Into Great Silence

Into Great Silence is a film that documents the monastic life of the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. As the title might suggest, the monks take a vow of silence. Outside the devotion of communal prayer-song, the monks are permitted to speak to one another only once a week during a long walk in the countryside, to celebrate one day a year when they may receive family visitors, and to have two days per year of communal recreation. The remainder of their days are spent in solitary study, prayer and manual labors.
    There is a scene in the film I hold in memory. An older monk walks solitarily down a cloister walk heading somewhere. He moves with considered slowness, one might say he shuffles deliberately with no sense at all of urgency. I remember thinking to myself that he ought to step in a more lively pace to his destination, but no, I remember thinking next, this man is in no hurry to get anywhere. Indeed, there is no where he need be in any specific requirement of time. He is going nowhere and he is content where ever he might be in the life of the monastery.  There is no where he need be rushing to; whenever he gets to wherever he is going it will be time enough when he arrives. I experienced a great peace watching the monk move down the cloister path perfectly at peace with himself and his life.
     There is a line in Tillie Olsen’s short story “Tell Me a Riddle.” The old woman’s family attempts to convince her to move with her husband into a retirement like dwelling where she will have all her needs cared for: she need not cook or clean because all will be done for her. Nurses will care for her in her illness. But she absolutely refuses to leave her home. And she considers: “Enough . . . She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others . . . Being able at last to live within, and not move to the rhythm of others” I have often been struck by the profundity of her demand and her wish. After a life devoted to the needs of others—to the rhythm of others—she desires now to follow only her own rhythms and tend to her own needs. Like the Carthusian monks, she chooses to move only to the deliberate pace that her desires demand; her desires are slight.
     I would learn this peace now—this peace that comes dropping slow—to do as the yogis teach—to slow and to deepen my breathing, to move deliberately without rush or anxious speed. Thoreau teaches that it is a great art to saunter, and I would like now to saunter. I would not be a monk—Thoreau celebrated society and declared himself ready “to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.” But I would like to learn the art of sauntering and like the monk ambling peacefully down the cloister path would move slowly going somewhere in my own rhythms and with no deliberate speed.