Sara Maitland, author of the Book of Silence, says Ed has much to gain from the experience of being alone in the wild, if he can navigate through the psychological rapids of the first couple of weeks.
To research her book, a mixture of personal journey and cultural history of solitude and silence, Maitland spent silent time in silent places, including 40 days on Skye in the Hebrides, in forests and mountains and flotation tanks, and compared her experiences with those of long distance single-handed sailors, hermits, prisoners and castaways, mountaineers and polar explorers. Maitland says the psychological challenges of Ed's attempt to survive alone in the wild are considerable, but could bring him great strength, joy and peace.
'The biggest danger is that you don't notice that things have gone horribly wrong. Admiral Richard Byrd, who spent a long time in solitude at the South Pole talked a lot about how you "lose good sense". With an awful lot of people who go off into the wild, you don't know what happens to them, and they don't come back. It is probably that they stopped taking good care. Time functions differently in silence and solitude. It is different for everybody but there is a disinhibition I think, a risk-taking that does seem to grab everybody. You lose your sense of boundaries and of time. People do unbelievably risky and sometimes stupid things. You have to be very disciplined not to. Chris McCandless, (whose fatal walkabout in Alaska was chronicled in the 2007 film Into the Wild) died, we don't know exactly what from. A lot of people think he was just stupid and possibly a bit mad, that anyone who goes into the wilderness with no map is just asking for trouble. Having said that he clearly did some stupid things, highly reckless things. And there is no evidence he was ill before he died. He must have lost it.
'So I admire Ed enormously, I think he's very brave. I really wish him well. I am sure he is very competent and he also has a job to do. It makes it a great deal less scary if he can send out distress signal in an emergency. I don't think I'd go somewhere where I could not make contact with anyone. Obviously the hermits did, but they were much less used that we are to communication.'
Maitland thinks that fact that Ed will busy himself hunting, foraging and filming should help him keep on an even keel. 'Busyness helps against the complete loss of time, and what I would call disinhibition, which can manifest as delusions of grandeur - the great psychotic version thinking you can fly. Or you don't eat. All the religious people who have really thought it through stress a rigid pattern of discipline of one sort or another. What can set in is a kind of torpor where you stop taking care of yourself. So in that sense, if he has stuff to do to mark the passage of the day, that is healthy.'
Maitland believes Ed rightly sensed a psychological 'precipice ahead' after he spent a week alone in the wild filming the pilot. 'I think it takes eight days, actually. First of all, you experience this physical and emotional intensification. You get intensely sensitive. On the physiological side, when you're cold you're cold, when you're hot you're hot, when you're tired you're tired. Food tastes very strongly too. And of course all your emotions are intensified and that is quite scary if you're not prepared for it. I think that's just the effect of not having anywhere to 'vent'. But he's got lots to do as he's got to do the filming. I will be interested to see the effect of that. Of course he will speak to the camera so that will break up the silence.'
'I do worry about people losing it. There is a character that Robinson Crusoe was based on called Alexander Selkirk. After he came back to civilisation, he never came back properly. He was really very strange. He became a recluse in a cave and died there. He managed the solitude very well but he couldn't reenter. He clearly lost something somewhere.
'And of course the famous person is Donald Crowhurst, who in 1968 was supposed to be sailing in the Golden Globe Race and lost the plot, and ended up bobbing about in the South Atlantic, sending radio messages in pretending he was going around the world, and then he completely cracked up. Probably jumped overboard, taking - interestingly enough - the ship's chronometer with him.'
Having said that, Maitland says that there are great spiritual gains in leaving behind the noise of others that normally constitutes identity. 'I believe we have over-invested in relationships. You do lose knowledge of the self as a result and security of the self. There are aspects of the self which are extremely enriching that you find in solitude and silence because you have to go there. You have to deal with emotions, you can't run away from them. And I think it is beautiful, I love it, I have set up a life to have as much as possible of it in the longer term. It has made me deeply joyful, beyond happiness, and something that I can still access much more quickly. It doesn't take me eight days to go mad and eight days to recover. I can do it in much smaller doses. And it is a gift, a blessing, a grace perhaps is a better word.'
The paperback version of Sara Maitland's The Book of Silence is out in August 2009.
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