A Book of Silence (7 page)

Fascinated by silence, drawn joyfully into the void, I wanted to experience a total version; I wanted to know what it was that I was trying to build into my life before the habits of the quotidian asserted themselves. The nearest analogy I can think of is that of a honeymoon. When this post-wedding holiday started it was in a society in which the newly wed couple had probably not spent more than a couple of hours at a time together, and even less time alone together. Rather than start immediately on the business of building a shared working life, they would spend a period of intense time together away from their normal daily concerns, where they had nothing to do but focus on and learn about each other. Similarly monks and nuns in even the most silent of religious orders take ‘retreats’, periods of time when they are separate from their community and relieved of all the burdens of work for an intense period of concentration on God. I decided that I would go away and spend some time doing nothing except being silent and thinking about and experiencing it. I decided that forty days would be a suitable amount of time. Obviously this was not a randomly chosen period – but it seemed to be possible but substantial, as well as iconic.

The most straightforward way for someone like me to manage this sort of time and space would have been to spend these six weeks in a religious community where I would have been freed from all the hassles and would have had gatekeepers against any interruptions. But at this point I wanted to separate prayer from silence. My imagination is so ‘Christianised’ that I felt those sorts of ideas could have overridden other feelings in a monastic context with holy pictures (mostly bad ones!) on every wall. I did not want to go on a ‘retreat’. I wanted to explore what this profound pull towards silence might be about. I wanted to examine my conviction that silence was
something positive, not just an abstraction or absence. I wanted to know what would happen.

In the end I rented a self-catering holiday cottage on Skye, more because I found a house there that met my slightly off-centre requirements than for any particular engagement with the island. I needed a small house that was genuinely isolated, and had a deep freeze and no TV – and in which I could smoke. My care in checking all these details in advance was rewarded, or else I was lucky – Allt Dearg
³
might have been designed for my purposes.

In all events in late October, my car fully laden with books, notebooks, pens, reading matter, foul-weather gear and six weeks’ worth of food and other supplies, I left my sister’s lovely and luxurious house near St Andrew’s and drove east to west the whole way across Scotland. It was a long, tiring and stunningly beautiful drive, in and out of sunshine and rain, and all the time I had a growing sense of moving away – the roads getting narrower, the houses less frequent, the towns more like villages and the villages tiny. I had forgotten that the ferry crossing from Kyle of Lochalsh over to Skye has been replaced by the muscular sweep of the new bridge and for a moment I missed that sense of being
somewhere else
, in a new and different place, that the ferry provided. But once on the island the bilingual road signs, in both Gaelic and English, provided a strong sense of strangeness. In Gaelic, which about half the population speaks, the island is called An t-Eilean Sgitheanach (The Winged Isle), which refers both to its curious shape and to the wild empty freedom of its terrain.

The Cuillin, the mountains of central Skye, are perhaps the toughest range in Britain, naked jagged rock rising abruptly from the sea, several soaring to some 900 metres. In the shadow and shelter of these mountains, facing west towards the mainland, was Allt Dearg, once a shepherd’s croft.

It was lovely. As I drove up the quarter-mile of rough track through yet another smatter of rain, I saw in the wing mirror of my car an extremely vivid rainbow, all seven colours in wide bands. It seemed a good omen.

Allt Dearg sat small, white and welcoming. Although it is nestled under the mountains there is nothing human above it, and below the land drops away to a long narrow bay with steep sides. I could not see the road or any buildings. Close beside the cottage is a burn that leaps and rushes, and makes a good deal of noise. Inside it is compact and tidy. I lived throughout the time I was there entirely on the ground floor, where a tiny bedroom opened off the kitchen-living room, so that I had a strong sense of containment inside despite the wildness outside. Outside, even in the evening light, the colours were extraordinary. Higher above me the mountains were grey; they were like teeth – craggy, broken, fierce. Behind the house is a croft field, still reasonably green, but everything else below those iron heights is gold, gold-bronze, punctuated by very white lichen on stones.

