Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last Friday (obituary here), was one of the great figures of the twentieth century. His daring military exploits during World War II (where he led guerilla operations on Crete against the Nazis while disguised as a Cretan shepherd and kidnapped the commander of the German garrison) were combined with a remarkable literary career as a master of English prose and the author of two celebrated books (A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water) describing his 1934 walk across Europe at the age of 18. As Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker a few years ago, Leigh Fermor had "so much living to his credit that the lives conducted by the rest of us seem barely sentient--pinched and paltry things, laughably provincial in their scope, and no more fruitful than sleepwalks." But most of the obituaries for Leigh Fermor have neglected or mentioned only in passing his little book about French monasticism, A Time to Keep Silence, which includes this beautiful Latinate paragraph about the monastic life:

To begin with, I slept badly at night and fell asleep during the day, felt restless alone in my cell and depressed by the lack of alcohol, the disappearance of which had caused a suddent halt in the customary monsoon. 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 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 most 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. Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything. No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life. Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo and not only failed to emerge in the small hours as tormentors but appeared to have lost their dragonish validity. This new dispensation left nineteen hours of absolute and god-like freedom. Work became easier every moment; and, when I was not working, I was either exploring the Abbey and the neighbouring countryside, or reading. The Abbey became the reverse of a tomb--not, indeed, a Thelema or Nepenthe, but a silent university, a country house, a castle hanging in mid-air beyond the reach of ordinary troubles and vexations. A verse from the office of Compline expresses the same thought; and it was no doubt an unconscious memory of it that prompted me to put it down: Altissimum posuisti refugium tuum...Non accedet ad te malum et flagellum non appropinquabit tabernaculo tuo [Thou hast made the Most High thy refuge...No evil shall befall thee nor any plague come near thy dwelling].