A Book of Silence (36 page)

T
hen, very soon, and wilfully, I turned my attention to what felt like the opposite sort of silence; Kafka’s idea that ‘there can never be enough silence around one when one writes’. My whole idea of what it is to be a writer was profoundly formed within a post-romantic model of the creative artist. I wanted to undertake an adventure in romantic silence that I could balance against my desert experience and try to learn more precisely how they were both the same and different and what I might do about that.

What I should probably have done was go to the Swiss Alps. The Alps were, for the leading romantics, the apotheosis of the sublime – beautiful not in the orderly, balanced and serene style of classicism, but in a new aesthetic – which meant that a kind of wildness, horror or terror should pervade a view and intensify the emotions. In the previous classical period the Alps had appeared so chaotic and uncivilised that the man of sensibility on his way to Italy for the Grand Tour was supposed to pull down the blinds of his carriage lest he be driven mad by such grotesque excess; some people apparently even had landscapes with tidy Greek temples and other classical scenes painted on the inside of the carriage blinds to protect them against the vast disorder outside. This doubtless made them all the more attractive to the would-be rebel poets of the early Romantic Movement. In Britain, at least, there was nothing comparable, so the high mountains of the Alps had an additional exotic ambience, which was attractive. Shelley in ‘Mont Blanc’ – his great poem of 1817 – captured and refined a cultural moment:

This elevated understanding of mountains, and particularly the Alps, led moreover to the original solitary adventurers. Walking and climbing alone, in marked contrast to team sports and their rules and regulations, became activities appropriate to a man of genius. Coleridge led the way by semi-addicting himself to vertigo, running preposterous risks in high places in order to enjoy the sensation of terror.

There were, however, some practical reasons why I did not go to the Alps. The most important one was about
solitude
. It was not physically possible (for me) to go to the desert alone, but I had found going in company difficult. I wanted to explore the romantic ‘bliss of solitude’. I did not have the knowledge or the physical skills to climb high alone and I did not want to do it with anyone else. Moreover, I had learned that rock climbing scared me, and not in any ‘sublime’ way.

I also needed to distinguish this investigation from the long
silence in Skye. This was to be a very different sort of journey. Then I had wanted to sit in silence and see what happened. Now I wanted to replicate the particular sort of silence that romanticism has made central to our culture and see how that related to my own ideas about my writing and my growing sense that this was a profoundly different silence from the silence of the desert. I decided that what I should do was go for a very long walk, the sort of walk that Dorothy Wordsworth describes so often in her
Journal
. Day-long hikes in wild, high hill country, followed by quiet evenings at home seems to have been the Wordsworths’ circle’s recipe for productive poetic work.

The obvious choice, for anyone who is seeking such silence on these terms, would be the Lake District, Wordsworth’s own country, but unfortunately the Lakes are now so popular and crowded that they cannot represent silence or solitude for me. The success of the idea that wild nature is somehow ‘good for us’ is reflected in the recent proliferation of long-distance walks throughout Britain. There are several wonderful trails now – but for various reasons they did not feel right. The Pennine Way was too near home; the West Highland Way too closely associated with Skye. St Cuthbert’s Way, particularly the bold clean hillsides over the northern shoulder of the Cheviots and coming down to Lindisfarne, held an enormous attraction for me, but planning this trip, it seemed too closely associated with the eremitical silence of the desert. I am fully aware that the Border Hills do not look in the least like the Sinai Desert, but I know I read all landscapes with a pre-formed imagination; try as I will, there is no pure unmediated seeing for me. Cuthbert had been trained at Melrose in the Irish tradition, with its complex association with Sinai itself and with the hermits. Moreover, it was not coasts I wanted this time but mountains, harsh rock faces, hideous slides of scree, waterfalls, rainbows and long views obscured by moving cloud and mist. The odd storm would be an additional benefit – but even in my most romantic moods I know that I cannot summon the lightning or call up the thunder.

