A Book of Silence (47 page)

1 Janet Batsleer, personal communication.

2 Genesis 1:1–3.

3 John 1:1.

4 Genesis 1:1–5.

5 John 1:1–3.

6 P. B. Shelley,
Prometheus Unbound
(1820).

7 In Greek there are two words that are translated by a single English word – time.
Kronos
means time in its literal and measured-out sense – as in chronology or chronometer.
Kairos
means time in the sense of ‘the right or opportune moment’, an undetermined period of time in which something takes place. Naming their ur-god Kronos (rather than Kairos) therefore has a metaphorical depth that is quite hard to express in English.

8 Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

9 Almost the only personification of silence I have seen is a picture of
her
in a nineteenth-century mural in the old British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

10 George Steiner,
Real Presence
(Faber & Faber, 1989).

11
OED
. Both these possibilities are mentioned, although they are rejected.

12 Figures comparing the 1991 with the 2001 census. The present population of the Scottish islands is now just under 100,000.

13 C. S. Lewis,
The Screwtape Letters
(Geoffrey Bles, 1942) reissued Fontana, 1973, p.114.

14 Ernest Gellner,
The Psychoanalytic Movement
(Paladin, 1985), p. 154.

15 Anthony Storr,
The School for Genius
(André Deutsch, 1988), p. xiii. This excellent book has been reissued in a revised edition with the simpler title
Solitude
(HarperCollins, 1994).

16 Revelation 8:1.

17 Philip Howard in
The Times
.

18 John 19:9

19 Attributed to Bodhidharma (fifth century
CE
) and first recorded in
Ts’u-
t’ing shih-yuan
(1108).

20 Douglas Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach
, (Harvester Press, 1979) p. 248.

21 Ibid., p. 251.

22 Ibid., p. 255.

23 Pierre Lacout, 1969 www.quaker.org. uk.

24 John Russell, personal letter.

25 Evelyn Underhill,
Mysticism:
A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s
Spiritual Consciousness
(1911).

26 Jenny Uglow,
Nature’s Engraver
(Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 99.

27 Saint Augustine,
Confessions
, vi:3, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin, 1961).

28 The principal scholarly positions are laid out by Balogh in 1927 and Knox in 1968. In
A History of Reading
(Viking, 1996), Alberto Manguel lays out the case for the lay reader. In 2007 in the
Guardian
James Fenton challenged this, but I remain persuaded by Manguel.

29 1Timothy 2:11–14.

30 Adam Phillips,
Promises, Promises
(Faber & Faber, 2000), pp. 373–5.

31 William Dalrymple,
From the Holy Mountain
(HarperCollins, 1997), p. 290.

1 Henry Thoreau,
Journal
, 7.1.1857.

2 Thomas Merton,
Journal
, 27.2.1963.

3 These concerns are reflected in my fiction, especially in
Three Times
Table
(1990) and
Home Truths
(1993), and in many of my short stories, but most particularly in ‘A Big Enough God’ (1995), an attempt at a theology of creation post-Einstein.

4 Annie Dillard,
Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek
(Cape, 1975), p. 165.

5 Anthony Gormley, interview,
Guardian
14.6.2005.

6 Psalm 124:7

7 Nicolson,
Sea Room
, p. 29.

8 ‘St Columba’s Island Hermitage’, Irish, twelfth century, anon. From
Celtic Miscellany
, ed. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (Penguin Classics, 1971).

9 William Cowper, ‘The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk’,
Palgrave’s Golden
Treasury
, (Oxford, 1907) p. 114. Oddly enough, far from being a paeon to solitude and ownership, this is a very depressing poem about the pains of isolation and the pointlessness of ownership – the opening four lines are entirely ironic and quite bitter, but they have been removed from their original context and are frequently quoted as positive pleasure.

10 The Forestry Commission has recently taken on a great number of these concerns – both planting with more diversity and opening out the forests for recreational use. Far more than private landlords, they have taken on board not just the legal obligations of the new access laws but their spirit also.

11 Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows
(1908).

12 Bruno Bettelheim,
Uses of Enchantment
(Thames & Hudson, 1976). One of the places from which silence is conspicuously absent is the index to this fascinating book. Bettelheim, a psychologist, sees no value in silence and overrides it in his work.

13
Maitland Miscellany
, vol. 2, part 1 (Edinburgh, 1840), pp. 187–91.

14 In some tellings there are seven or twelve brothers; and in some versions they are not swans but crows or ravens. I am not sure why they are always either pure white or pure black.

1 Franz Kafka, letter to Felice Bower, 14–15 February 1913,
Letters to
Felice
, trans. James Stern (Schocken Books, 1973).

2 Charles de Foucault, letter to Father Jerome, OCSO, 1901, quoted in Ann Fremantle,
Desert Calling
(1950), pp. 162–3.

3 Gertrude Bell, quoted in Janet Wallach,
Desert Queen
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), pp. 54 and 108.

