In a hollow just north of Bennington, Vermont, near the New York state line, nineteen monks at the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration live and die in seclusion. It’s the only Carthusian site in North America, a remote spot in the shadow of Mt. Equinox, highest peak in the Taconic Range. In 2005 the documentary Into Great Silence gave secular audiences a reverent look at the Grande Chartreuse in France, the “Mother House” of the Carthusians, and particularly the regimen of solitude and prayer, which struck viewers around the world as blissful, sweet, and wholly otherworldly. Here in New England it’s the same. There are no signs or markers pointing the way there. A bumpy side road passes a small reservoir, turns a corner, and the monastery appears, blank and quiet. The compound spreads across two acres behind an entrance crowned by a twenty-foot cement cross on a hill beside the gate. A ten-foot wall of monochromatic gray stone surrounds the buildings and gardens. The cemetery inside has a row of eight plain wooden crosses with no names or dates.
Sixty years ago, Joseph Davidson, an industrial chemist at Union Carbide, and his wife donated the eleven square miles that they owned to a group of Carthusians who’d settled in the area fifteen years earlier. Legend has it that one day an unknown hunter shot the Davidson’s dog on Equinox property, leading the couple to turn the land into a No Trespassing zone by giving it to the monks, though when the tale came up in conversation with three residents of the Charterhouse during my visit in late November, they only smiled. A Connecticut architect was hired, a spot halfway down the mountain in a cleared field was chosen, plans drawn, giant slabs of Vermont granite delivered, and construction finished a few years later.
