In ‘Biography of Silence’, a Writer Journeys into His Soul
A review of ‘Biography of Silence’, by Pablo d’Ors.
‘Listen to silence,’ urges Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic. ‘It has so much to say!’ Pablo d’Ors, Catholic priest and writer, would agree. His Biography of Silence, an extended essay that runs over just 80 pages, is both a meditation diary and a love song to soundlessness. In the course of 49 short chapters, he describes his journey into himself: his attempt to throw himself, ‘trusting, into that dark and luminous ocean that is silence’.
Of course, it is not always so easy. Inspired by the sudden realisation that his desire for literary fame had become a curse, he began to meditate without any real idea of what he was doing. And he describes how his ‘back hurt, my chest, my legs … To tell the truth, almost everything hurt’. And yet he perseveres out of a sort of narcissistic tenacity: an unwillingness to see himself as the kind of person who quits. Soon, he begins to register that once his mind is clear, astonishing things can happen. He learns to appreciate nature, to see himself as an indivisible part of the world he inhabits, to concern himself with how he perceives events and not the events themselves. He develops a kind of intimacy with his most fundamental driving forces and insecurities—what he calls his ‘iceberg’. And he falls in love with concrete reality, preferring it to the non-existence of dreams, memories, ideas. At times of course, things do not go so smoothly. Silence shows him its more ‘arid face’. He discovers himself in ‘the desert’: a barren wasteland that is hostile towards him, and urges him to turn back, to return to the world.
Soon, he begins to register that once his mind is clear, astonishing things can happen.
His central theme is that we are all tossed about the waves of modern life, constantly distracted, untrusting, alienated from others and ourselves. We ‘season our biographies’ with drama. We confuse real life with ‘liveliness’. Life, writes Pablo, is what happens when the waves stop, and we sink into the flowing waters of the world. If you are, as I am, interested in meditation or mysticism, then you will be familiar with those who say that they cannot engage with meditation because their mind never stops. It is those stale, repetitive, mostly negative thoughts, and the feelings they elicit and reinforce, that give us an impression that something is happening in our lives. When all that we are doing when we think is erecting a barrier between ourselves and everything else—including ourselves. Pablo urges us to ‘throw [ourselves] into the water, [rather] than spend too much time thinking about it on the edge.’ ‘That is exactly our problem in life,’ he writes. ‘The hesitations, the fears, the systemic doubts, the fear of living.’ He is not even urging the reader to meditate as such; but ‘given that we are in life … live it!’
The technical challenge that Pablo faces is one that he names explicitly: that in the West ‘we live in a world that is too intellectualised’. What he is describing—the encounter with the real, with the divine—necessarily lies beyond words. This is something that Wittgenstein and McGilchrist, two of my intellectual heroes, have also noted: that, like love or morality, words can only take us so far. There are some things that we can only experience. To talk about them is to abolish them. Hence Saint Augustine’s remark, that ‘Si comprehendis, no est Deus’ (‘if you understand him, he isn’t God’.) Pablo echoes Augustine, writing that the ‘witness of the witness’ — a power or force that we allow in—‘is only accessed in very deep meditation and there are no words to describe it. When we try to put it into words, it stops being there.’
Like love or morality, words can only take us so far.
But Pablo, in my view, overcomes this challenge; and he does so through style. His style—poetic, lucid, dreamy—and the sincerity with which he writes, come together to create an impression of something like what he is trying to describe. Poetry, as McGilchrist writes in The Matter with Things, uses language against itself, that is to say: the poet deploys words in service of that which lies beyond them. And so it is with Pablo d’Ors, whose poetry communicates more about the experience of meditation than the mere intellectual meaning of the words he uses. In what is perhaps the most beautifully written chapter in an exquisitely expressed essay, he describes the changes that he will make in his life thanks to the insights he has gained from meditation. ‘I am going to stop, I am going to think, to breathe, and to be born, if it is possible, for a second time,’ he writes. ‘I have decided to stand up and open my eyes.’ At the end of this passage, he concludes that in this way, he will ‘arrive at a happy old age, when I will contemplate, humble and proud at the same time, the small but grand orchard that I have cultivated. Life as cult, culture, and cultivation.’ Of course, we must also credit David Shook, who translated Biography of Silence from Spanish. All translation is interpretation; but his rendition is as faithful to the text, in my view, as it is possible to be—and I have read translations of Biography of Silence in a number of other languages.
I have to confess that Biography of Silence is perhaps my favourite book, and I read it at least twice a year. I suppose what appeals to me so strongly about this book is its intensity, its particularity, its avoidance of abstraction in favour of experience, and the way it communicates depth with such simplicity. (It’s also short.) This is a luminous little book, and the mere act of reading it is good for the soul. If you have not read it, then I urge you: read it.
