A Book of Silence (37 page)

I walked high and hard, and was exhausted every evening. I tried to contrast this experience with sitting in a nook of the desert rocks and trying to empty my mind and my heart of
everything
; and I also tried to think about authenticity and ‘coming to voice’ out of the silence around me. I learned some things.

I had loved and felt deeply drawn to the silence of the desert hermits – who chose, so strenuously, to empty their minds and hearts. But I was also aware that this concept is profoundly alien in our culture. I started to think about why this should be so and what had changed.

In Europe until well into the seventeenth century most serious-minded people would have accepted the hermits’ underlying motivation as a normal and healthy one, even though some of the more extreme forms in which this was expressed raised a few eyebrows. The sensible person practised disciplines, like an athlete in training, in pursuit of the radical freedom to choose the good, unhampered by the pressures of the ego and the weakness of the flesh. Above all, pride, any sense of self-sufficiency or autonomy, and particularly self-love, needed to be wrestled with and overcome:
low
self-esteem was considered a moral good. Now there is something outrageous and wrong in the very idea. This is made more complicated because of the accompanying emulsion of self-abnegation and joy, almost like salad dressing – the emollient of sweet oil and the sharp acidity of vinegar shaken together. This is now hard to understand. The post-Enlightenment, post-Freudian mind cannot find bliss in self-abnegation and if or when someone does, this is swiftly pathologised as self-hatred, repressed guilt or masochism.

Gradually I came to see the movement as historical and that at the Enlightenment a very profound change in how we understand identity itself occurred. Every definition of the Enlightenment ends up proving unsatisfactory, but here I am using it fairly loosely: by the Enlightenment, I mean that shift which surfaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by which individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority and tradition as core
European values. The Enlightenment was optimistic, secular and rationalist, and developed an ethical language of natural law, inherent freedoms and self-determination.

Inevitably Enlightenment thinking moved towards a greater respect for the autonomy of the individual and for the positive nature of desire. Romanticism, critical of the excessive civility of the eighteenth century,
*
focused on the emotional and subjective experience of the individual. Under the pressure of this shift certain relevant words began to change their meaning. Etymologically it is much less common for words to ‘improve’ their standing than for them to decline in status – villain, gossip and spinster show a typical progression from something positive or neutral to something pejorative. So when I noticed a whole group of words becoming
less
negative in their connotations I got curious. What is going on when words like imagination, self-esteem and above all pride simultaneously move from being negative moral terms to being virtues or positive attributes?

For instance, the word ‘genius’ changed meaning at this time. Today, as the OED recognises, it almost exclusively refers to a person endowed with:

This sense of the word does not seem to have existed before the mid eighteenth century. Prior to that the word, derived from Latin, had only its classical meaning of the ‘tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to people at their births – to govern their fortunes, determine their characters and finally to conduct them out of this world’. Places and institutions had similar spirits. A Christianised version of this story allowed people two ‘geniuses’ – a good and a bad one, who were often identified as angels; and the phrase someone’s ‘evil genius’ is a throwback to this original usage. From here the word developed to mean characteristic disposition or turn of mind, and thence a ‘natural ability or capacity’.

In the early eighteenth century this sense came to be applied with increasing frequency to the kind of intellectual power particular to poets and painters – and given the way artists were making increasingly grandiose claims for themselves, it is not altogether surprising that the word began to denote:

Although this use of the word ‘genius’ originated in English, it was taken up enthusiastically by the German Romantic Movement, to such an extent that their literary and artistic revival is often known as the
Genieperiode
. The major influence of German writers on early English romantics meant the term was reimported with particular overtones.

(I strongly suspect that the word ‘genius’ was given added ameliorative impetus by the enthusiasm at the time for Arabian and Persian culture – for example, in the growing popularity of
The Thousand and
One Nights
. The word ‘djinn’ was translated as ‘genie’, with the plural ‘genii’, which is the same word as the plural of the Latin genius. This placed the powerful magic spirits very close to the ‘genius’ of the classical world, but with an added frisson of exoticism.)

But for me the most important of these upwardly mobile words was ‘individual’ itself. It has acquired a totally new meaning over the last two centuries.

