The hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life

From A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor was a magnificent travel author but not all his travels were across land. From the blurb.

Leigh Fermor writes about a more inward journey, describing his several sojourns in some of Europe’s oldest and most venerable monasteries. He stays at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, a great repository of art and learning; at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant; and at the deeply ascetic Trappist monastery of La Grande Trappe, where monks take a vow of silence. Finally, he visits the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, hewn from the stony spires of a moonlike landscape, where he seeks some trace of the life of the earliest Christian anchorites.

There is this striking passage about his stay in the French monastery, Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fonatanelle.

To begin with, I slept badly at night and fell asleep during the day, felt restless alone in my cell and depressed by the lack of alcohol, the disappearance of which had caused a sudden halt in the customary monsoon. The most remarkable preliminary symptoms were the variations of my need of sleep. After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the hours I spent in or on my bed vastly outnumbered the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug. For two days, meals and the offices in the church—Mass, Vespers and Compline—were almost my only lucid moments. Then began an extraordinary transformation: this extreme lassitude dwindled to nothing; night shrank to five hours of light, dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy and limpid freshness. The explanation is simple enough: the desire for talk, movement and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo; after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment. Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything. No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life. Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo and not only failed to emerge in the small hours as tormentors but appeared to have lost their dragonish validity. This new dispensation left nineteen hours a day of absolute and god-like freedom. Work became easier every moment; and, when I was not working, I was either exploring the Abbey and the neighbouring countryside, or reading. The Abbey became the reverse of a tomb—not, indeed, a Thelema or Nepenthe, but a silent university, a country house, a castle hanging in mid-air beyond the reach of ordinary troubles and vexations. A verse from the office of Compline expresses the same thought; and it was no doubt an unconscious memory of it that prompted me to put it down: Altissimum posuisti refugium tuum…non accedet ad te malum et flagellum non appropinquabit tabernaculo tuo.

The latter quote is Psalm 91 in Latin.

9 He, the Lord, is thy refuge; thou hast found a stronghold in the most High.
10 There is no harm that can befall thee, no plague that shall come near thy dwelling.

Written in 1953, how much more pertinent are Fermor's observations today?

I wonder, occasionally, of the mismatch of our cognitive world today in contrast to a hundred of five hundred years ago. The volume of things to notice, the requirements of cognitive switching across so many domains, the sheer deluge of information, the thousands of interactions with dozens or hundreds of people a day. Is it significant when contrasted with our evolutionary conditioning which occurred in nature among a few dozen people. When you might not meet more than a few hundred in a lifetime. I don't know, but it seems possibly consequential.

And what would happen if we stripped it all away? Not just disconnecting from email and the internet, but turning off the TV, discarding the newspapers, withdrawing from the bustle of interactions. Fermor tells us what happened to him and I suspect it would be a common response.