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’. 2 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 inthe 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.
Fascinated by silence, drawn joyfully into the void, I wanted to experience a total version; I wanted to know what it was that I was trying to build into my life before the habits of the quotidian asserted themselves. The nearest analogy I can think of is that of a honeymoon. When this post-wedding holiday started it was in a society in which the newly wed couple had probably not spent more than a couple of hours at a time together, and even less time alone together. Rather than start immediately on the business of building a shared working life, they would spend a period of intense time together away from their normal daily concerns, where they had nothing to do but focus on and learn about each other. Similarly monks and nuns in even the most silent of religious orders take ‘retreats’, periods of time when they are separate from their community and relieved of all the burdens of work for an intense period of concentration on God. I decided that I would go away and spend some time doing nothing except being silent and thinking about and experiencing it. I decided that forty days would be a suitable amount of time. Obviously this was not a randomly chosen period – but it seemed to be possible but substantial, as well as iconic.
The most straightforward way for someone like me to manage this sort of time and space would have been to spend these six weeks in a religious community where I would have been freed from all the hassles and would have had gatekeepers against any interruptions. But at this point I wanted to separate prayer from silence. My imagination is so ‘Christianised’ that I felt those
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’. 2 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 inthe 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.
Fascinated by silence, drawn joyfully into the void, I wanted to experience a total version; I wanted to know what it was that I was trying to build into my life before the habits of the quotidian asserted themselves. The nearest analogy I can think of is that of a honeymoon. When this post-wedding holiday started it was in a society in which the newly wed couple had probably not spent more than a couple of hours at a time together, and even less time alone together. Rather than start immediately on the business of building a shared working life, they would spend a period of intense time together away from their normal daily concerns, where they had nothing to do but focus on and learn about each other. Similarly monks and nuns in even the most silent of religious orders take ‘retreats’, periods of time when they are separate from their community and relieved of all the burdens of work for an intense period of concentration on God. I decided that I would go away and spend some time doing nothing except being silent and thinking about and experiencing it. I decided that forty days would be a suitable amount of time. Obviously this was not a randomly chosen period – but it seemed to be possible but substantial, as well as iconic.
The most straightforward way for someone like me to manage this sort of time and space would have been to spend these six weeks in a religious community where I would have been freed from all the hassles and would have had gatekeepers against any interruptions. But at this point I wanted to separate prayer from silence. My imagination is so ‘Christianised’ that I felt those
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