I kept the car radio longer, but eventually it broke and I have not replaced it.

Soon I discovered that a person living alone in the country does not need a doorbell or a microwave oven and certainly has no real use for a tumble dryer. One of the things about this list is that, with the exception of a radio, these are all inventions of the last half-century. So I do understand why people started to accuse me of being a Luddite, but in fact I don’t think this is true – some modern inventions make silence a great deal simpler. Email is a wonderfully non-intrusive communication tool, a telephone answering machine means that I can unplug the phone without inconveniencing anyone, even myself, and online shopping resolves a great many dilemmas. A deep freeze and a breadmaker actually make more silence possible. Above all, in my case a computer goes a very long way to solving the financial difficulties of living in extreme rural solitude: I live now mainly by teaching creative writing online in various ways. It is silent; it is flexible; it keeps me in touch with writing at the technical level and it allows me not to have to churn out new writing while I brood on the complexities of narrative and silence.

I have made some failed experiments too. I tried to live without
clocks, without imposing that sort of artificial time and its demands on the rhythm of my days: I felt that even the implicit ‘tick-tock’ of time measured and meted out the silence of eternity. This turned out, at least then, to be a silence too far. It was too countercultural, and to avoid mismanaging things seriously and inconveniencing others I found myself adding anxiety and also cheating – it is cheating to turn on your computer
just
to find out what time it is; it is cheating to shatter your silence with a wake-up call from BT. One of the great advantages of silence in community – and this seems to be one of the things that crosses the boundaries between different religions – are the bells. Time is marked out in beginnings and ends but there is no anxiety for individuals in silence because they do not have to ‘keep an eye on the clock’ for themselves. I stopped wearing a watch and gave up having an alarm clock, but have come to accept that I need a clock in the house.

I discovered, helpfully, how little I really did need in a material sense and that was encouraging. And as I pared down my possessions I began to develop a more conscious clarity about what I was trying to do. I am not a ‘back to nature’ survivalist. I do not think it is possible, or at least not in this country, to live wholly outside the cash economy. I do not know if it would be possible to be food self-sufficient; I do know it would be extremely hard work. It would become an end itself; it would not increase my sense of freedom, space or silence. I do not want to grow all my own vegetables, live without cigarettes or coffee, knit or weave my own clothes or write with a quill pen and home-brewed ink. I do not want to struggle each day to milk my goat, or forage for wood for my fire. And even if I did, there would still be council tax. What I want to do is live in
as much silence as is possible
at this point in our history.

The other unqualified good thing about living in the North Lodge was that it was situated overlooking an estuary, the kind with a good deal of tide and a great expanse of reed beds. This daily silent rhythm of the tide affects everything; it causes the colour of
the reeds to change constantly, reflecting the water through the reeds or flattening out the light when the tide is low; even the birds are affected by it – you see different species on the mud flats at low tide than in and around the reeds when the water is high. This sense of the daily ebb and flow of the oceans affected the rhythm of my days. I started to keep an estuary journal, in which I tried day after day to capture the silent moments of change. It was tricky because the tidal timetable is not synchronised with the twenty-four-hour day, so the change happens at a different hour each day. The rise and fall of the water changes with each tide too and the quality of the light is affected by the level of the water. Tides are deeply mysterious, caused by the gravitational pull of the irregular moon in relation to the regular sun.
*
I took out my nephews’ little rowing boat and paddled about in the reed beds waiting for the kingfishers, herons and goosanders to appear or disappear. I watched for reflections too; when the water was as still and clear as a mirror, and when it ruffled and swayed in the wind. One night when the tide was full there was an evening so still that I could see reflections of the stars. Reflection is a magical silent thing – and the double meaning of the word doubles the magic; I reflected, silently, on the silent reflection of the stars in the water, and the reflections of dragonflies coming up from the depths to meet the real dragonflies as they skim down on to the surface, which is a skin between the two worlds of air and water. I would stand on the little stone bridge for hours trying to learn to see fish, which can look like the reflection of trees but are not.

There was morning and evening; there was high tide and low tide – they were like silent counterpoint. They created a lovely rhythm and on good days I could sense in them a model, or image, for the double silence of prayer and writing that I wanted to explore.

Then my mother died.

She did not die as abruptly as that sentence. She was in hospital for a long stretch of the spring and early summer and in pain, but no one thought she was going to die. She wanted to come home and we set about making that possible with complicated but optimistic plans for her care. I don’t think we were deluded or closing our eyes to reality, her doctor was predicting ‘months’ and worrying about how on earth we were going to keep that house warm enough for her through the winter. My poor sisters, who unlike my brothers and me were not in Galloway, were constantly coming and going. Perhaps more touchingly, so were her nineteen grandchildren, who adored her, and proved it, not just visiting but participating in her care in very hard practical ways.

Towards the end of June she was indeed brought home, but within days it was clear that all that planning for a future had been pointless. Not that anyone felt it was a waste – we are the sort of family who believes that people ought to die in their own place with their family around them. She died in the first week in July, on her wedding anniversary, ‘peacefully at home’ as they say. My youngest brother was with her, and the rest of us were around and prepared.

There is a silence in death that is absolute; especially, perhaps, in deaths like this where people are ready and have slipped outside medical intervention and fuss. The noisy churning body is silent, and that silence somehow spreads outwards and fills the room, and then the whole house. That huge, inconvenient, welcoming, sociable house was silent. There was a long hush. I have been ‘in the vicinity’ of several deaths now, different people in different circumstances, but even where the external events are noisy or dramatic there is still, at the centre, a final silence. My mother lay in her big bed in her sunny bedroom and there was silence.

Death itself is silence; which may be why we think that silence is death. In one sense death is the only silence. Most of us are not conceived in silence; in the womb there is no silence, there is the steady maternal heartbeat, and we are led to understand a constant bubbling, churning, rhythmical ‘tune’ of pulse and energy. As soon as we are born we are encouraged to yell, to make a noise, to announce our arrival. But in death the silence sneaks in and sets up home. Death is a very concrete physical event, so its silence is also concrete and physical, but it is also made more intense by the emotional silence that is necessarily present. All the things that were not spoken will never be spoken, for good or ill. The living have to shut up; there is nothing more to be said.

The silence of death is unbearable to a noisy society like ours. There can be no other reason why all our customs around death are designed to make the whole thing as noisy and fraught as possible. I thought with great longing and envy of those societies where the dead must be buried before sunset; of those societies where the bereaved are ‘supposed’ to pull down the blinds, dress in darkest black and not communicate with anyone for a while; even of those societies where everything is ritualised and ordered, and with such clarity that you do not have to discuss what to do next; you are free of all those decisions that have to be made – cremations, dates, places, whom to contact, whom to visit, whom to telephone. We do not allow ourselves enough time to be in the silence of death and honour it. I was shocked and, I admit, saddened by the general family sense that we did not want a ‘coffin funeral’ – but instead some sort of ‘thanksgiving service’. It seems to me still that to have the dead person there, there in the church or wherever, there physically but also somewhere else, silent, boxed up but nonetheless
there
, ought to be a natural and proper acknowledgement of the great silence that we want so much to block out and drown in waves of sound – with cheerful hymns and cucumber sandwiches.