Sara Maitland
In her late forties, Sara Maitland found herself more and more drawn to silence. Repeatedly criticized by friends who thought her choice of solitude and silence "selfish," and challenged by one friend's contention that silence is something totally negative, meant to be broken, Maitland sets out to experiment with silence. Prone to landscapes with vast expanses of "nothing," she begins with six weeks alone in a self-catering holiday cottage on the island of Skye off the coast of Scotland. Other experiments include a sojourn in the Sinai desert and a solitary walking tour of the mountains and hills of her childhood in Galloway--an area that has the second-lowest population density in Britain.
The insights that she draws from these experiences, and from the extensive reading that she does while probing her own capacity for prolonged periods of isolation and silence, are original and often amazing. I was especially interested in her wrestling with the seemingly opposed purposes of religious silence and the silence of romanticism. That is, silence undertaken for religious purposes seeks to empty the self and overcome the propensity of the ego to shelter behind strict boundaries. Religious silence has for its end an opening up to a reality that transcends the self. The creative silence of romanticism, on the other hand, "uses silence to exaclty the opposite ends: to shore up and strengthen the boundaries of the self; to make a person less permeable to the Other...Rather than self-emptying, it seeks full-fill-ment" (251). Maitland is a writer who prays for three hours each day; a believer who wants to share what she discovers in print. One can readily see why this issue is important to her.
This is one of the most unusual books I have read for some time. I highly recommend it.
Mary Aquin O'Neill, RSM, Ph.D.