Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #459436 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Carthusians are contemplative monastics who live in community but spend most of their days alone in their private dwellings. With a lifestyle similar to that of their 11th-century French founder, they wear hair shirts, practice self-flagellation and eat just one meal a day from mid-September to Easter (though some monasteries reluctantly have begun allowing such luxuries as electricity, hot water and flush toilets). Maguire, a Renaissance scholar married to an ex-Carthusian, examines this living museum of a bygone age by following the lives of five young men who entered St. Hugh's Charterhouse in England between July 1960 and March 1961. As they work, pray and live in solitude, they discover not only God but also themselves. They do not, however, learn much about the rapid changes taking place beyond their walls, and the men who leave the monastery in 1965 find themselves in a strange new world. Through painstaking research including countless phone conversations, 5,000 pages of e-mails and a reunion of the five men in France, Maguire creates a personal, sympathetic and amazingly detailed description of an ancient order and its contemporary adherents, traveling "toward inner space within the confines of their solitary cells." (Mar.)
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(MSNBC.com, 3/27/06)
"The level of detail is astonishing… Reading "An Infinity of Little Hours" is almost like praying."

(American Scholar)
"[An] outstanding work of cultural anthropology and oral history… it probes, it teaches, it unsettles, it amazes."

Customer Reviews

An unlikely page turner
Reading "An Infinity of Little Hours," I was, somewhat to my surprise, drawn deeply into the ascetic world of this Carthusian monastery in England through the stories of the five men who entered in 1960. The book becomes an unlikely page turner as you wonder who among the five will be able to endure the silence, the alone-ness, the cold, and other privations in order to become closer to God, which was their motivation for joining this most austere of all religious orders.

The small details and trials of contemporary monastic life, little changed from the order's founding in the 11th century, are precisely described here and form a compelling counterpoint to the men's psychic yearning for the spiritual. You might both experience the "feel" of a hairshirt yet also "hear" the sweetness of a chant well-sung. You can share the frustration of one musically trained monk with his tone-deaf brothers.

Reader's tip: Keep a bookmark in the page that lists the monks' secular and religious names (it can be confusing keeping track of who is who).

This book will appeal to the religious and non-religious alike who share a fascination with those whose search for God sets them apart from our materialistic and secular society. "An Infinity of Little Hours" depicts a world which few of us would or could enter but which is nevertheless as fascinating to observe as any other rarified culture.

A window into an unknown world
This contemplative, low-key text shone light into a realm unknown and unknowable to most people, and offered insights into the daily rituals and rhythms within this cloistered context. The men described were well-drawn, human, and treated respectfully, and each vignette offered different perspetives and angles on the experience inside the walls.

I have recommended this book to friends interested in learning more about lives of meditation and solitude. I found it raised many points of comparison to the lives of Buddhist monks and nuns.

Excellent. A literary and religious breakthrough
simply excellent. Couldn't put it down until finished. profound, moving and direct. one has to admire her five subjects and others involved----and the author who told their individual and collective story.
Jim Whalen