A Book of Silence (6 page)

I did not want peace and quiet; I wanted to be ‘wholly a flame’. It is not chance that the words ‘whole’, ‘healthy’ and ‘holy’ are all derived from the same root. I incline to excess.

At a more practical level I had at least four conscious intentions.

First, I wanted to understand silence better. I wanted to demonstrate at least to myself that silence was not just a negative absence or loss, and was not necessarily waiting to be broken. But if it was
not simply a lack of noise, then I needed to know what it was, what its positive content might be. I am convinced that as a whole society we are losing something precious in our increasingly silence-avoiding culture and that somehow, whatever this silence might be, it needs holding, nourishing and unpacking.

I wanted to explore my own spirituality and deepen my growing sense of the reality of God, and the possibility of being connected to that reality. Within all the major religious traditions, though to differing degrees, there is a shared recognition that silence is one very effective tool for spiritual development. Of course, there are others, but I had put my hand to this particular plough and wanted to cut a deeper, straighter furrow.

I also wanted to dig deeper into my own writing. I had, as I have said, reached a point where I no longer had the simple confidence in narrative, in storytelling, which had sustained a steady flow of work for over twenty years. I find this difficult to explain, again I think because of our contemporary tendency to see any deviation from the mainstream as a loss or lack. I did not feel that my imagination had ‘dried up’ or that I was being silenced by a writer’s block, but rather that there was something
more
. I wanted to find out what it was. I had been brought up, and indeed had profoundly internalised, the dicta of post-romanticism: ‘solitude is the school for genius’;
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creativity is the ‘still unravished bride of quietness, [a] foster child of silence and slow time’.
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I had a sense that I needed a hefty dose of the sublime, of the extreme, to counterbalance the fragmented, psychologically realist babble of so much contemporary fiction. I needed as a writer to escape the pressure to conform, to sing in harmony with what is going on rather than seek out whatever may be beyond that. This journey into silence in extreme terrains has been important for a number of creative thinkers while they prepare themselves for radical new work. Although I did not know it at the time, my motivation feels very close to Wittgenstein’s decision to leave Cambridge and its, to him, intellectual triviality, and live in extreme isolation in Skjolden, Norway.

And finally I wanted more silence because I enjoyed the small amount I was getting. I enjoyed it at a great number of levels, intellectually, emotionally, physically. As well as being a silence-avoiding culture, and perhaps linked to this, we are also becoming a profoundly personalist culture, in which only relationships, feelings and psychodynamics are allowed full significance. If I had said to people, ‘I am in love with someone and we are going to live on an isolated moor,’ I doubt anyone would have said, ‘Why?’ in quite the same way. We have lost the conviction that Dorothy Sayers, the crime writer and theologian, so vigorous defended: ‘It is time to realise that a passionately held intellectual conviction is passionate.’ I was falling in love with silence. Like most people with a new love, I became increasingly obsessed by it – wanting to know more, to go further, to understand better.

That was what I wanted and I was in the enviable position of being able to have what I wanted. I don’t want this to sound like a midlife crisis, because there was no crisis. It was more a question of, ‘Well, what now?’ and ‘what now’ turned out to be silence.

So in the summer of 2000 I moved north to County Durham, to a house on a moor high above Weardale. I was eager and greedy. I wanted both to be silent and to think about silence. I set out to hunt silence and I have been doing so ever since.

T
he house in Weardale was wonderful. It was also slightly odd: it was perched very high, nearly 450 metres, on the summit of a bizarrely exposed ridge. It was isolated in one sense, but at the same time it was the middle house of a terrace of three cottages. When I first moved there both the other two houses were holiday homes, used only at weekends, so the neighbours created little disruption and, indeed, were immensely helpful as I struggled to learn how to live in such a cold, wind-driven location (drain your pipes before you leave home).

From both the front and the back there were enormously long views. Because of the steep sides of the dale, Stanhope, three kilometres and nearly 250 metres below, was invisible; the view stretched straight over the valley to the moors the other side. At night there were pairs of sharp eyes looking at me – the headlights of cars six miles away, coming over from Teesdale, and shining clean across the valley and in through my bedroom window.