In the fitful sunshine driving across I had thought the colour was sun-on-dead-grass; now I learned it was the grass itself, and dead was not a good word for it. The wind moved fast across it, flapping it like flags. When it reached darker clumps of heather or bog myrtle the rhythm of the movement changed. I kept thinking I’d seen ‘something’, something alive, moving like an animal running for cover – but no, it was just the wind somehow haunting and energising.

I was exhausted by the time I had explored the house and the immediate surroundings, unpacked the car and settled in, but I also had a powerful sense of excitement and optimism, I was at the beginning of an adventure. I felt oddly foxy – I’d slipped my leash and got away. I felt open to whatever might happen and hungry for the silence.

At one level Allt Dearg was never completely silent. The wind roared down from the mountains more or less incessantly throughout the whole time I was there. There was also the ‘voice of many waters’.
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When it rained, which it did a very great deal, I could hear it lashing on the roof-light windows upstairs; all the old windows of the house, hunching its back against the predominant wind, faced westwards; the modern desire for light has dominated over the older
longing for protection. Even when the wind and rain paused the burn did not. Just behind the house it descended sharply in a series of small waterfalls and they sounded like distant aeroplane engines. Nearer to the house the sound of the burn was not dissimilar, in both volume and tone, to the lorries coming up the hill from Stanhope, except that it was continual. Yet my sense was that none of these noises mattered; they did not break up the silence, which I could listen for and hear behind them. I thought a lot about whether it was the constant background nature of these sounds or the fact that they were natural rather than human-made noises that meant they did not disrupt my personal sense of silence.

For the first few days I wallowed in the pure pleasure of freedom: no phone calls, no emails, no neighbours. I snuggled into the private silence of the house and walked out to see the fitful sun on the grass and on the sea, to watch the sharp mountain peaks punctuated by cloud, and to let the wind blow through me. To settle into the silence and somehow lower my own expectations – to plan, scheme, rule, manage the days as little as possible. To experience, sense, live,
be
as much as possible. The experience of most people who voluntarily take themselves off into silence is that it takes a while to settle into it. Of course, it does not grow more silent as time passes, but you do become more attuned to the silence. Unlike sound, which crashes against your ears, silence is subtle. The more and the longer you are silent the more you hear the tiny noises within the silence, so that silence itself is always slipping away like a timid wild animal. You have to be very still and lure it. This is hard; one has only to try to quieten one’s mind or body to discover just how turbulent they are. But gradually I discovered a shape for each day and the silence took over.

I was intensely curious to discover what might happen. There are a good number of published accounts of experiences of silence, which could have told me, but I decided not to read any while I was on Skye as I thought it might influence my own experiences excessively; I wanted to discover for myself. However, since then I have read extensively about other people’s accounts of it in tandem with
my own journal and I have come to believe that there are indeed quite specific things that happen to people who are silent for a prolonged period of time. But it is complicated.

In the first place I had chosen this silence and prepared myself for it; I wanted to do it. Moreover, I enjoyed it. Silence can be terrible and even lethal, most usually when it is enforced or imposed. This is not an absolute rule – Donald Crowhurst chose to enter the Golden Globe race in 1968, and the silence drove him mad and finally killed him. On the other hand Boethius, in the sixth century, and John Bunyan, in the seventeenth, had no choice at all about their isolation and imprisonment, and both found positive and creative resources in the silence. However, in terms of matching my Skye experiences to those of other people I have concentrated on chosen silence.

Another problem I encountered is that most of the accounts that we have of chosen silence are
religious
. Before the mid eighteenth century I can find no detailed reports of voluntary silence whatsoever that are not directed by a religious impulse; even when Daniel Defoe wrote
Robinson Crusoe
, based on the real experience of Alexander Selkirk, he took a totally secular event and turned it into a religious work. All the early accounts share a set of particular expectations, rewards and goals, which are bound to slew both the experience itself and the way it is reported.

