I've been very slowly making my way through Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time to Keep Silence. This is a very slim little volume of less than 100 pages that could probably easily be read by a faster reader than me in a day or two, but I've discovered that I cannot read Leigh Fermor's prose quickly, nor do I really want to. His writing is elegant and erudite and so filled with interesting facts and reflections and ideas that I automatically slow down and reread as I go. The book is based on his experiences in the mid-1950s. He had been in Paris writing a book but was unable to find a quiet place to work. A friend suggested that travel to St. Wandrille, a Benedictine Abbey not far from Rouen for a peaceful place to work. A Time to Keep Silence is based on letters that he wrote at the time to a correspondent.
Leigh Fermor was uncertain whether the monks would receive him as he didn't wish to go into retreat, however the abbot warmly welcomed him to stay. What follows is Leigh Fermor's description of his experiences at the Abbey. He goes into great detail exploring the history of the Abbey of St. Wadrille de Fontanelle and the monk's daily routine. My teaser is a passage that describes Leigh Fermor's first few nights at the Abbey and the physical transformation that took place.
"To begin with, I slept badly at night and fell asleep during the day, felt restless alone in my cell and depressed by the lack of alcohol, the disappearance of which had caused a suddent halt in the customary monsoon. The most remarkable preliminary symptoms were the variations of my need of sleep. After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug. For two days, meals and the offices in the church--Mass, Vespers and Compline--were almost my most lucid moments. Then began an extraordinary transformation: this extreme lassitude dwindled to nothing; night shrank to five hours of light, dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy and limpid freshness. The explanation is simple enough: the desire for talk, movement and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment. Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything. No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life."
This sounds really blissful to me, but then (and I hope this doesn't sound awful) I think there is too much noise in the world. He goes on to talk about the Abbey's library, and while I won't share anymore long passages he does talk about a rare breviary that is part of the collection. He writes that "It is a treasure that the Abbey sighs to possess." I love that. My own collection of books is pretty humble, but imagine having a book that you would "sigh to possess"!