A Book of Silence (8 page)

The
Sunday Times
’s creation of the race itself was somewhat opportunist: there were two experienced single-handed yachtsmen, Robin Knox-Johnston and Bernard Moitessier, already preparing to rise to the challenge for its own sake and who had found other
sponsorship. Neither of them took any interest in the idea of a race, Moitessier announcing that the very idea of it made him ‘want to vomit’.
⁸
It was clear that, when either of them was ready, they would set off, waiting for no race and, if successful, leave no role for the
Sunday Times
. In response the newspaper framed the race so that it was impossible
not
to enter it. There would be two prizes – first round the world, and fastest time round the world. These could be different because there was no actual starting date – entrants merely had to set out from any port north of 40°N at any time between the beginning of June and the end of October.

In the end there were nine entries. But there was only one finisher – Robin Knox-Johnston.

One yacht was dismasted in a gale off South Africa and one foundered barely 1,500 kilometres from home. All the other entrants, for one reason or another, ‘retired’. In each case it was not the sailing itself that proved the most significant hurdle, but the emotional response to it. No one was killed by wave or wind; their ‘will’ was warped or altered by isolation and silence. Donald Crowhurst went mad; Nigel Tetley committed suicide some months after his rescue; and Moitessier fell so ‘in love’ with silence and the sea that in the end he simply could not bring himself to return home.

The reason for elaborating this little piece of history here is simple. Several of the cultural changes of the sixties came together. None of these sailors was independently wealthy, as previous adventurers had predominantly been – they
needed
sponsorship at the very moment when the media had learned that non-specialist readers
wanted
to know about extreme adventures and the interior lives of their heroes. Readers will consume every crumb of emotion, darkness, fear and triumph they can get, so the books of solitary adventure began to include feelings, emotions and inner awareness. All the survivors of this first race wrote books about it.

One effect of the race (not, of course, separated from other cultural developments of the 1960s, which reshaped masculinity as much as they more famously reshaped femininity) was that it led to a new kind of ‘adventure writing’, a new sort of account of silence
and solitude. For sailing, at least, the silence was short-lived – over the next three decades the public’s desire to know what was happening emotionally and physically, to ‘keep in touch’, overwhelmed the silence. Satellite navigation systems, effective radio communications and the global reach of the rescue services have made it nearly impossible for independent small ships to slip away. The reporting of the silence has destroyed the silence – whatever else her adventure may have been, Ellen McArthur’s experience during her record-breaking circumnavigation was hardly one of silence.

Single-handed sailors have produced some of the best accounts of extreme silences. This may have something to do with the psychology of those who put to sea in small ships, but I expect that in reality it is practical: long periods of single-handed journeys are actually quite boring – you are not in the Roaring Forties all the time; nor do you have to shin up masts in high gales seven days a week. You have space and time to brood, think, listen to the silence and moreover a place to write extensive journals. For large parts of Knox-Johnston’s journal you would hardly know he was at sea:

The necessary discipline of keeping the ship’s log (without which you will not know where you are or how to get to where you are going) means that daily you have to sit down and record your trip. Adding a more personal narrative, which anyway you have already had commissioned and which is enabling you to make the voyage, fits tidily into the pattern of your day. You have the same cabin throughout the journey and can safely store your papers in it. You do not have to lug your notebook or tape recorder around with you day after day. It is patently easier to keep a coherent and consistent
account of prolonged silence at sea than under most other adventurous circumstances. For the 1968 Golden Globe yachtsmen we have a solid group of accounts written at the same time, in basically similar external conditions. This race provided me with a touchstone for the experiences of silence.

Of course, there are other accounts too. Almost every extreme habitat has its own silence aficionados. I am not sure what it is that links ‘extreme’ geography and silence, but I suspect it is something more than the likelihood that such places will be fairly deserted. I know that my own silence is nourished by, even born out of, a particular sort of visual austerity. (‘Bleak’ is the word more commonly used by my friends.) There are now accounts of prolonged silences in a wide variety of terrain. Deserts, mountains, islands and the Poles are as popular as the oceans; and Jacques Cousteau, the underwater explorer, called his autobiography
The Silent World
.

There are exceptions. For example, I have never come across an account of silence in the jungle, although there are many adventure stories located there. My own limited experience of the jungle suggests that, quite simply, it is not silent. Jungles are noisy – and the noises are sudden, alarming and suggest a density of life, even if not human life, of fertility, movement, surprise. The hot, fetid density of the jungle offers a different kind of physical experience from the sharp, austere atmospheres that seem to be emotionally connected to silence.

Throughout written history at least there have always been individuals who have taken themselves off voluntarily and often alone seeking silence. Some of these expeditions have had important historical consequences. Gautama Buddha’s silent meditation under the Bo Tree some time between 566 and 368
BCE
, Jesus of Nazareth’s forty-day solitary fast in the Sinai Desert
c
. 33
CE
and Muhammad ibn Abdullah’s annual Ramadan retreat to Mount Hira, near Mecca, culminating in his revelations of 610
CE
, are rather obvious cases in point. Most silent adventures, however, have had no particular public consequences – or at least not that we can
be aware of. The explicit motivation for these adventures has changed across cultures and across time (religious, artistic, heroic and escapist) but the desire is there constantly. John Hunt, in his foreword to
Alone
, wrote:

On Skye, like Byrd, though less extremely, I was ‘thrown upon myself’. People ask me what I did all day. I prayed and meditated a lot more than I was able to do at home; I read a bit, though less than I had anticipated. I walked a good deal when the weather permitted, but I was restricted both by its consistent vileness and by the very early nightfall, that far north in November and December. When I could not walk I drove out in the car and looked at the wild countryside, both the mountains and the rocky coast. I worked on some very intricate sewing. English traditional canvas embroidery, unlike Continental tapestry, does not create pictures but patterns, almost mathematical; it requires endless precise repetitive actions, like knitting but without that irritating click-click sound. And I listened. I listened to all the complex sounds, and I listened to the silence, and I listened to myself and tried to notice what was happening. Every evening I wrote up the day in a journal, usually 2,000 or 3,000 words.

