"This is the story of the five-year journey taken by five young men inside the largest center of the most rigorous and ascetic monastic order in the Western world: the Carthusians. When the five young men arrive at the imposing gates of Parkminster in 1960, they enter a world virtually unchanged since its founding in the eleventh century. " "As well as being a uniquely intimate portrait of the customs and practices of a monastic order almost entirely unknown until now, An Infinity of Little Hours is a drama of the struggle faced by the young men. After five years, each faces a choice: if he stays to make "solemn profession," he will never leave. But if he leaves he must turn his back on a journey to find God - his life's ambition. Like a team of mountaineers, each searching for a spiritual summit, the novice monks' lives are followed as they climb out of their own age and into a spiritual world of their own making. " "An investigative work, the book combines unique source material - including personal interviews with the monks themselves, and their handwritten notes, journals, and other correspondence - to describe first-hand the Carthusian life. In the final chapter, describing a reunion forty years later, Nancy Klein Maguire reveals which of the five made it to the top of the mountain, and how the others incorporated their monastic experiences as they rejoined the world outside. "--BOOK JACKET.