Sara Maitland fell in love with silence while living alone in the countryside. She was in her late 40s and had been at the center of a noisy world most of her life: as one of six children and then as a vocal feminist and mother. In "A Book of Silence," published in October by Counterpoint Press, she describes her exploration of silence across the world in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye. We asked her to explain the euphoria of being in the presence of silence.

GUEST BLOGGER: Sara Maitland

In September I went back to the Sinai desert. I wrote about my first visit there when I was researching some of the world's silent terrains. It was very good to be back.

Desert silence is unique for various reasons. There are few people and no roads. There is less wind, and fewer objects for the wind to move. The hotter and dryer the atmosphere the more it soaks up the energy of sound waves. And Sinai has been the place of an ancient silence of awe for all three of the Abrahamic faiths. Here Moses received the Law on Mount Horeb; here Elijah heard God in the "sound of sheer silence" (a better translation than the "still small voice".)

We were sleeping out on the desert floor. Through the night I would wake up to see the enormous stars wheel overhead, brighter than dreams and then fade slowly in the light before the dawn.

One morning, I wriggled out of my sleeping bag and walked up a slope of white sand. Our camp was nestled under a great sandstone escarpment - Sinai is a rocky mountainous desert - but I only had to walk about a hundred yards before the view opened out, enormous into the distance, an immense view of silent nothingness.

I sat and watched as the desert was washed from dusty beige to gold pink and the sky changed from dove grey to bright blue. Then without warning the sun pounced over the scarp and caught me in its sharp light and. . .and. . . something shifted, like a gear change.

Suddenly I am tiny and vulnerable in an enormous perilous place, and then I am welcomed into that space, at one with it. I am dissolved into it, without boundaries, connected to - and part of -- the cosmos itself. There is rhythm but no time or thought. There is acute awareness but no self-consciousness. There is euphoria but no agitation.

This is joy.

It is hard to tell exactly what is going on here; while you are in ecstasy you can't ask, and when it is over you can't tell. You are outside language and outside time. What I do know is that it is very good. It is a pure gift. It is now - only now.

It ends quite abruptly; someone moves in the camp. I return to myself, to the beauty of the morning, to the simple, now enhanced, pleasure of breakfast. There is a sense of loss, but it does not over-ride the beauty and pleasure of being there.

This joy is, for me, inextricably connected to silence and to enormous empty space - up mountains, on small islands and, above all, in the desert. I will go on hunting such joy, hoping for it, aware I cannot summon it, but can create a context for it, and knowing that it illuminates even the long spaces in between its gratuitous appearances. Silence sings silently and the world is glorious even in the face of its dark wounds.

I go rejoicing.

In his book "Guilt: The Bite of Conscience," published by Stanford University Press in October, Herant Katchadourian explores the many manifestations of guilt across disciplines, religions and philosophies. Here, Katchadourian, emeritus professor of psychiatry and human biology at Stanford University, assesses the role of guilt in literature.

GUEST BLOGGER: Herant Katchadourian

Clinicians and behavioral scientists focus mostly on the subjective and psychological aspects of guilt -- feeling guilty. Prophets, theologians, philosophers and legal scholars are more concerned with the objective element in guilt as culpability -- being guilty.

Literature offers a vast array of descriptions and insights into guilt that provide compelling illustrations of the experience of guilt, as well as penetrating insights into its nature.

The oldest, and most compelling example is the Greek tragedy, "Oedipus Rex," by Sophocles. The story of King Oedipus -- and Freud's Oedipus complex derived from it -- are well known. Oedipus admits to having committed the heinous crimes of parricide and incest, yet he vehemently denies being guilty. He rightly claims that his actions were ordained by the gods before he was born, and he committed them unknowingly and unwittingly ("...how, with any justice could you blame me?").

This moral dilemma is still with us. We no longer invoke the will of the gods but attribute instead our actions to the interplay between biological factors and social upbringing. We have no personal control over either of these. Yet we invoke the idea of a "free will" in order to hold people responsible for their actions.

St. Augustine's monumental "Confessions" is not a formal autobiography, but it contains a great deal of biographical material dealing with guilt. It is the model of the confessional genre in literature that serves as the vehicle for authors to bare their chests. And it was Augustine whose teachings on guilt became elaborated into the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.

Martin Luther (who revered Augustine) provides his own autobiographical accounts of struggles with a particularly obsessive form of guilt, called scrupulosity by the Catholic Church. ("I went to confession frequently, and performed the assigned penances faithfully. Nevertheless, my conscience could never achieve serenity..."). The realization that he could not achieve absolution by his own efforts, and could only be "justified by faith," freed him from his obsession with guilt and became the cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation.

Shakespeare (who was a psychologist before there were psychologists) provides compelling insights into guilt. The tragedy of Macbeth is a tale of murder that leads to a ferocious sense of guilt that drives Macbeth to his downfall, and Lady Macbeth into insanity and suicide ("...Here is the smell of blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand"). It is a cautionary tale of how unbridled ambition can drive even intelligent and upright individuals into striking a Faustian bargain with the devil and to their doom.

The contributions of literature to our understanding of guilt are complimentary rather the competitive with those of the behavioral sciences, religion and philosophy. Some experiences of guilt cannot be subjected to the quantification of behavioral studies, and the constraints of faith or reason.

Literature captures them more readily by bringing us closer to the personal experience of guilt. It allows for a more intuitive understanding, an imaginative extension, and a greater scope and latitude in the use of language that make possible a more subtle and nuanced understanding and expression of guilt in human lives and relationships.

By Dennis Drabelle

Here's why bookstores will always be important to me.

Last week, on a visit to Philadelphia, I stopped in at the Book Trader, a roomy secondhand store on Second Street, looking for something to read, wanting to be surprised. While browsing the fiction shelves, I noticed "Chad Hanna" (1940), by Walter D. Edmonds, and a bell rang in my head: The book was made into a movie (also 1940) with Henry Fonda. Not a movie I'd seen, but one of whose existence I was aware.

I picked up the volume, an old Bantam Pathfinder paperback, saw that the eponymous Chad is a circus roustabout circa 1836, and that was all I needed to know -- I made the purchase.

"Chad Hanna" may not be an incandescent masterpiece, but it's nicely paced and evocative, not to mention intelligent, informative, diverting, frank (but not lewd) about sex. Its author, Walter D. Edmonds (1903-98) wrote it in a period when he could hardly make a wrong move. Both "Chad Hanna" and an earlier novel by him, "Drums Along the Mohawk," were bestsellers (according to the Wikipedia article on Edmonds, "Drums" placed second to "Gone with the Wind" on the fiction list for a while); and along with a third novel, they were made into Hollywood films, with "Drums" being directed by John Ford, no less.

But it took a bookstore to bring the two of us together. It took that dreamy process of roaming though the aisles, considering and rejecting other candidates, and finally meeting the book you didn't realize was the very one you wanted -- an experience that seems unlikely, and perhaps impossible, to have on the Internet.

In an ideal world, "Chad Hanna" would be in print, but in today's publishing climate it's hard to imagine anyone founding a line of worthy but forgotten bestsellers from decades past. So libraries (also browsable, of course) and secondhand stores are the only places where these books can be approached. Patronize your local used bookstore (if you are lucky to have one: It can perform the valuable function of taking you down offbeat literary paths.

Capt. Sullenberger vs. William Langewiesche on landing in the Hudson. ... Best books for boys and young men. ... Supreme Court declines to enter fray over Cuba book. ... Attorney plans book on D.C. sniper. ... Must-read social media books. ...Google, Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers submit new version of digital book settlement.