What I saw over those forty days was a group of sensations, most of them oddly physical. Later I was fascinated to find that all of these frequently, even usually, occur to anyone who exposes him-or herself
*
voluntarily to long periods of silence, for any reason whatsoever. I noted at least eight distinct experiences.

The first effect that I noticed, towards the end of the first week, was an extraordinary intensification of physical sensation. It started with food. One morning I cooked myself my usual bowl of porridge and, eating it, was suddenly overwhelmed by the wonderful, delicious delightfulness of porridge. Eating was an intense pleasure: it tasted
more
like porridge than I could have imagined porridge could taste. The milk was very slightly cooler than the oats; I could distinguish the sugar and the salt tastes independently even though there was no sense that they weren’t perfectly blended and balanced. Even cooking it was exquisite – the bubbles rose like lava and created moon craters on the surface in an infinitely pleasing way. It was not a sublimated sexual or religious experience; on the contrary it was an entirely gustatory experience.

Even as I ate it I realised quite suddenly how good all the food was tasting this week, how delicious, how pleasing to cook. It feels slightly foolish at this distance from the moment, but there was something so complete about the making-and-eating. I thank God now that I did not take the alternative option, which I had considered, of buying forty frozen meals and stacking them all prepared into the freezer. The quotidian business, or busyness, of cooking seems extremely important – like weaving the rush baskets was for the desert hermits.
¹¹
Yet it was only and simply porridge – it did not taste of ‘nectar and ambrosia’ or the Heavenly Banquet: it tasted of porridge! Intensely of porridge.

The sensation that everything sensory was
more so
was the first effect that I noticed in myself and the one that I would say with most confidence was a direct result of silence. I suspect that some of this was simply having the time and opportunity to concentrate. But it was more than this. This is quite hard to describe, but by the middle of the second week I was feeling everything with an extraordinary degree of intensity. Even now when porridge has become just porridge again, I discover in myself a new understanding of little Goldilocks, trespasser and thief, sneaking out of the dark and silent forest and smelling the porridge in the Three Bears House. Even her name can make me salivate, with delight and desire.

All food took on something of this intensity – I cooked well, making more effort, taking more care than I normally do, and enjoyed things for and of themselves. It was not that I cooked very elaborately, and indeed I was confined to the ingredients I had taken with me before I knew that this would be such an important part of my day; it was simply that my sense of taste intensified. But so did my other senses. My hearing, for instance, felt honed and accurate to a remarkable degree.

One evening I noticed that I was suddenly able to separate the different wind noises and follow a bit their relationship to each other – like an orchestra. The wind in the chimney as opposed to ‘outside’ was quite easy – but there were infinitely more, and subtler, differentiations to be made. The wind (I expect it always does but I am not always so well focused) was changing constantly in volume and strength – so there were almost lyrical moments when it sank down towards silence (brief but intense) and I could rest there. Or there would be just one tone – from the burn or the chimney – then more and more picking up and adding in, including extremely wild moments when all the roof tiles would ripple like a percussion (tympani) line. I could not listen to it in a very sustained way – either all the tones would collapse into one rather formless loud wind noise or my awareness would drift. It was hard work as well as a gift. But the silent falls were exquisite and consoling. It felt, perhaps because of the attention required, entirely NOW and physical – I was not thinking about the wind but listening to it.

My sense of body temperature became more acute – if I was wet, or cold, or warm I experienced this very directly and totally. I have never been so physically tired, so aware of weather, of sound, and of the variety of colour in the wild environment. It seems as though speaking, ‘telling’ one’s feelings, even to the extent of ‘look, look how wet I got’, acts as a way of discharging them, like lifting the lid of a boiling pot.

Before long my emotions also seemed to swell likewise into monumental waves of feeling – floods of tears, giggles, excitement or anxiety, often entirely disproportionate to the occasion. These
roller-coaster rides come up again and again – when I reread the journal I am amazed by them, partly because they often seemed quite normal at the time but also because, even when I did notice them, they did not seem to worry me much. These were not new or inexplicable sensations and feelings; they were the old ones felt more strongly.

Whatever caused this intensification it was not some psychological peculiarity of my own. Almost every account of silence I have ever read contains some version of it. In my journal at the time I commented that this intensification of sensation made me think of St Anthony’s sexual torments. Anthony is generally regarded as the founder of Christian monasticism, and especially of eremitical (hermit) spirituality. He was born in 250
CE
in Upper Egypt into a prosperous Christian family. His parents died when he was about twenty and (after making suitable arrangements for his sister) he sold all his property and became a hermit, first in his own neighbourhood and later in the Sinai Desert – seeking ever more isolated and extreme situations. The way silence ratchets up the intensity of physical experience makes some sense of his famous struggles with demons. His particular demons frequently disguised themselves as sexy dancing girls. So immediately and powerfully did he become sexually aroused that he felt obliged to rush out of his cell and throw himself into thorn bushes. Actually, I don’t share his beliefs about either masturbation or demons, but I can understand how the
intensity
of the physical and mental experience might drive one to seeing such actions as somehow sensible.