Sabbath as a sanitizing temporary reprieve.

In an extract from her new book, Nicola Slee looks to the inspiration of Wendell Berry and the example of monastic life in a bid to temporarily escape the hyper-connected world of today …

In today’s world of instant and global communication, ceaseless accessibility and availability of information and connection that we need to practise restraint, cessation and Sabbath rest, if we are not to be overcome by the falsification of digital reality. We need, not so much rules, but a rule of life that is wide enough to encompass the new world of social media that is now the norm. Both the principle and the practice of Sabbath have something powerful to speak into our world of ceaseless communication in which reality is constantly created and mediated by the screen. By creating a temporary withdrawal from every form of work and distraction, Sabbath relativizes and destabilizes the all-pervasive, so called ‘reality’ of the digital world. The pause of Sabbath, temporary and modest though it is, nevertheless create a kind of buffer which allows us to step back from the habitual worlds we inhabit and see them for what they are, question them and resist them. We may well go back to these worlds once Sabbath is over – indeed, we have to – but their hold on us has been lessened and loosened. We will switch our mobile phones back on, we will clock into our emails again; but that temporary reprieve enables us to rediscover who and what we are when we are not staring into a screen or tapping messages into a keyboard.

Our own contemporary dilemmas around social media and new forms of technology can seem a world far removed from American poet, essayist, farmer and novelist, Wendell Berry’s farm and the life he has chosen there. Refusing, as far as possible, modern mechanization, Berry has spent his life farming with horses rather than tractors, and writing with pencil or pen on paper, after which his wife typed up his first drafts on a 1956 Royal standard typewriter. Berry intentionally refused to acquire a computer, let alone any of the other mobile devices I have been commenting on above. In his 1987 essay, ‘Why I am not going to buy a computer’, (1) he set out his reasons: a commitment to remain as economically and spiritually independent from consumerism and technology as possible; an endeavour to conserve the simplicity of life and the economy of the household in which the tools of his trade are only such as are required and may be purchased and repaired locally, and in which dependence upon a person (his wife) rather than an expensive commodity is an expression of the commitment of their marriage. In a follow-up piece from 1989, ‘Feminism, the Body, and the Machine’, occasioned by the barrage of critique his first piece had elicited, Berry added another powerful reason for refusing to write with a computer: to resist the mind/body dualism that most forms of technology promote and to employ the body as well as the mind as fully as possible in the creative work of writing (he goes on to give a long, and powerful apology for writing by hand, well worth reading):

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. (2)

Berry is now in his eighties, and I have not been able to discover whether he finally succumbed to modern technology and bought himself a computer. Regardless, Berry is a man of his generation for whom the decision not to acquire a computer was a sane and rational one at the time. His reliance on his wife to type up his poems may also be typical of men of his class and generation; most women writers don’t have wives who will function as their secretaries! Nevertheless, and notwithstanding such considerations, Berry may be regarded as a prophet whose actions have an emblematic and symbolic significance that goes way beyond his own personal choices. Although I cannot imagine living by his choices, and know hardly anyone who does, I am nevertheless profoundly grateful for the choices he has made (most of them, anyway!), in the same kind of way that I am seriously indebted to those monastics who live out a form of traditional monastic life against the grain of modern life, because they embody a countercultural alternative to the madness that most of us are compelled – or choose – to live.

People like Wendell Berry, and monks and nuns living in monastic communities, create the same kind of boundaries or alternatives in space and time that Sabbath itself, as a practice, creates. These are real spaces, real places, with real people living in them – Berry and his wife in their farm, the brothers at Glasshampton monastery and the sisters at Malling Abbey who have been my friends and companions over many years. However threatened and fragile such places may be (and they often are), simply by being there, they hold out the hope that others, too, may create such alternative spaces and forms of life – likely more compromised, less radical, but nevertheless in the same spirit as that manifested by Berry and the many other advocates of the simple life which have grown up as protests against the monopoly of the machine.

This is an extract from Sabbath: The hidden heartbeat of our lives by Nicola Slee. It is available in paperback price £9.99 from www.dltbooks.com and all good bookstores.

(1) Wendell Berry, ‘Why I am not going to buy a computer’, in What Are People For? (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010): 170-77. Also widely available online.

(2) Wendell Berry, ‘Feminism, the Body, and the Machine’, in What Are People For?: 190.