This book review I wrote originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of The Wire, number 471. The article appears here (from behind the paywall, now that subsequent issues have come out) in ever so slightly edited form (just matters of punctuation). As I noted at the time of its publication: major thanks to my old friend Erik Davis for having tipped me off to this.
Here’s the review in full:
Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks – And What It Can Teach Us
Kim Haines-Eitzen
Princeton University Press Hbk 145 pp
For Kim Haines-Eitzen, the desert is both biblical and personal. An American, she spent her childhood in the Middle East, or Near East, reared by parents who, inspired by their Mennonite heritage, had moved from the US to Jordan to study Arabic and do humanitarian work. Born in the late 1960s, she associates her experience with serenity and fear alike, with the quiet expanse of the Sinai and the sirens of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The shore of the Red Sea was her holiday playground.
Now a Cornell University professor of religion, Haines-Eitzen seeks to merge the personal and the biblical in a slim volume with a vaguely self-help-ish subtitle, Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks – And What It Can Teach Us. She achieves this goal through the humble act of sitting quietly, much like the hermits of yore.
Unlike those hermits, however, she has audio recording gear in tow. Since 2012, Haines-Eitzen has documented the sound of the places she visits and where she lives. The poetic codas to each chapter feature QR codes that, given the context, can be mistaken for the ornate initials that decorated ancient manuscripts. These link to online recordings she made around the world. Her tracks transport the listener to places like her family’s retreat in Arizona and the canyons of the Wadi Qelt in the Judean Desert.
The key word is retreat. Despite the monastic act’s association with solitude, a monastery is itself a community, and thus the notion of self-exile gets revealed here as something more akin to migration: from one life to another, from exterior to interior. In Haines-Eitzen’s telling, such paradoxes inherent in the monastic impulse run deep. While Trappists take vows of silence, most monastic life is simply remote. Less explored in the book is the contrast (even conflict?) between personal discovery and selfless divinity.
The narrative moves back and forth between the wired present and the mythic past. In meaningful ways, little has changed, least of all the human propensity to complain about noise pollution. An early avatar of this disgruntlement is Antony, a celebrated hermit from roughly 1800 years ago who “left the noise and distractions of city life for the quiet of the desert.”
We abandon civilization alongside Antony, and with other monastic aspirants. The ancient ones include the saints John Climacus, Paul, George of Choziba, and Eucherius, who said “no sound is heard in the desert save the voice of God.” Haines-Eitzen politely disagrees: the desert is rich with sound. We witness her personal revelations (sometimes repetitively) in this regard, such as the idea that to listen while recording is to listen intently, and to re-listen through the ears of the machine is to hear what one might not have otherwise. Likewise, she stops trying to capture the world “pure and pristine,” without people in it, and comes to appreciate humans’ sonic place in the environment. We also visit reverberant cave chapels, ponder the animism belied by Western monotheism, and learn lots of cool ancient Greek onomatopoeia.
Sonorous Desert is a book about seekers, among them the widely travelled author herself. Modern figures cited include Edward Abbey, Virginia Woolf, Gordon Hempton and Thomas Merton, each arriving at the same conclusion: the quest for external silence is ultimately one for internal peace. (Oddly, that list doesn’t include Pauline Oliveros, who is synonymous with the deep listening mentioned in the book’s subtitle.) Wandering into the desert provides a metaphor for the effort and time required. As Haines-Eitzen quotes Merton from 1962, foreseeing smartphone apps like Calm and Headspace half a century hence, “You can’t have interior silence just by pushing a button.”