But my house on the hill was not some shepherd’s cottage or ancient hermitage. It was part of a major industrial complex. From the earliest times Weardale has been a hive of industrial activity. One of the largest caches of Bronze Age artefacts in the UK was discovered beside the Heathery Burn, between my house and Stanhope. The Romans did not use the A68 (Dere Street), which still runs along the eastern edge of the Durham moors, solely to march troops up to Hadrian’s Wall, but also to take the lead and silver from the hill mines down to York. Lead, silver, feldspar, tin and coal were all mined up
here, and during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Weardale became a crucial source of lead and feldspar, which were mined under extraordinarily exploitative and dangerous conditions. In 1834 a railway was opened to bring lead down from the scattered hill mines to the dale itself, then out to the factories on the coastal plain. The sides of the dale were too steep for the trains to climb and a double steam winch was installed to pull them up. The winch engines needed steam twenty-four hours a day, so a line of cottages was built for the winch engineers. Farm labourers’ cottages were exquisitely cantilevered in to the landscape to provide them with as much shelter as possible, but the engineers were ruthlessly exposed to the full effect of the elements, 425 metres above sea level, on the very crest of a hill. My house was an ex-winch engineer’s cottage.

The ruin of the engine house itself stood derelict a hundred yards from the cottages. There is no winch, no railway and no mining now. The cement factory at Eastgate closed while I was there and the sand quarry beside the old railway line will no doubt follow it. There are no industrial jobs in Weardale, and the machinery and social life of the miners is silenced. But the views of apparently desolate and wild hills have been carved and shaped and constructed and formed by that industrial past. This is ‘Famous Five’ country
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because for every fog there is a mysterious mine shaft and for every bog a deserted railway line. The moors are a place of adventure.

At the same time the area is rich in the artefacts of the hermit tradition of northern England – Durham itself, Hexham, Lindisfarne (Holy Island) and a scattering of stones that mark erstwhile chapels and hermitages. In fact, the radical politics of the north-east drew its inspiration from the great hermit Bishop Cuthbert. At the end of the eleventh century, the inhabitants of the north-east resisted William the Conqueror’s demands for feudal dues and Norman reorganisation. Their land, they claimed, was the patrimony of St Cuthbert, unalienable, freely given and held. The habit of stubborn resistance has marked most of English history.

There are not many places you can live within such a long history and still have the huge silences and beauty of it all. The dales are full of stories and the vanished silent ghosts of other lives lived very differently in the same place. The emptiness of these moors is not the desolate tragedy of the Western Highlands, where the keening of the dispossessed can still be heard in the silence that followed the Clearances. It is something more dynamic.

I settled in very smoothly, once I had learned how to manage my coal-fired back boiler – my only source not merely of heat but of hot water as well. I started to walk a good deal. Moors are excellent for elementary walkers, especially those who smoke, because once you are above the valleys there are miles and miles of long views, often down on to woods and rivers, but the terrain itself is flat, without steep climbs. There is always something to see but you have to look for it. I felt increasingly pared down, lean, fit and quiet, shacked up, as it were, with the wind and the silence and the cold.

I also found that the landscape worked in a kind of harmony with my prayers. The ruined signs of previous inhabitants reminded me that ‘here we have no abiding city’. But the horizon line of the hills abided. It was uncluttered by trees or houses. I could see it out of every window. Wherever I sat to meditate, there was the clear, clean line that divides earth and sky and also unites them. That line was constant. It emerged out of the dark in the first dawn light and was swallowed back into the dark at nightfall. Above the line, infinity; below the line, mortality. But the line itself was both and held them both, and the wind blew along it, fresh and free like the passage of the spirit.

However, I also began to realise that Richard Byrd had been right when he speculated that ‘no man can hope to be completely free who lingers within reach of familiar habits and urgencies’.
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In the contemporary Western world it is very difficult to be silent for very long in the place where you live – people phone, they come to visit, to canvass your vote; the postman needs a signature, Jehovah’s Witnesses knock politely, someone has to read the meter; you run out of milk and have to go and buy some more, and the woman in
the village shop starts to chat. In fact, it is impossible. Moreover, there are what Byrd calls ‘urgencies’ – the economic urgency of work, of making a living, and the emotional urgency of love and friendship. I was living more silently than before, but I still was only dabbling on the margins of that deep ocean I sensed was there.