It is fairly obvious that ‘individual’ has its roots in ‘that which cannot be divided’. And in fact until the late seventeenth century, it meant very much the same as ‘indivisible’: different parts that cannot be broken down into smaller units. Before about 1650 the most common English usage was theological, specifically as a way of describing the Holy Trinity: ‘To the glorie … of the hie and indyvyduall Trinitie’ (1425) is the first example in the OED: the Trinity is made up of three ‘bits’, which cannot be divided, which cannot be made sense of except in an indivisible unity. It also referred to married, or conspicuously loving, couples. Shakespeare, in
Timon of
Athens
, can talk of ‘individual’ mates, or Adam can address Eve, in
Paradise Lost
,

In the eighteenth century the word began to shift. First it became a zoological term meaning a single example of a whole species. Its move from adjective to noun is, I think, as indicative as its change in meaning. Interestingly, it was one of the earliest words to make this grammatical shift – to be swiftly followed by terms like homosexual, feminist, lunatic and so on, words that may well have required the present understanding of ‘individual’ to achieve their contemporary noun status. William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft’s partner and a leading radical philosopher, seems to be the first person to use ‘individual’ in our contemporary sense. It was not until the early nineteenth century that human beings’ individuality was deemed not to extend beyond the boundaries of their own skin. That which was not breakable down, divisible into further constituent parts, was the
self
– the individual in whom innate human rights and self-authenticating emotions could reside.

Through the twentieth century the word ‘individual’ increasingly developed positive moral connotations – it is now a good thing to
be individual, unique and separate. Its ascent is still in process: my 1933 edition of the OED has not yet quite caught up with contemporary ‘individualism’ and still describes it in negative moral language as ‘self-centred conduct or feeling; egoism’. In current usage, though, I think it has transcended this obloquy and now means something nearer to ‘original’, ‘independent’, or ‘well-integrated’.

For many of the intellectuals of the early classicist phase of the Enlightenment the very notion of a hermit was repellent to a civilised person:

And, most famously, Edward Gibbon, with what Helen Waddell was to call his ‘slow-dropping malice’, wrote:

In the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Gibbon also wrote the much-quoted line: ‘Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school for genius.’
⁴
He clearly felt then that there were two different sorts of solitude – the ‘genius’ post-Enlightenment kind and the ‘savage’ solitude of asceticism.

This view remained in currency into the nineteenth century, when James Wilson, on tour in the Scottish Highlands, wrote:

I suspect it is a view that many people would fundamentally agree with now.

But by the end of the eighteenth century the idea that the individual was of supreme importance launched a movement that saw itself as being in total opposition to the values of the civilised (‘city based’) rationalism of the early Enlightenment, although ideologically it drew on the same concept of the autonomous individual. To the idea that an ‘individual’ was a single unique person, indivisibly contained within a single body, the Romantic Movement attached quite a specific package of philosophical attitudes. Among the most relevant of these are:

• An elevation of emotion over reason and of the senses over the intellect.
  
• Introspection and a fascination with the self; a sort of heightened awareness of one’s own moods and thoughts.
  
• A fascination with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional personality, and particularly his inner struggles.
  
• A construction of the artist as a free creative spirit – whose expression of authentic personal emotion was more important than form.
  
• An emphasis upon imagination and spontaneity as a way to spiritual truth.
  
• The idea that children were born naturally free and even perfect – and that social life and its demands corrupted them. They came
  into the world ‘trailing clouds of glory’, but ‘shades of the prison house’ ensnared them all too fast.
  
• A heightened appreciation of the beauties of nature, particularly the sublime.
  

The romantic genius or artist had somehow to escape the coils of social convention and slip back into primal innocence so that he would be able to access his deepest emotions. Obviously solitude and silence in nature proved useful here; as I have discovered, these do indeed intensify feelings and sensations. Untrammelled by the demands of social life, the genius will find his inner true authentic self, buried under the layers of false consciousness, and be free to express it.

The ‘he’ and ‘his’ throughout this passage is not accidental; the original romantic hero-artist was definitely male. Although a woman, ideally in a doomed love relationship, could and ought to be his muse, she was more often his nemesis, demanding his return to the chains of conventional society.

And so the romantics sought out solitude and silence in order to ‘find themselves’, just as the desert hermits sought out silence and solitude to ‘lose themselves’. It is not coincidental that while the hermits generally preferred the word ‘silence’, the romantics tended to use ‘solitude’; they certainly did not want to be silenced; they wanted to use silence as a way to finding their own individual voices. Periods of silence and solitude modelled on the idea of the religious ‘retreat’ were considered valuable for developing independence and authenticity, and for allowing an individual to stand outside the conforming pressures of ‘civilised’ life. They also talked about it a great deal.