A Book of Silence (25 page)

But during my time in Weardale I discovered a new way of reading. I read more slowly and therefore in a sense I read less, but I read more carefully and attentively. I felt less excited by plot, tension and pace, and more engaged with language and mood and place. I started reading more poetry and enjoying it more. I want to say that I learned to read more silently, but also I read with a sense of the mystery of what reading is and how deeply and silently it has shaped our sense of self.

S
o for the three years that followed my Skye adventure I was busy and engaged pursuing these ideas and experiences of silence. But simultaneously and woven into these various forays into the silence and lack of it out there in the world, something else began to happen to me; a more domestic and intimate kind of silence welled up in my consciousness and started to counterbalance this more intellectual research.

One of the things I discovered at this point was that there were bits and pieces of silence woven into the fabric of each day and I began to try to keep an eye out for them and move into them as swiftly and quietly as possible. Some of these moments I had to create for myself – unplug the phone, maintain a pattern of meditation, walk where or when there are least likely to be other people, say ‘no’ even to delightful invitations to work or social events – but some were just
there
, waiting for me as it were.

Dawn became one of those occasions. I found myself waking earlier and earlier in the mornings. At sunrise, as at sunset, particularly in the summer months, the wind often drops, so that even in very exposed places there can be a period of great calm, especially if the weather is clear. I became attentive to those early mornings, which came so gradually. The stars would fade and the black sky turn indigo. The distance emerged, colourless out of the darkness. The sky would change colour: indigo, grey, cream. The view opened out and away mysteriously. The horizon line like a shadow separated the sky from the moor. The sky would go on changing: grey, cream, peach. Although the sun rose to
my left in the east, because of the conformation of the hills, the first sight of it was to my right; the western hills would catch fire first, the sunshine suddenly falling on them in a splash of brightness. The sky would still be changing: cream, peach, white, palest blue. On the moor there were very few songbirds, so this extraordinary silence was not broken by that joyful but insistent clamour, but occasionally there would be buzzards, hunting high, floating against the enormous blue. Sometimes the rising sun would catch them from below and the moth-markings of their under-wings would light up suddenly, tawny gold as they rode the bright air. On some lucky mornings there was an extra bonus: overnight the valley would have filled with a thick mist, which did not rise as high as the cottage, or as the moor the far side of the dale, so I could contemplate the glory of this making of the day, as though above and outside the world, looking out over a shimmering lake of mist, barely stirring in the dawn calm.

Perhaps it was because of thinking so much about creation and the land or perhaps it was simply that living in more silence deepens an engagement with topography and ecology, but in Weardale I found in myself a growing fascination with and love for natural history. There does seem to be a link between what is usually called Nature Writing – that genre of literature which developed in Europe in the late eighteenth century and has been particularly highly developed in the United States, which brings together scientific knowledge and intense careful personal observation and experience – and solitude. Gilbert White, a clergyman and significant naturalist, in Selborne, Hampshire and Thomas Bewick, the wood engraver who grew up in the dales where I now lived, were both fully aware that their habit of solitary walking in the countryside was the key to their powers of observation and their emotional response to what they saw. Henry Thoreau made the connection explicit early on, writing that it was practically impossible to love both company and nature.

A century later Thomas Merton experienced a similar development. Because of his extensive and continuous journal writing Merton is someone in whom it is possible to see an idea or imaginative commitment growing over a period of time – whereas with most writers we see only their reflections on that growth. As he moved further into his hermit lifestyle he became increasingly conscious of and engaged with the natural history of his silent habitat – the woods of Kentucky, within the grounds of his monastery. Being Merton, he helpfully, if laboriously, spelled it out:

I now found that this was becoming true for me too; I wanted both to see better and to know more about what I was seeing. In some ways there was nothing new in this; although I had, like most British schoolchildren, alas, been educated within a system that maintained the rigorous division between arts and sciences, and I had most definitely been ‘arts’, during the 1990s I became profoundly interested in certain areas of science – particularly cosmology and astrophysics, palaeontology and some sorts of theoretical mathematics.
³
However, these had been quite abstract
ideas; no one gets to look inside a Black Hole slowly, carefully, quietly and then relate the experience of seeing and feeling it to the theoretical knowledge we have about it. This was a new desire – to learn to see what was really going on around me.

There was a more mundane reason for this new fascination. When I left Northamptonshire I had assumed that I would go on gardening, which had met so many of my longings for growth and beauty and knowledge and exercise. Alas, it turned out to be well-nigh impossible to make the sort of garden I wanted to make. This was partly because of the extreme weather conditions – the house was not called Weatherhill for no reason. There is a traditional gardening wisdom that claims you cannot make a proper garden over 250 metres above sea level in the UK and Weatherhill was a great deal higher that that. I am not actually convinced that this is true and I might have found some way of negotiating with the weather had it not been for the rabbits. As Peter Rabbit learned, it is not possible for rabbits and humans to share a garden. I find it hard to describe how many rabbits there were; I could look out of the window and count fifty at a time – they kept the grass beautifully mown, but they mowed everything else you might want to grow. (Except daffodils. Rabbits do not eat daffodils. In fact, there is a range of plants rabbits are said not to eat and I kept sending off for or downloading lists of them, but it was very discouraging. The rabbits and I seemed to have much the same tastes when it came to favourite plants and, moreover, I frequently found that the rabbits had not read the lists.) However, all my attempts to exclude them proved fatuous – the drystone wall surrounding the property was very old, it had fallen and been repaired too often and often not very well, so that its base was too spread out to put in effective fencing. (To exclude rabbits effectively you need to get your wire mesh well underground.) I invited youths with ferrets to come and hunt my rabbits; I invited youths with guns to come and practise on the rabbits. One afternoon we killed thirty-six rabbits and the next morning there were just as many in the so-called garden. I was defeated and gave up.