I wanted to love this book, but... nope. The subject is right up my alley for sure, but the writing is dry and humorless. The author several times reveals her shallow knowledge of topics (confusing dark matter with antimatter, for example). I'm sorry, but if you are going to write about astronomy -- or whatever -- you ought at least to read up to the point where you don't make basic errors like this. Such fundamental errors in areas I happen to be versed in don't bode well for what she says about the areas I'm not familiar with.

The dry humorlessness made the listening tedious, so I sped it up to get through it faster. Two days and, while I appreciate much of what she had to say about silence, modernity, and related topics, I can't say I'd recommend this to anyone. I'm waffling between a two and three, but GR says three means 'liked,' and for me, it was a bit less than good. In GR star parlance, 'It was ok.'

The topic deserved a better, more conscientious treatment. ( )

I love silence, but I'm also of very limited means so I live in an apartment with paper thin walls next to a busy highway AND a railroad. Maitland is from the upper class and can afford to buy a new house every couple of years and go on exotic vacations anywhere she pleases, and sure enjoys telling you about it. Annoying, banal, repetitive, self-indulgent, pseudo-mystical goop. ( )

A very rewarding book. Maitland deftly weaves her very personal experiences with educated and intelligent reflections on the writing of others (from her personal friends to classical sources) and her observations of society. I have found my own relationship with silence and spirituality subtly shifting in response.

It's true that her privilege gave her the ability to do far more traveling and independent living than most people can, but I never felt that it gave her an attitude or expectation that everyone else should be able to do the same. She approached the exploration of silence with a sense of personal humility and gratitude.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the eremetic (hermit) spiritualit, creativity, or simply the beautifully-written reflections of an intelligent woman on an unusual personal quest. ( )

The dictionary defines silence as absence of any sound or noise. But in the modern environment we are surrounded by numerous sources of noise, from traffic, planes, phones and even the background hum from the mains.

As Maitland goes on to discover and describe in this book, there are many types of silence, for the natural sounds of a seascape to the brush of the wind through a meadow and the unnerving silence of a wood. She visits a desert, and spends weeks at an isolated house on Skye seeking silence, and exploring her feelings towards solitude. As she is a practicing catholic, there is a huge spiritual dimension to this book. She writes about the Christian methods of silence and prayer, the Islamic desert, and the Tibetan mountain refuges.

Some silences are enforced, such as sensory deprivation, and are considered as a form of torture. She writes of others who have endured silence because of mishaps and misfortune, that have driven people to the edge of reason. At the end of the book she describes the house that she bought on a moor and the methods that she uses in seeking that silence.

Generally I thought that the book was well written, and she gives a balanced account of this most enigmatic of situations. I felt that the last couple of chapters lacked the focus of the earlier ones, hence only three stars.
( )

Viaje al silencio es el resultado de diez años de búsqueda explorando el silencio con todas sus contradicciones y paradojas: como fuente de paz pero también de miedo, de creatividad y de parálisis, en diferentes contextos geográficos, tales como páramos islas escocesas, monasterios budistas, cristianos y reuniones cuáqueras, viajes al monte Sinaí y paseos por el montañoso sur de Escocia; también en textos literarios de místicos, exploradores, aventureros y condenados al ostracismo. Sara Maitland escribe su tesis principal en la que el silencio no debe concebirse como “ausencia” o vacío, sino como presencia.