Sara Maitland

A Book of Silence

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In her late forties, after a noisy upbringing as one of six children and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland found herself living alone in the country and, to her surprise, falling in love with silence. In this fascinating, intelligent, and beautifully written book, Maitland describes how she set out to explore this new love, spending periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills, and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye.
Maitland delves deep into the rich cultural history of silence, exploring its significance in fairy tale and myth, its importance to the Western and Eastern religious traditions, and its use in psychoanalysis and artistic expression.
Her story culminates in her building a hermitage on an isolated moor in Galloway, and as she guides readers through experiences of silence in this new home, she evokes a sense of peace that includes the reader in its intimate tranquility.
This book is currently unavailable
395 printed pages
Original publication
2010
Publication year
2010
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Quotes

  • Mariana López Gonzálezhas quoted4 years ago
    It is salutary to recall just how modern a concept this is: until the railway network spread out across Britain, with its need for timetables, there was no ‘accurate national time’
  • Mariana López Gonzálezhas quoted4 years ago
    I found it harder and harder to maintain a sense of time passing. I ceased to have a ‘normal’ sense of how long I had been doing something or why I might continue or stop. This did not feel like absent-mindedness and was probably exaggerated because of the amount of the day that was dark, but it did make me realise just how clock-obsessed we have all become, marking our days ritually and shaken by anxiety, like Alice’s White Rabbit, if we ‘lose’ time
  • Mariana López Gonzálezhas quoted4 years ago
    I was quite shocked to find how quickly and easily I abandoned many of the daily activities I’d assumed were ‘natural’ or necessary, like washing, or brushing my hair, for example

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