[The book is called]…called A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and I quickly fell under its spell.
At a mere 95 pages, it is a short read, yet nothing about it makes you want to rush. In the mid-1950s, Fermor, an English travel writer who as a young man once walked from Holland to Turkey, became interested in the life of monks. He decided to visit several Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France. A Time to Keep Silence is the record of those visits and it accomplishes something that few books do: It replicates in style and rhythm the very experience that it seeks to describe. The writing is spare, exactingly precise, and then occasionally quite beautiful, just as the life of the monks we hear about are pared down, highly concentrated, and every now and then sublime. In short, it’s a book about the contemplative life that delivers the reader into a contemplation of his or her own.
I read this book last year and it is wonderful, particulairly the part covering his first monestary stay in Normandy. Anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor is well worth reading. His “Between the Woods and the Water,” and “A Time of Gifts,” are two of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered.