A Book of Silence - Sara Maitland

After an early life of raucous dinner-table sparring and an involved public feminist intellectualism, all of which was decidedly “noisy,” in her middle years the English writer Sara Maitland converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and actively sought out a life of silence. Maitland is interested in her own growing love of silence and solitude primarily as it enacts an essential tension of the spiritual life. Is silence life-affirming, or deathly? Is it an absence, or a presence? Is it essentially either “’mad’ …or ‘bad’ (selfish, antisocial)”? A Book Of Silence (Counterpoint, $25) is Maitland’s effort to comprehend the magnetism of quiet, and to settle upon a “rule” for her own practice of it. In Sinai and Scotland, her narrative dwells upon gardens, Genesis, psychoanalysis, landscapes, monks, menopause, and supporting anecdotes from literature, world religions, and her own colorful life.