Customer Reviews:
 The World of Silence August 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Enigmatic, oblique: form fits content well February 18, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
Very enjoyable, very erudite January 18, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
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.
 "The Inner Empire" December 20, 2007
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
"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.
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