Three reasons to reread A time to keep quiet, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

The English writer, Leigh Fermor, born in 1915, scholar and hothead, who left at 18 years old to cross Europe on foot, was then recruited by the SOE and parachuted in Crete to organize the resistance against the occupier Nazi, was not the type of man to cloister himself at home for the pleasure of meditating. This is why in 1948, installed in Paris to write, but finding himself unable to resist the joyful requests of the capital, he decided to isolate himself for some time at the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille. No mystical intention in this chosen confinement: " I was looking for a quiet and inexpensive place to stay while I continued to work on the book I was writing ."

Tired, he had not anticipated the effects of the silence and the spectacle of the monks, austere like the models of El Greco, which bear on their faces " the traces left by the climbing of celestial mountains and the exploration of interior castles ". From the first day, he falls into a depression

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