In the end I followed Wordsworth biographically rather than geographically. The Lake District was where Wordsworth had grown up. Like him I went ‘home’, to walk in the mountains and hills of my childhood in Galloway. Galloway – the old County of Wigtown and Stewartry of Kirkcudbright
*
– is strangely, though fortunately, unknown. The area has the second-lowest population density in Britain (only Caithness, now part of Highlands and Islands Region, is less inhabited) and that population is very predominantly located on the coastal plain. This leaves a large wilderness, without roads, houses or much else, between the coast and Ayrshire, including a number of significantly large hills, with the Merrick, the highest point on the Range of the Awful Hand, at 843 metres the highest mountain between Scafell Pike in the Lake District and the Highlands. (This in itself is a blessing – another mere 70 metres and the Merrick would become a Munro – one of the 284 mountains in Scotland over 914.4 metres, or 3,000 feet when the list was made in 1891. Munros lure walkers and break up silences.) The Southern Upland Way crosses the southern edge of both the Merrick and the Rhinns of Kells, between Newton Stewart and St John’s Town of Dalry, then passes below the Black Shoulder of Cairnsmore of Carsphairn, but most of this part of the route is through forestry plantations, cunningly hiding the mountain wilderness beyond. This is as near as we can get, I believe, in the UK today, to the romantic wilderness scenery that the Lake District offered Wordsworth 200 years ago. It has everything I needed for the expedition I was planning – high hills with enormous views, rough walking, waterfalls and tiny lochs, roofless castles and abandoned farmsteads. Unlike the Lake District, northern Galloway is
more
desolate than it was in 1800 because the population has declined. As a bonus it is scattered with prehistoric sites – standing stones and barrows – often miles from any road, which stand as gaunt reminders of a culture entirely silenced and, to fuel a sense of freedom and fervour, it is also the setting for Robert the Bruce’s early guerrilla campaigns against English imperialism.

There were other, less high-minded reasons for choosing south-west Scotland. One of the problems with walking alone in areas without much public transport is that you have to walk in circles, or carry too much heavy baggage. In Galloway this was not a problem – someone, usually my mother – would come and pick me up at a pre-appointed rendezvous; and this meant that I could walk further and cover more territory. A final factor was cost: at this time my mother had furnished a redundant farmhouse, about a mile from her house, specifically for her daughters and their families and friends. It felt worth sacrificing some silence in exchange for free board and lodging, and a chauffeur.

So I went to Galloway and walked for ten days, on the high, windswept hills, seeking that release of expressive imagination that Wordsworth calls the ‘bliss of solitude’. It was rough and wild and silent and beautiful – and there are few physical sensations as profoundly pleasing as the tiredness at the end of a long day’s walk.

The silence on a high hillside is aurally very different from the silence of the desert. In the first place it is nothing like as silent – there is always the wind moving through, across or over things. The wind is like a cellist’s bow – it itself is silent but it draws sound out of things in a surprising and rich range of tones, wind in grass, wind in reeds, wind in heather, wind on water, wind squeezed between rocks. The wind driving rain against a waxed jacket makes a different sound from the wind driving rain against a cagoule. There is also the ‘sound of many waters’. Linguists, rather sadly, now teach that the claim that Inuit languages have all those words for snow is a myth; but it is a credible myth to me because of how many words English has for the sounds of running water: babble, bubble, burble, ripple, splash, gush, cascade, run, rush, spout, spurt, dribble, drip, drizzle, trickle, flow, ooze, roar … and a day spent walking in these sorts of hills will reveal most of them, usually overlaying each other and creating a kind of orchestral effect.
Presumably, high up above the snow line these sounds would vanish as the water no longer runs.

I am not enough of a physicist to know whether hot air carries sound waves differently from cold air, or dry air from wet air, but it certainly feels as though this were true. Hillwalking is bracing – you do not sit mute and still in a cleft in the rocks while the sun dries you out and empties your head. The reverse happens. It is not necessarily cold in the hills (though it often is) but what makes you warm is the expenditure of your own energy – you make your own heat actively, rather than absorbing the sun’s passively. There is more external stimulus – you have to look where you are going and there is a lot else to look at too. The view changes quickly, the weather changes quickly – the clouds shift and there is the summit of the Merrick like a hooked beak above you; or Loch Enoch shining like a coin framed by its unexpected white beaches, a hundred metres below you. You can’t help looking: was that a deer, or even a wild goat? There are golden eagles in these hills, though I have never seen one; it is hard not to look speculatively, hopefully, at every large bird in the distance. Views like this make you look outwards rather than inwards as you do in the desert.

One lunchtime I found myself eating a hard-boiled egg sitting on a stone on the ridge beyond Benyallery. This ridge, called the Nieve of the Spit locally, affords enormous views both east and west. It was stunning countryside, with the Merrick big and grey in front of me and a ‘vast vacuity’ below; huge empty distances and golden grass blowing, and here and there patches of bright green sward – very closely sheep cropped. And
nothing
: miles and miles of nothing and no one. The clouds in procession bore down towards me from the north with the sun dodging them almost playfully. More hills for ever away into a blue mist and the wind, coming and going with moments of real calm. I felt strong and free, and the world seemed holy and whole. I thought, ‘Earth hath not anything to show more fair.’ It was one of those memorably happy moments. I thought, too, that perhaps the effort, the sheer hard work of getting up there from Loch Trool, somehow added to the pleasure – a bonus sense of achievement.