4 Wind, Sand and Stars publicity brochure. (The company’s name is derived from a book of the same title by Antoine Saint-Exupéry, an extraordinarily lyrical memoir of the desert.)

5 Cage,
Silence: Lectures
, p. 8.

6 Martin Buckley,
Grains of Sand
(Vintage, 2001), p. 49.

7 My own free reworking of 1 Samuel 1:1–20.

8 Personal communication.

9 Amos 8:11–12.

10 Indeed, someone has done so. Rudolf Bell’s
Holy Anorexia
(1985) is a tediously reductionist attempt to present a wide range of medieval women saints as case studies in anorexia. To achieve his purpose he has to strip them of all cultural context and all self-awareness. If he is right, the only reasonable conclusion is that the medieval Church was better at treating anorexia than modern medical science is.

11 Even in the early nineteenth century Jane Austen, in
Northanger Abbey
(1818), has Eleanor Tilby (a model of rational good sense and refined taste) support the view that it is perfectly proper for historians to invent speeches for historical characters.

12 Waddell,
Desert Fathers
, pp. 289ff.

13 Nicolson,
Sea Room
, p. 156.

14 Athanasius,
Life of Antony,
in
Early Christian Lives
, trans. Carolinne White (Penguin, 1998), p. 39.

15 See, for example: Derwas James Chitty,
The Desert a City
(Blackwell, 1966); Peter France,
Hermits
(St Martin’s Press, 1996); Andrew Louth,
The Wilderness of God
(Darton, Longman & Todd, 1991).

16 John Cassian, ‘On Mortification’, in Waddell,
Desert Fathers
, pp. 232–4.

17 Waddell,
Desert Fathers
.

18 France,
Hermits
, p. 139.

19 There is some disagreement about this. Some argue that she sought and received baptism in the hospital shortly before her death; some that she was baptised without her explicit consent after she lost consciousness. Here I am following Simone de Petrement, her friend and biographer, who writes persuasively against any regular form of baptism;
La vie de Simone Weil
in (Fayard, 1973).

20 Thérèse of Lisieux,
The Story of a Soul
, trans. M. Deig (Source Books, 1973).

21 Simon Weil,
Waiting for God
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 116.

22 De Foucault, letter to Marie de Bondy, 15.7.1906, quoted in Philip Hillyer,
Charles de Foucault
(Minnesota, 1990), p. 129.

23 Thomas Merton,
Raids on the Unspeakable
(New York, 1964), quoted in M. Furlong,
Merton, a Biography
(London, 1980), p. 283.

24 Merton,
Journal
, 16.12.1965.

25 Dalrymple, Holy
Mountain
, p. 410.

26 Jia Dao (779–843), James J. Y. Liu,
The Chinese Knight Errant
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).

1 John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, Book iv, 481–8.

2 William Lecky, quoted in France,
Hermits
, p. 22.

3 Quoted in Waddell,
Desert Fathers
.

4 Gibbon,
Decline and Fall
, chapter 37.

5 James Wilson,
A Voyage around the Coasts of Scotland and the Isles
(1841).

6 Michel de Montaigne,
The Complete Essays
, trans. M. A. Screech (Penguin, 1987). I find it fascinating that Montaigne should have picked this particular image. He himself was from a noble family and probably never entered a ‘back-shop’ in his life – ‘trade’ being even more despised by the French landed classes than by their English equivalents. While Catherine of Siena, who grew up over her family’s dyeing shop, had spoken of a ‘hermitage of the heart’ where she could retreat to be with her beloved, Montaigne chose the commercial metaphor.

7 Thomas de Quincey,
Collected Writings
, ed. Masson (Edinburgh, 1890), p. 235.

8 Thomas Carlyle,
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays
(1838).

9 William Wordsworth,
The Prelude
(1850).

10 Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

11 George Eliot,
Felix Holt
(1866).

12 Wordsworth, ‘The Advertisement’ to
The Prelude
.

13 Storr,
School for Genius
, p. 33.

14 Meher Baba, ‘Meher Baba’s Universal Message’, World’s Fair pamphlet, 1964.

15 See chapter 2 for more on this topic.

16 Sara Maitland,
Other Voices
, produced by Sara Davies for BBC Radio 4,
Afternoon Theatre
, 2001. The play later won a Media Mental Health Award. My deep gratitude goes to Sara Davies and the Exeter Group of the Voice Hearing Network.

17 John Prebble,
The Highland Clearances
(Secker & Warburg, 1963), p. 10.

18 Donald Ross,
Scenes at Knoydart
(1853), quoted in Prebble,
Highland
Clearances
, p. 278.

19 The 1901 census lists ninety-one individuals in Galloway as Gaelic-speaking.