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

by Patrick Leigh Fermor (Author), Karen Armstrong (Introduction)
Key Phrases: rock monasteries, Asia Minor, Conventual High Mass

Editorial Reviews

Review
"I can't remember when I was so pleased by a group of reissues as the Patrick Leigh Fermor books that the New York Review of Books is putting out...Mostly, the Europe he wrote about is long gone, but the books are as fresh as ever because they're about the spiritual connection between place and person. I would particularly recommend A Time to Keep Silence, a lovely 1957 book about Leigh Fermor's time spent in a couple of monasteries in France and Italy." --The Fort Worth-Star Telegram

"For the past three centuries, British writers have gone on trips to remote areas or exotic places and lived to tell the tale...Patrick Leigh Fermor, 92, has carried this great British tradition into our own time." --The Wall Street Journal

"Fermor writes logbooks of discovery, keenly meandering through architecture, music, art, history and the minutiae of everyday life...[His] erudition and courage are matched by his discerning compassion, which shapes the probing character sketches that populate his books, including A Time to Keep Silence, which has been reissued by New York Review Books." --Los Angeles Times

"[A Time to Keep Silence] is his shortest book (and to my mind his best)." –Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

"A gem of a short book." –Los Angeles Times

"Delightful…His book is not only an admirable piece of travel writing; it is also a brilliant piece of human exploration." –New Statesman (UK)

"Prose lapidary and evocative enough to please even the hardiest skeptic." –The Washington Post

“Introspection, history, reportage have their balanced places in a well-written book…measured and lucent.” —The Sunday Times (UK)

“A most successful attempt to portray the reactions of the man of the world (in the literal sense) when confronted with the monastic life.” –Daily Telegraph (UK)

“A pleasure and an instruction to read.” —Irish Times

"There is only one complaint I can think of making about Patrick Leigh Fermor's books: They appear too seldom. When they do appear, they offer that kindest of pleasures open to a reviewer--the chance of unqualified praise." –The New York Times

"...one of the greatest travel writers of all time" –Sunday Times (UK)

"...a unique mixture of hero, historian, traveler and writer; the last and the greatest of a generation whose like we won't see again." –Geographical

"The finest traveling companion we could ever have . . . His head is stocked with enough cultural lore and poetic fancy to make every league an adventure." –Evening Standard (UK)

“The genius of Patrick Leigh Fermor is a many splendored thing. Soldier, traveler, writer, Phihellene…he has already dazzled and delighted…It is some time since more truth and beauty were distilled into a hundred pages.” –Stewart Perowne

“The English language is still a superb instrument in the hands of a writer who has a virtuoso skill with words, a robust aesthetic passion, an indomitable curiosity…and a rapturous historical imagination.” —Philip Toynbee, The Observer (UK)

“Patrick Leigh Fermor is a stylish, superb master of words, which he savors like the choicest vintage.” —The Times (London)

“The greatest of living travel writers.” –Jan Morris

Product Description
While still a teenager, Patrick Leigh Fermor made his way across Europe, as recounted in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. During World War II, he fought with local partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Crete. But in A Time to Keep Silence, Leigh Fermor writes about a more inward journey, describing his several sojourns in some of Europe’s oldest and most venerable monasteries. He stays at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, a great repository of art and learning; at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant; and at the deeply ascetic Trappist monastery of La Grande Trappe, where monks take a vow of silence. Finally, he visits the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, hewn from the stony spires of a moonlike landscape, where he seeks some trace of the life of the earliest Christian anchorites.

More than a history or travel journal, however, this beautiful short book is a meditation on the meaning of silence and solitude for modern life. Leigh Fermor writes, “In the seclusion of a cell—an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual, and long solitary walks in the woods—the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.”

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (October 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590172442
• ISBN-13: 978-1590172445
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #33,409 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The Inner Empire", December 20, 2007

By	Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very enjoyable, very erudite, January 18, 2008

By	ScrawnyPunk (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enigmatic, oblique: form fits content well, February 18, 2008

By	John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.