Stories
Reading Silence and Solitude
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"The silence seemed to expand like a balloon, displacing everything else."
Exhausted by postwar Paris, Patrick Leigh Fermor retreated to a Benedictine abbey in 1953 needing somewhere quiet to write. This slender book chronicles his weeks among monks in France and Cappadocia. Fermor captures the "huge, black wings" of monastic quiet settling over him: initial agitation giving way to clarity, then unexpected peace.
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"In the dead hush, like the hush in these snow mountains, the silence swelled with the intake of my breath into a Presence of vast benevolence."
Peter Matthiessen went into the Himalaya in search of a snow leopard and found something rarer: silence. This is both travelogue and inward journey—a man moving through grief in thin air, guided by Zen teachings only partly understood. The leopard may never appear, but the silence offers something vaster: intimacy with wind, glacier, and the slow dissolution of self.
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"In my life below, I'm so determined to make the most of every moment; here, simply watching a box of light above the bed, I'm ready at last to let every moment make the most of me."
For over thirty years, Pico Iyer has returned to a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur—perched on cliffs above the Pacific. He is not religious, but goes to rediscover inner silence, a state we forget exists. Written in short, epigrammatic fragments, this book mirrors the quiet it describes: no epiphany, just the slow accumulation of hours and the changes they work beneath the surface.
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"A window is more transparent than a television. It does not tell you what to think; it shows you what is."
Sylvain Tesson—heir to Thoreau, but with vodka and cigars—locked himself for six months in a Siberian cabin on Lake Baikal's edge. In this slender, witty book, winter and silence act as "cleaning agents," stripping life to its essential rites: chopping wood, drawing water, pouring tea. The taiga offers no comfort, only indifference. What falls away is everything unnecessary.
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"The islands are a kind of silence made physical."
Adam Nicolson inherited the Shiants—uninhabited islands in the Hebrides, wild and miles from anywhere. Part memoir, part natural history, this is his meditation on owning a place shaped entirely by isolation, weather, and sea. Solitude here isn't loneliness but freedom—remoteness not as deprivation but privilege.
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Deeper explorations of silence and solitude
A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland: Part memoir, part intellectual history.
Biography of Silence by Pablo d'Ors on the joy of silence.
Retreat by Nat Segnit on stepping back from the world.
The Desert Fathers translated by Helen Waddell, fourth-century texts on hermit spirituality.
Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise by Thich Nhat Hanh on zen stillness.
On the enduring power of Paul Bowles’ writing