[Assam] Six Days at a Scottish monastry

[Ram Sarangapani]

For those interested in this kind of reading, this seems to be a gem of a
book (IMHO).
This review is from Slate Magazine. The book promises to be good and the
author Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor has a number of other books too.

What I found interesting is that there seems to be something for everyone in
Fermor's writings.
I highlighted some lines which I thought were interesting. A good many seem
applicable to many of us:)

I am suddenly envious of netters who may have already read him :) :)

--Ram

http://www.slate.com/id/2167854/fr/flyout


 *from: *Inigo Thomas
The Myth of Monastic Peacefulness
 Posted Thursday, June 14, 2007, at 6:37 PM ET

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, a writer and a man of famous charm, has, in his
90s, been all but canonized. Anthony Lane wrote a loving appreciation of him
in *The* *New Yorker* last year: St. Paddy, patron saint of British travel
writing, ideal dinner-party guest, a treasured national secret.

In 1957, Leigh Fermor wrote a book about monks, *A Time To Keep
Silence<http://www.amazon.com/Time-Silence-Patrick-Leigh-Fermor/dp/1590172442/>
*, which I took with me to Pluscarden. He described plunging into gloom
after his arrival at a Benedictine monastery in Normandy nearly a decade
earlier: days of bad sleeping, inexplicable disruption, and procrastination;
a pile of blank paper that stayed blank, *eventually followed by some serene
summer months not thinking about the fun he might have had in London or
Paris, which, in turn, allowed him to write a book*. *Yet was it really the
fun he thought he was avoiding that enabled him to write? *I don't know,
although Leigh Fermor isn't the last writer to have found a monastery
conducive to work.

Monasteries are notionally very peaceful places—there's nothing to do but
what you choose to do. There was at Pluscarden, which Leigh Fermor writes
briefly about in *A Time To Keep Silence*, a sense of imminence or
aftermath, of an event having happened or about to happen—which, I wasn't
sure. These characteristics are also present in Leigh Fermor's writing. *One
of his remarkable skills is to write about events that happened 40 years
earlier as if they were yesterday:* *A Time of Gifts* and *Between the Woods
and the Water*, his chronicles of the Homeric walk he made in the late-1930s
from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, were written 40 and 50 years later. (*In
his 90s,* he is working on a third volume.) Yet both are haunted by what
succeeded his journey across Europe: obliterating world war. Leigh Fermor's
books about Greece, *Mani* and *Roumeli*, are about the same war's
aftermath. In between, however, is Leigh Fermor's own war experience,
something he's more guarded about, when he—as has proved to be the case for
many British travel writers of that vintage—acted as an agent of the
government. *He was a Special Operations Executive officer, and in that
capacity* *he acted with heroism on Crete, famously kidnapping a German
general.* A Cretan accomplice subsequently wrote his account of this
celebrated adventure, which Leigh Fermor
translated<http://www.amazon.com/Cretan-Runner-Story-German-Occupation/dp/0140273220/>into
English.
------------------------------
 ------------------------------

In the aftermath of this incident, however, the Wehrmacht arrived in the
Cretan village from which the general had been abducted and massacred its
inhabitants. *Leigh Fermor was heroic; the SOE had a German general, who was
taken away by a submarine.* *But in the bigger scheme of things, the
kidnapping meant little, it brought no swifter end to the war, and it
inspired a pointless atrocity, although wars so often involve so much
pointless bloodletting that it can seem banal to say this*. Leigh Fermor is
considered a travel writer and a bona fide British hero. *But he is
primarily a writer about conflict, even if the fighting is almost always
excluded from his pages*. The book he wrote at a Norman monastery was the
chronicle of his voyage through the Caribbean archipelago in the late 1940s,
*The Traveler's Tree.* Coincidentally or not, Leigh Fermor alludes to some
of the atrocities the British carried out to preserve their dominion over
Caribbean islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, imperial rule that
often required massacres and bloody acts of reprisal.

*A Time To Keep Silence* is a short book; my days at Pluscarden were few. I
never knew the serenity Leigh Fermor found at an abbey 50 years earlier, and
I don't think I would ever have found it. On the last morning, I called for
a taxi from the phone box. I asked the guest master how much I owed him, and
he replied, "Whatever you can afford." I walked through the grounds of the
abbey a last time, into the graveyard with its well-preserved wooden
crosses; soon, another monk would join this congregation. Then down the ilex
and rhododendron avenue I'd walked up some days earlier, to the gates that
said *Pax*.

The taxi arrived, and it took me to Elgin, where I arrived early in the
morning, before the shops had opened.* Wanting to walk about the town
without my case, I asked a newsagent if I could leave it with him. He said
no*, even after I said I was prepared to open it to prove I wasn't about to
blow him or Elgin up, but he said security precautions meant he couldn't,
regardless of what was, or wasn't, in my case. *My request was unreasonable
in a sense; but his reply seemed the more so. Fear-mongering, which T*ony
Blair's government has excelled at, seems to inspire acts as irrational as
any in organized religion. At Elgin's bus station, several people waited, as
I did, for the bus to Inverness, the gateway to the Highlands and the
railhead for journeys to the south.

*Arguments about religion between those who are religious and those who are
not are irresolvable*. *If you don't believe in a god, then what argument is
there about its nonexistence*. But it's *impossible to say that religions
don't exist or that you can avoid the rituals or institutions associated
with them*. Aspects of religious life are muddled into everyday life: *How
would you disengage yourself from every act with a religious dimension
attached to it. Where would you begin?* *You aren't proving yourself any
less religious by avoiding them, but nor are you proving your religiosity by
adhering to them.*

*Arguments about religion can prove futile, because they turn out to be
arguments about something else, such as wars and whether you think they
resolve differences between people or create them.* *At Pluscarden, war
wasn't present, but nor was it absent*. The Tornado bombers flying low up
the valley, the former navy and army men, the dead monk and his earlier
life. It also seemed to me that, after monks, only soldiers are as keenly
aware of death, although militarism and monasticism have other
characteristics in common as well. Monasticism is now neither a necessity
nor an obligation, nor is joining the army. It is practiced by very few men
and women, although monasteries exert themselves more influentially than
their size suggests. They are visited, apparently in large numbers, and
people return from retreats claiming new calm after staying among those who
have not only reconciled themselves to death but look forward to it. This is
a belief I couldn't reconcile myself with, however hard I might try.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.assamnet.org/pipermail/assam-assamnet.org/attachments/20070703/7b862487/attachment.htm>