Customer Reviews

A Time to Keep Silence (New York Review Books Classics)

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"A Time To Keep Silence" is travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor's beautifully written account of visits to a number of European monasteries (Benedictine and Cistercian) and later to the ruins of an even older Turkish desert community in his efforts to understand the continuing appeal of the monastic way of life. An outsider, Fermor frankly acknowledges his contemporary bias, making it clear he's a man of the world whose direct intention is not to seek a believer's purification of soul. Instead, he wants to discover why an initially unattractive way of life, one that must strike a big-city dweller like himself as filled with deprivation and sadness, has continued through the centuries to exert its appeal upon men, men of a sort he discovers through his own experience to be not only psychologically balanced, but largely happy.

The telling insight Fermor receives from his initial stay at St. Wandrille's, one reconfirmed after visits through the years to other Benedictine abbeys, is that hidden within abbey walls is something truly magical, "the slow and cumulative spell of healing quietness." Whereas the abbey had struck him first as a place about as exciting as a "graveyard," it becomes one where he discovers, after a painful adjustment, that he can dispense with interfering trivalities and begin to look at life steadily and whole. Not surprisingly, when he returns to the outside world, he has to adjust once again, the world now seeming after his monastic stay "an inferno of noise and vulgarity entirely populated by bounders and sluts and crooks."

Fermor's insights in this book are equally matched by his extraordinary descriptive powers. Like any true poet, he is enough a lover of the world's body to give it a memorable description. When he speaks of the long sleeves of monks' robes brushing the floor, for instance, he says they are "like the ends of elephants' trunks." And describing the arid desert location of the long since abandoned Turkish monastery, he talks of "lion-colored uplands" and "biscuit-colored villages." Far from simply telling what he sees, Fermor through stunning word painting allows his readers the pleasure of seeing with him.

The other night, needing a calm book after an agitating day, I re-read this short but typically-- granted this author's ability to convey much depth in a few pages-- account of the famed travel writer's visits to monasteries. His simple account focuses on a long stay at St Wandrille's in Belgium, a bit of Solesmes, more at La Grande Trappe in France, and the journey later among the ruins of Cappadocian foundations in Turkey.

Fermor knows his limitations in retreating to such places in search of solitude to work on his own manuscripts. He tries to take on the mystery of the call to silence even as he tries to put it into words, to account for its appeal to a few and its strangeness to many of us. The results may not please all readers, for Fermor submits to the difference he encounters, and so by his lay status must remain too at the margins of what the monks take decades to live within. Writing well before Vatican II, Fermor conjures up an astonishingly austere regimen that he glimpses among the Trappists at their motherhouse; the Belgian Benedictines, by contrast, earn much more time for study and scholarship.

I wondered, in the decades since, how many monks remain at such European houses. Fermor provides us with efficiently told summaries of the past depredations and recoveries of such venerable communities, and one closes Fermor's depictions of life as it was lived there a half a century ago with a realization of how close it was to observances centuries older. Again, such a description leaves me to ponder how much as been altered and how much remains the same given the enormous shifts in Catholic practice and the decline in vocations since then.

This reflection leads to the comparatively short glimpse of the biscuit-colored mountains, with their pyramidical, anthill-like terrain, that housed some of the first monks in Christianity. The photos, as the one on the cover show, of this forbidding terrain remind me of an objective correlative for La Grande Trappe. The caves, the few remains, the hostile environment present, it seems, Fermor with a sense of an otherworldly terrain in more ways than one.

Another great book by a great travel writer. This is a very quick read, but absolutely stuffed with erudition. For all but the most educated, it wouldn't hurt to read this with Wikipedia as a companion piece. As with his other travel books, the mix of architecture, history, linguistics, and an obvious personal touch lend an air of familiarity which, in the end, help give the impression that you have experienced these things yourself.

I once read a review which stated this book concluded that the vow of silence and other retreats from secular life were not effective or warranted in some circumstances. In my opinion, this conclusion was not reached by the author. The opposite appears to be true - Fermor's return to secular life seemed to be more traumatic than his adjustment period during his first visit. His understanding is remarkable and serves as a good lesson to the casual reader - his hosts honestly believe they are suffering in order to atone for the sins of the world, and they ask for nothing in return.

