INTELLECTUAL ISLANDS
Greek mosaic of St Joseph meditating in the desert
Patrick Keigh Fermor
described his adaptation as a book writing guest of the Abbey of
Fontanelle as a period during which normal standards recede and the
strange new world becomes reality. This was a slow, and, at first,
acutely painful. To begin with, he slept badly at night and fell
asleep during the day, felt restless alone in his cell and
depressed by the lack of alcohol.
"The most remarkable preliminary symptoms were the
variations of my need of sleep. After initial spells of insomnia,
nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for
sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the hours I spent
in or on my bed vastly outnumbered the hours I spent awake; and my
sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of
some hypnotic drug. For two days, meals and the offices in the
church-Mass, Vespers and Compline-were almost my only lucid
moments. Then began an extraordinary transformation: this extreme
lassitude dwindled to nothing; night shrank to five hours of light,
dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy
and limpid freshness. The explanation is simple enough: the desire
for talk, movement and nervous expression that I had transported
from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked
no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a
vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or
nourishment".
Work became easier
every moment; and, when he was not working on his book, he was
either exploring the Abbey and the neighbouring countryside, or
reading. The Abbey became the reverse of a tomb-a silent
university, a country house, a castle hanging in mid-air beyond the
reach of ordinary troubles and vexations.
Conversely, if his
first days in the Abbey had been a period of depression, the
unwinding process, after he had left, was ten times worse. The
Abbey seemed at first a graveyard; the outer world seemed
afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity
entirely.
"This state of mind, I saw, was, perhaps, as false
as my first reactions to monastic life; but the admission did
nothing to decrease its unpleasantness. From the train which took
me back to Paris, even the advertisements for Byr and Cinzano seen
from the window, usually such jubilat emblems of freedom and
escape, had acquired the impact personal insults. The process of
adaptation-in reverse-had painfully to begin again".
The abbey had become
an intellectual island, a self-contained world, where each day
passed in tune with the strictly observed monastic rituals. The
mind is freed to order thoughts with no time limit or distraction.
So it is with all islands, whether surrounded by water or cut off
from the stream of consumerism by gates, fences, or a strenuous
climb to a summit.
