When the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor first entered the Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontenelle, he must have felt like he was checking himself into rehab. Fermor was hoping the peace and quiet of abbey life would help him overcome a bad case of writer’s block, but he was unprepared for the monks’ austere lifestyle. He would stare at his papers for hours on end, he couldn’t sleep, and he chafed under the abbey’s restrictions on smoking. It wasn’t exactly like rehab, of course. On his first night in the abbey’s guest room, Fermor polished off a bottle of Calvados.
Fermor would go on to write A Time to Keep Silence, an account of his visits to two French abbeys and his time wandering the ruins of monkish retreats in Cappadocia. And while the rehab analogy is inexact, it does capture the feeling of social withdrawal Fermor felt on entering St. Wandrille for the first time. In the quarantine era, his short book on monasticism is something of a how-to guide for adapting to conditions of solitude.
The modern reader, cooped up inside and constantly bombarded by social media, might object to the idea that A Time To Keep Silence has anything to teach us. Fermor voluntarily subjected himself to monastic discipline, or at least the closest an outsider can get to the real thing, and withdrew from a world considerably less connected than our own. Besides, authors are naturally solitary figures. A writing retreat at a beautiful medieval abbey sounds much more rewarding than life under lockdown.
But before dismissing Fermor’s monastic experience, one should consider his long and varied career as a travel writer. After getting kicked out of boarding school in 1933, Fermor decided to walk across Europe from Holland to Istanbul. His journey is recounted in great detail in A Time of Gifts and its two sequels, in which Fermor charms his way into chateaus, nightclubs, and palaces across Central and Eastern Europe. Terms such as raconteur and bon vivant are overused, but Fermor was the genuine article. Even in a world before digital connectivity, the prospect of cutting himself off from society must have been genuinely upsetting.
Our isolation is not voluntary, but mindfulness, meditation, and “getting away from it all” were en vogue long before the lockdown. The trouble with the quarantine is that we live in isolation, not solitude. From virtual museum tours to distance learning to Zoom dance parties, we have tried to replace our pre-quarantine lives with digital simulacra. The results have been largely unsatisfying, something that would not have surprised the monks of St. Wandrille. Their environment was designed for solitude and contemplation. Ours is optimized for driving us crazy. “In the world outside our walls, speech is gravely abused,” remarked the abbot of St. Wandrille to Fermor. One can only imagine what he’d say about Twitter.
Fortunately, you do not have to become a monk to adopt certain monastic practices. After four days at the abbey, Fermor began to sleep deeply for five hours and enjoy “absolute and god-like freedom” for the remainder of the day. The soothing ritual of monastic life, the communal spirit of the Benedictine monks, and the tranquility of his environment combined to give him a profound clarity of thought. Of course, Fermor was spared the interruptions of a buzzing phone, an overflowing email inbox, and a barrage of social media notifications. We cannot enter an abbey to escape these distractions, but a little self-imposed monastic discipline might make the quarantine experience more bearable.
Fermor’s visit to St. Wandrille was only his first stay at a Catholic monastery. Years later, he entered La Grande Trappe, the center of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance. As the name implies, the Trappists’ unbending rules made the kindly Benedictines of St. Wandrille look like a clutch of Unitarians by comparison. According to lay rumor, the Cistercian brothers would greet each other by saying, “Brother, you must die.” Indeed, some features of the Cistercian Order bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the worst aspects of life under quarantine. Brothers would denounce each other for violating the abbey’s rules, a monastic version of the now ubiquitous quarantine snitching. An ex-Trappist monk recounted to Fermor his experience of being “assaulted by temptation” while living under the Cistercian rule, recalling the ever-present urge to break protocol and walk the dog twice in one day. But for those who could endure the order’s discipline, the spiritual rewards, Fermor writes, were extraordinary.
An increasingly secular society is one less likely to look to religious institutions for guidance, but certain aspects of abbey life are not so different from the fashionable prescriptions of wellness experts and meditation coaches. Fermor himself was a nonbeliever who could still appreciate the attractions of Catholic monasticism. He laughingly compared his expectations of wine-swilling friars to the reality of the monks’ austere existence. He also noted the similarities between the monastic orders and certain strains of Eastern mysticism he had encountered on his travels. Perhaps Fermor would have even had a few kind words for the lifestyle gurus at Goop.
The coronavirus outbreak and the resulting lockdown have merely accelerated an already extant shift toward virtual connectivity. Now more than ever, we can physically isolate ourselves from the outside world, but the demands of digital life deny us the tranquility of simply being alone. In a time of quarantine, Fermor’s book is a reminder that solitude is not the same as isolation and that digital connectivity is no substitute for community. Ritual, routine, temperance, and self-abnegation offer their own kind of freedom, a spiritual lesson that even the most fervent secularist can appreciate.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Eger, Hungary.