There are inevitably biases. For instance, Tibetan Buddhists may not take a permanent vow of silence on the grounds that if they were to achieve enlightenment they would have an obligation to
teach
: finding that silence was a permanent personal need and a primary source of delight would involve admitting (however subconsciously) that one’s own silence had ‘failed’, that it had not brought you to a state of enlightenment.

Specifically religious accounts are most likely to accept ineffability, to feel and say that the experience is outwith language and beyond human expression. Every attempt I have ever seen to diagnose or describe mystical experience uses ineffability as one of the tests. If you can describe what happened and what it felt like, then
by definition you have not had an authentic mystical experience. This is not going to encourage mystics to struggle to express themselves. Ineffability goes with the territory. I might even say that the ‘best’ hermits of both Eastern and Western traditions are those who have least to say about it – or never bother to say it at all. The only thing Tenzin Palmo, a British Buddhist nun who spent three years high in the Himalayas in radical silence, seems ever to have said, at least publicly, about her personal experience is, ‘Well, it wasn’t boring.’
⁵

There is – in my opinion – nothing wrong with this religious bias, but it does distort the evidence; and until recently it underpinned almost all accounts of silence. Luckily for me there are now a growing number of more secular sources to balance out the religious narratives, but they are all modern and cannot offer the cultural spread I would have liked. First there were the Romantic Movement writers like William Wordsworth and Henry Thoreau, who may have been theist in their understanding of nature but were militantly not religious and had quite other fish to fry in their accounts of silence.

Since the mid nineteenth century there has been an invaluable new source of silence stories: the explorers, pioneers, prospectors and lone adventurers. At first too many of these were so stiff-upper-lip that they could not speak of their own emotions at all. ‘It was jolly frightening’ and ‘At the top I felt a certain satisfaction as I sat and admired the magnificent views’ do not really meet our contemporary desire for emotional engagement, any more than they enable me to explore the nature of silence.

As late as the 1950s John Hunt, the leader of the first successful Everest expedition,
apologises
for the emotion expressed when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary returned to the camp after their triumphant summitting of the mountain: ‘I am ashamed to confess that there was hugging and even some tears.’
⁶
In 1958 he wrote the foreword for
Alone
, Richard Byrd’s account of his solitary stay in Antarctica, and broods there on whether it is ‘healthy’ for a man to write about his interior life; or if it isn’t a bit indulgent and morbid –
‘unmanly’. In addition, a fair number of the solo adventurers have been markedly introverted. In some cases, like Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s father, who was,
inter alia
, an early and dedicated solo mountaineer, this seems to have been why they took to these activities in the first place. As he wrote: ‘Life would be more tolerable if it were not for our fellow creatures. They come about us like bees, and as we cannot well destroy them, we are driven to some safe asylum. The Alps as yet remain.’
⁷

The last thing someone like this would have wanted was to expose his emotions to any public gaze whatsoever. Although neither seems to have been neurotically misanthropic, Francis Chichester, the first solo circumnavigator of the world, and Augustine Courtauld, who spent six months in a tent alone in the Arctic (one of the most extreme modern silences I have ever come across) were both furious at the attention they received – Chichester from a protective Royal Navy flotilla as he sailed round the Horn and Courtauld by the media ‘fuss’ that seemed to him to vulgarise the purity of his polar solitude. Women explorers, like Gertrude Bell, have been more willing to give expression to their emotional response, but until recently there have not been a great many of them.

Then, in 1968 the
Sunday Times
sponsored the first ‘Golden Globe’ race, sailing single-handed, non-stop round the world. Francis Chichester’s single-handed circumnavigation, with a stopover in Australia, had caught the public’s imagination the year before. Chichester’s success established that a non-stop voyage was at least a possibility. More important, though, it demonstrated that the British public would love to hear about such an adventure and what they wanted to hear was not meteorological science, but the gritty little details of courage, endurance and grief; what it
felt
like to be alone at sea.