A Time to Keep Silence comprises three slim essays, morning reading with a pot of tea. Read once, then again more slowly, paying closer attention to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s language. With a dictionary nearby: scapulars, giaour, encomium. With Leigh Fermor, new words always tucked into the corners of sentences.
The essays trace his time in monasteries: the muffled footfall of the Abbey of St. Wandrille, the austere discipline of La Grande Trappe, the eerie riddles of the rock monasteries in Cappadocia. For a few hours, sharing in the stillness he sought and recorded.
He ends with a passage on St. Basil of Caesarea, though it could just as easily describe the spirit of this quiet book:
There is a mood of humanity and simplicity in his writings, an absence of bigotry that seems to blow like a soft wind from those groves of olive and tamarind and lentisk; gently ruffling the surface of the mind and then leaving it quiet and still. And, while the daylight vanishes from these northern hayfields, it is a similar blessing, an ancient wisdom exorcising the memory of conflict and bloodshed of the intervening centuries, that brings its message of tranquility to quieten the mind and compose the spirit.
One finishes the book with the sense that silence, for Leigh Fermor, was not absence but a form of attention; something that had to be entered slowly before it would yield anything at all.
>Anthony,It is a precious little jewel of a book. I see from one of your earlier posts that you were also very taken by A Time for Gifts. For me it joined a select band of reads which are a real pick-me-up. I do not think I am particularly prone to envy, but I have to admit to desiring PLF's art and scope. What a life well lived and well told!
>I want to read Fermor so much! I have heard fantastic things about his writing, and I love learning new words. So of course my library hasn't got anything by him. :\
>Uncle Toby – I relished A Time for Gifts. Leigh Fermor's teenage stroll down the length of Europe, at a pivotal moment in history, and his experiences during the war make exhilarating reading. Combine his life and the lucidity of his writing and, thankfully for us, you get some special books.
>Jenny – Do make sure to read some Fermor. I can't imagine the man writes anything that is not worth reading.