Searching for peace
Books about retreat, from Charlotte Wood's new novel to a 70-year-old classic
Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I read and recommend nature books. Thanks for reading!
What I’m reading
I once lived in an ashram for a while, getting up in the stinging cold before dawn to go to yoga in a softly carpeted room, levering the lids off catering-sized buckets of butter when on kitchen duty, finding profound rest in the rule of silence after 6pm. Once in a while, we gathered around a fire for a havan, singing a lengthy mantra 108 times and offering empty hands to the flames. It occurs to me now that perhaps there was something ridiculous about a bunch of white people solemnly performing an ancient Vedic ritual in the middle of the Australian bush, but it didn’t feel so then. Instead, it was at once boring, enraging, strangely moving, and at the last, ecstatic.
I’ve stayed at a convent, too, sleeping alone in a tiny stone cottage, walking down the lily-fringed drive to attend Prime and Vespers, divided from the nuns by far more than faith. At first I felt faintly condescending towards the nuns, then strangely protective, then humbled.
When I was travelling through South America, I often took refuge in churches from the busy streets and the strain of speaking a new language. They were never locked in those Catholic countries, and there were always candles burning and one or two softly murmuring devotees in the shadows. There was always space to sit quietly and breathe deeply and look up into slanting light.
There’s something in it, is what I’m saying. When the big things come at us, when fear and loneliness and death and grief sweep in, we look up at last.
Charlotte Wood’s new book, Stone Yard Devotional, follows a woman who has lost the faith around which she built her whole adult life. This faith wasn’t in any god, but in environmental causes, and for reasons never quite spelled out, it has catastrophically deserted her. With it has gone her job, her marriage, her friends, her world. And so she goes back to her home town on the high and dry Monaro Plain, and finds herself in a shabby little bush convent, despite never being even on nodding terms with any religion. She doesn’t join it, exactly; she just never leaves.
And then – well, nothing, really. Nothing happens, but some things do: the pandemic (at a distance, in their rural isolation), the mouse plague (all too close), the return of people she knew long ago at school. She discovers a convent (or a monastery, or an ashram) is not a place of retreat, if you stay. It’s the opposite: a place where, stripped of everything that usually softens and blurs the edges, you’re brought face to face with yourself. And she finds out what happens next.
There’s not all that much about religion in this book – Wood’s protagonist never prays; she simply “pays attention” – but there’s plenty of reverence. Quiet, focused, sacred attention is paid to nature, both its beauty and its ugliness (yes, the roiling masses of stinking mice), as well as to the past and to the people she’s loved. It’s a strikingly spare book, beautiful, and full of truth and wisdom. I think you’d like it.
Read alongside…
Patrick Leigh Fermor was a real-life war hero, an intrepid traveller and a superb writer who finally put down roots in this dream home in Greece. (It’s open to visitors for a couple of months each year, and yes, staying here is definitely on my bucket list.)
Despite being by birth an Anglican, and by inclination no particular creed at all, Leigh Fermor regularly stayed at Catholic monasteries in France, using them not just as places of sanctuary from the world, but also as writing retreats.
In 1953 he wrote a slender book, A Time to Keep Silence, about his monastic travels, and it’s one I reread every other year or so. The histories he recounts are never less than fascinating, and his depictions of the architecture and music he experiences are sparklingly beautiful, but where this book shines is his careful depiction of the effect on the mind of the contemplative life. As Wood’s protagonist discovers, and as I did too, those effects aren’t only the clarity and tranquillity that all those who retreat from the world are seeking. Leigh Fermor’s stays tend to begin with moods of loneliness and depression, after which he experiences profound exhaustion. Only then does peace begin to descend.
Despite my hero worship, I have to confess Leigh Fermor was a man of his time, and there’s not a woman to be seen in this book - even the Virgin Mary barely gets a look-in. It’s inevitable, given the subject matter, but still strange to a modern reader, particularly as he himself doesn’t notice or mention it at all. His blithe assurances that most monks manage to conquer sexual temptation read as desperately naive, too, given all that we know now. But his portrait of the monasteries he loves as “palaces of light and virtue and tranquillity” is delicately drawn, beautifully detailed, and entirely unforgettable.
Also read…
Nat Segnit’s Retreat: The Risks and Rewards of Stepping Back from the World is perhaps the opposite: a hyper-contemporary exploration of that same contemplative urge, describing Segnit’s forays into all types of retreats, from an Ibizan wellness centre to an isolated Turkish monastery. In stark contrast to Leigh Fermor, it’s funny and capacious and a little unfocused, but worth reading if the topic interests you.
Segnit interviews fellow writer Sara Maitland in his book, and in her own account of her retreat to a remote corner of Scotland, A Book of Silence, at last we hear a female perspective. And it’s a rare one: there must be few women who leave their adult children to their own lives and take to the hills for a life of quiet prayer. It’s a while since I read this one, but since I’m clearly chasing a reading theme, I’ll return to it soon. I remember that, funnily for a book about silence, it was deliciously discursive. Maitland is Anglo-Catholic, and the religious sections were my least favourite - I suspect there’s much on which she and I would disagree - but she’s clear-eyed about her own character, perceptive on the need for silence, and a passionate but never sentimental observer of the landscapes she’s lucky enough to inhabit.
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I have “tried” retreats. Silent. Week long. Or just occasional daylong zen. And now I understand my need to flee. I went into them thinking in the silence I would find peace and interior silence. And as external silence descended I found only what made me itchy with discomfort. I felt anger at the structure. I felt like I had to...flee. And finally you explained it so beautifully--my understanding is still imperfect--but I see what I think happened. I was left with me. And I had no exterior interaction to blame or struggle against. And the interactions that remained rubbed like sandpaper against the me I didn’t really want to be alone with. In short. I did not stay long enough. Thank you. And I will read those books.