Sara Maitland on Silence

How do you understand the term ‘silence’?

Well on one level, it’s very simple – silence is just an absence of noise. But actually it’s a bit more complicated than that. In the dictionary, silence can be defined in two separate ways, as either an absence of language or an absence of all noise. What I’m interested in is the reduction in the amount of man-made noise – and particularly speech. This is mostly because there are very few places, except perhaps outer space, where there is actual, physical silence.

You now live a pretty silent life. Is A Book of Silence autobiographical?

Bits of it are autobiographical, but it’s also based upon the research I did into the concept of silence and its cultural history. I have lived in Southwest Scotland, in London and in Oxford in the past, which were too noisy for me. Around the millennium year I moved north and started looking for the house I now have. I moved in two years ago. It is in Galloway, far away from anyone else. I love being alone, I love being silent, and I love certain kinds of landscape, very austere, empty. Living in solitude has taught me a lot about the importance of silence, and some of this obviously informs the book.

The Desert Fathers is about an early society who opted to live in silence. Tell us why you picked this book.

The reason I chose this book is because the Sinai desert one of the most silent places in the world. Because the climate is very warm and dry, it isn’t easy to inhabit and consequently it is very quiet. It’s into this environment that the early Christians headed to experiment with what difference leading a silent life makes, and, specifically, what the effects of silence on prayer might be. What the desert travellers were up to is actually very similar in a way to what the Buddhists do: seeking inner peace and love of God. They were also seeking the meaning of kindness and hospitality – if anyone were to turn up in the desert then they would welcome them fondly. Their adventure is something Waddell describes with heartbreaking empathy.

On the subject of Buddhism, your second book is written by a Buddhist. Tell us about it.

Palmo is a contemporary Buddhist, who has spent a great deal of time, including a solid three year stint, in complete silence. She lived for 12 years really on the snow line, in a little cave in the Himalayas. This book is a collection of her thoughts on Buddhism, and a practical guide in how to be silent. She has this commitment that ties with me, because she is interested in finding about the place of the female in the Buddhist tradition. She is a very modest writer. When she was asked what three years in silence was like, all she said was that ‘it wasn’t boring’.

That sounds like a lonely experience. Is silence inevitably connected to solitude?

It is quite likely to be, but no, not inevitably. There are very few people, and I’m not one of them, who are good at communicating silently. The Trappist monks live almost entirely silently, but at the same time very communally (they sleep in dorms and don’t have any personal privacy). In theory it can be done, but in practice I think that silence will usually be accompanied by solitude. I don’t like the popular idea that solitude is a retreat from society though. It’s one of the reasons I choose this book actually, because I don’t think that is what’s going on. It’s like saying that you go on holiday to retreat from work, which is just not a useful way to look at it. The solitary life is similarly not a retreat.

Tell us about your next book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

One of the other things that, for me, goes very much with silence, although it’s not the same for everybody, is a deepening of the experience of nature and understanding of ecology. This book, which won the Pulitzer literature prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. Dillard spent quite a long time in this small area in a particular valley called Tinker Creek in Virginia, America. She just recorded what she saw and what she thought about it, and this book is a collection of her observations. And it’s a very lovely book because it takes on the ferocity of nature and is very unsentimental, while at the same time being very beautiful. I think that she would say, and I would say, that being silent actually allows you to see the world more clearly. It’s often said that silent people have more acute hearing, and I think that they have a more acute sense of sight too. She just notices everything.

The next book is also about nature. Describe Sea Room.

Yes, it’s another ‘in the wild’ book. Nicolson inherited these tiny islands called the Shiants, which are in the Hebrides in Northwest Scotland.