The Carthusian monks who are the subjects of Philip Groening’s documentary Into Great Silence do not, as the film’s title suggests, have a great deal to say. Living in a light-filled stone charterhouse (as the order’s monasteries are called) in a picturesque valley in the French Alps, they bind themselves to a vow not of literal silence but of extreme reticence. They pray and sing aloud, alone and together, and once a week the elders take an outdoor stroll during which some chatting is permitted.
Mr. Groening’s cameras (one of them operated by the pioneering digital videographer Anthony Dod Mantle) observe the brothers from afar, or unobtrusively within their cells, a discreet approach that occasionally gives way to head-on portraiture.
Only one monk, elderly and blind, speaks directly to the camera. Appearing near the end of the film, he muses on the nature of his vocation and the texture of his religious devotion. Past and present are human categories, he says, but for God, there is no past, only present. Viewed from this perspective from the standpoint of eternity Into Great Silence, with a running time of 162 minutes, is absurdly short.
Mr. Groening, a German filmmaker, waited 16 years for permission to document the Carthusians, and this too seems like a trivial interval. The order was founded by St. Bruno of Cologne in 1084, and it appears that not much has changed in the lives of its adherents since then. A few concessions to modernity are visible: electric lights, a computer for keeping the books, and oranges and bananas in the middle of winter. But the rhythm of work, prayer and reflection, the attitude described as joyful penitence, flows in a cycle that feels not so much ancient as timeless.
And the film’s achievement is to capture, within a brief, elliptical span, this slow, delicate rhythm. Into Great Silence is not about the Carthusians in the conventional sense that documentaries are about their subjects. It offers no background on the history or theology of the order, nor any information about the biographies of individual monks. Though we do witness the initiation and adaptation of two novices, we learn nothing about their previous lives or their reasons for joining.
The psychology and philosophy of asceticism are not Mr. Groening’s concern. He is after something more elusive and, from an aesthetic as well as an intellectual point of view, more valuable: a point of contact with the spiritual content of intense religious commitment.
He finds it by means of a visual style and an editing scheme that match the feeling and structure of the days and seasons as they pass through the charterhouse. Snow gives way to greenery, early morning light cycles around to darkness, and the viewer witnesses ordinary moments that add up to a persuasive representation of grace.
Not the thing itself , Mr. Groening is not so vain as to suppose that a movie can provide a religious experience but a preliminary understanding of its shape and weight. The sensual beauty of the images is part of this, but the film has more than lovely alpine vistas and arresting compositions of light and shade. Like the monks themselves, it is both humble and exalted.
And, in its way, eloquent. The idea of removing yourself entirely from the world is a radical one, and Mr. Groening approaches it with fascination and a measure of awe. At first, as your mind adjusts to the film’s contemplative pace, you may experience impatience. Where is the story? Who are these people? But you surrender to Into Great Silence as you would to a piece of music, noting the repetitions and variations, encountering surprises just when you think you’ve figured out the pattern. By the end, what you have learned is impossible to sum up, but your sense of the world is nonetheless perceptibly altered.
I hesitate, given the early date and the project’s modesty, to call Into Great Silence one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.
~ A.O. Scott, Film Critic of the The New York Times
Click Here To Watch The First Part Of The Film
Click Here To Watch The Second Part Of The Film
Photo: alex_joffe/Flickr
About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow”.
Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began – I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign – was stillness.
A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere”.
Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with US$2,285 (S$2,965) a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts”, which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.
Has it really come to this?
In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them – often in order to make more time.
The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen. Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago.
Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send email, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.
URGENCY OF SLOWING DOWN
The average American spends at least eight-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book The Shallows, in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a television screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.
The urgency of slowing down – to find the time and space to think – is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context.
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content – and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends – Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages”.
Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest”, but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.
LESS AND LESS TO SAY
Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less).
And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, Dancing with the Stars), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us – between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there – are gone.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And – as he might also have said – we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.
So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.
All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.
‘INTERNET SABBATH’
Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age.
Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing – or riding or bridge: Anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.
Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their mobile phones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper”.
More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow”. The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.
BENEFIT OF DISTANCE
In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time).
I’ve yet to use a mobile phone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.
None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better – calmer, clearer and happier – than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: It’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens”.
It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.
For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year – often for no longer than three days – to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them.
The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a three-year-old around his shoulders.
“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.
“What are you doing now?” I asked.
“I work for MTV. Down in LA.”
We smiled. No words were necessary.
“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” – he pointed at a seven-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother – “this is his third time”.
The child of tomorrow, I realised, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.
~ Pico Iyer
Photo: Mommysaurus75/Flickr
“All I’m askin’ is for a little respect when you come home” — Aretha Franklin
I was raised by “the help.” I don’t mean that “the help” served me in my parents’ mansion. No, my parents were “the help” in white households — my mother a domestic servant and my father a handyman. While their employment was not necessarily the most desirable, domestic workers of their generation practiced in their lives what they had learned from those who professed a more genteel upbringing.
My parents were in their prime during the years of the Great Depression. They both worked in “some of the finest white homes” of their community. They earned a paltry $4.50 per week. Still, they were blessed to have any job as millions went unemployed in ways that even today’s economic climate can’t begin to mirror. During it all, those two people thought it important to teach their children basic manners and respect.
Our home was small in comparison to today’s dwellings but it was paid for and proudly ours. Mom and Dad had paid Mrs. Watters, the previous owner, on a weekly basis so that we kids would have a roof over our heads. Dad contributed his weekly 50 cents by walking to work rather than taking the trolley — even during the heavy snows of winter. Times were hard, the country was in disarray, but the Grays had a roof over their heads, food on the table and hope for a better future.
Much of that hope was invested in their children and in the future our folks prayed would result from their own sacrifices and continued efforts. Part of that hoped-for future could be seen in the ritual which unfolded when visitors were expected. We kids would be scrubbed clean, dressed neatly, and expected to wait behind the swinging kitchen door as the guests settled in the living room which adjoined the dining area. At some point after the guests had arrived, either they or our parents would bring up the topic of “the children.” Then my mother would call out, “Children!” and we would enter the room, with a bow from the boy (me) and a curtsy from the girl (my sister). We quietly took our seats with our backs straight, feet firmly on the floor, and with hands properly positioned on our laps. We spoke only when spoken to and responded with the expected “Sir” or “Ma’am.”
Ours was a world of respect — respect for our parents, neighbors, anyone older, but — more than anything — respect for ourselves. These weren’t the affectations of “the help” trying to copy the masters; it went much deeper than that. It went to a true appreciation of human life, regardless of wealth or station.
Some years ago I journeyed to Oklahoma to attend the funeral of a young cousin. He had lived in Pennsylvania while his mother lived in Southern California, but he had chosen to endure his watch for resurrection morning among other family members in the little cemetery in Wybark, Oklahoma. That community wasn’t much more than a dozen homes stretched over the length of a couple of football fields, just five mile from Muskogee, Oklahoma — the closest “big” city.
It was during the drive from the mortuary in Muskogee to the Wybark cemetery that I was reminded of those kinder days, those periods of human respect that appear to have left us now. As the funeral procession moved along the way, motorists on our side of the divided four-lane highway stopped, exited their vehicles and stood in respect for the departed. But the crowning deference came when cars going in the opposite direction of that divided highway also stopped to give honor to the deceased. No one was aware of whose remains were carried in that hearse, be they white or black, rich or poor, male or female. It was simply understood that a child whom God respected by giving them breath had flown home.
I miss those gentler times.
May we all be blessed.
~ Darius A. Gray
