A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Exhausted by postwar Paris, Patrick Leigh Fermor retreated to a Benedictine abbey in 1953. He needed somewhere quiet to write. What he found was silence as a force—restorative, unsettling, alive.

"The silence seemed to expand like a balloon, displacing everything else."

This slender book chronicles weeks among monks in France and later at Cappadocia's ancient monastery. Fermor writes with characteristic elegance about the "huge, black wings" of monastic quiet settling over him—the initial agitation, then clarity, then unexpected peace.

"The mood of the monastery was settling on me, like a tide creeping forward."

Silence, he discovers, isn't absence. It's presence. And it takes time to stop resisting it.

Essential reading for anyone drawn to contemplative travel—or curious what happens when we finally stop talking.