I am a Benedictine, and I just finished reading A TIME FOR SILENCE by Patrick Leigh Fermer. I am distressed by the fact that he seems to think that Benedict's Rule is strict and severe. "Au contraire!" Of course he was writing before Vatican II, which might account for that impression. I realize some of our practices might seem difficult. Take silence for instance. Our world is so filled with noise and distraction that silence can be a very hard discipline for one who is not accustomed to the richness of it. I guess I would like to tell Mr. Fermer that Benedictine life isn't about asceticism for its own sake. Aspects of our life that may seem ascetical are really about clearing away anything that might distract us from the spiritual journey - a journey that's not just for monastics but for everyone! Other than that, the book is an interesting read as a travelogue. I was especially interested in the bit about the abandoned rock monasteries of Cappadocia. I knew nothing about them.

because it's so beautiful. Lovely, inspiring, all too brief. I want to know much more about this man and these monasteries. I tried to read Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain because I'm interested in monastic life and I couldn't get through it. Leigh Fermor, on the other hand, isn't on a faith journey. He's a writer looking for a quiet place to work. Yet he manages to tell me more about why one might choose to leave the world and become a monk than I got from Thomas Merton.

I'm a big fan of Fermor's writing and this little gem of a book is a departure from the classic travel works he has given us. In this short book, Fermor describes life in several monasteries where silence defines the world of the monk. Fermor stipulates that as a guest in these places he will never achieve the level of faith and monastic practice that the monks do, but he shines a light on their world, giving the reader a glimpse of an existence we've always wondered about but rarely got to know.

Anyone who, on a journey through the world, can stumble into the Trappist world and both embrace, respect, and absorb the difficulty has got to be worth reading. That he has such a fine eye for detail and a range of knowledge (especially about architecture and theology) only adds to the pleasure. Highly recommended.

I only wish the book had been longer. The writing is engaging as always, and this book gave a fascinating glimpse into the Benedictine world. The bit about Cappadoccia at the end (which I was very interested in, don't get me wrong) felt a bit "tacked-on" as if they needed to fill out a slim book.

Very well-written, and I liked it, but again I wish it had been longer and in-depth.

Patrick Leigh Fermor died in June 2011 at the grand age of ninety-six. He was the very last of a heroic generation of British travel-writers who earlier had earned distinction as soldiers during World War II (a group that included Peter Fleming, Norman Lewis, and Wilfred Thesiger). Leigh Fermor's WWII exploits were particularly notable. He lived for two years in the mountains of German-occupied Crete, organizing resistance activities, and in 1944 he led the mission that abducted the German Commander General Heinrich Kreipe, a story that became the subject of the film "Ill Met by Moonlight".

After WWII Leigh Fermor embarked on a career as a travel-writer that brought him even greater distinction. His best-known books were set in the Balkans and Greece. A TIME TO KEEP SILENCE is an earlier one. Originally published in 1957, it contains Leigh Fermor's thoughts on the monastic life, as occasioned by a series of stays at Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France in 1952, followed by a visit to the ancient (and long-abandoned) rock monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey.

A TIME TO KEEP SILENCE is not the paradigmatic travel book of action and adventure in exotic places. The monasteries are, by design, sequestered havens of quietude and solitude. The "unfamiliar" that the author reports on is not so much a foreign land of strange sights and sounds as an inner world and an alien modality of living. As Leigh Fermor writes, "The secret of monastic life, that entire abdication of the will and the enthronement of the will of God which solves all problems and trials and turns a life of such acute outward suffering into one of peace and joy, is a thing that it is given to few outside a cloister fully to comprehend." Reading A TIME TO SLIENCE will give the non-cloistered secular reader of this modern world a much better appreciation of that other world, a world that truly does seem to be imbued with peace and joy.

What most distinguishes A TIME TO KEEP SILENCE is the extraordinary prose - cultivated and recondite, yet gracious and relaxed. Leigh Fermor is a master of description, both of physical settings and of spiritual or psychological ambiance. Here is a longish extract, from Leigh Fermor's first visit to the Abbey of St Wandrille de Fontanelle: "As the monks dispersed after Vespers and, a few hours later, after Compline, I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero, the blood running every second thinner and slower as if the heart might in the end imperceptibly stop beating. These men really lived as if each day were their last, at peace with the world, shriven, fortified by the sacraments, ready at any moment to cease upon the midnight with no pain. Death, when it came, would be the easiest of change-overs. The silence, the appearance, the complexion and the gait of ghosts they had already; the final step would be only a matter of detail."

I first read A TIME TO KEEP SILENCE about twelve years ago. It was rewarding and enriching to read it again, as I believe it would be were I to read it in another ten or so years (which I hope to be able to do). My copy predates the New York Review Books edition, but NYRB deserves commendation for keeping it and the other major books of Leigh Fermor in print. His is a voice of culture and wonder that, I hope, does not pass into antiquity for generations to come.

this books is so interesting! I'm midway still, but it is perfect for the introspective individual who longs to isolate him/herself from the craziness of this world and understand the true meaning of silence. Silence can help you find yourself, and this book helps show you how! Most recommended for the spiritual kind.