In Pursuit of Silence

by George Prochnik

  As I learned everywhere from rural Iowa to exurban Florida to England and New York, our schools are filled with an entire generation for whom, especially among those from difficult socioeconomic backgrounds, there is simply no positive experience of silence. I have a friend named Lyman Casey who teaches math in a public high school in Brooklyn. It’s considered a good school in a tough stretch of town. Casey and I have had a number of conversations about the struggle he’s undergone trying to cajole and discipline his students into being quiet for even a single moment. This is not an issue of authority. Casey is six foot five, a basketball player, and a natural leader. It is a matter, he told me, of kids literally not knowing what it means to be quiet.

  Casey was fortunate to spend a good deal of his youth outside in nature. It troubles him no end that his students have nothing equivalent in their own lives to fall back on as a source of inner strength. After our conversations, he began trying, now and then, to impose a moment of silence on his classes. To begin with, it was tough going. The kids would last about twenty seconds before one of them made a crack, or cracked up, or simply forgot to be quiet and shot off a remark to someone, whereupon the whole class would explode back into noise. However, one day near the end of the school year Casey finally succeeded in coaxing a full two minutes of quiet out of a group of tenth graders. At the end of this time, he said to the class, “Now wasn’t that nice? You see how it can be positive and meaningful to take a moment to enjoy silence.” His students just stared at him. “Why?” one of them finally asked. “Why is it positive or meaningful?” “They had no idea what I was talking about,” Casey told me. “And yet they were curious.”

  I confess that I found this story hard to believe. So I asked if he would help me conduct a little experiment. I requested that he ask his students to think of one moment of silence that had been meaningful in their lives. Then I went to the school to hear for myself what they had to say.

  Five minutes into our discussion, I was overcome with emotion. But not for the reasons I’d anticipated. Out of the ten students who talked to me about experiences of silence, nine described situations in which they’d been unable or unwilling to speak because of overpowering anguish. One talked about the period after his mother died when he had to go and live with his father, whose attention he could never get. He didn’t speak to anyone but his closest friends for months, he said, and was ultimately forced by the school into therapy. Another said that when he was six years old his stepfather hit his mother and that for several months thereafter he didn’t talk to anyone because he didn’t know how to verbalize the experience. Another described the silence he fell into after his older brother was killed in a gang fight and his father came home weeping. Another talked about how his mother became ill and had to undergo an operation, and how when that was happening he didn’t want to speak to a single person in the world. For each of these young people, the idea of silence had one association: a tragic, or at least extremely disturbing, event that left them bereft of words. The sole exception was a young woman who described how when her beloved grandmother “passed,” she stepped out of the funeral and suddenly everything became completely silent. People were all around her, but she couldn’t hear anything. She thought there was something wrong with her. She turned back toward the church and saw her grandmother standing on the steps above her. Her grandmother smiled without saying anything. Then her grandmother disappeared and she could hear again.

  Surely, as a society, we owe these young people a wider association with the idea of silence than the ones these painful memories convey.

  After the initial round of comments, a few students acknowledged that silence could be good, that it could give one a chance to think and allow one to relax. But none of them had specific recollections of this sort of silence. When I asked them to describe a place they went to when they wanted quiet, several of them spoke about closing themselves inside their rooms and playing a computer game or turning on the television. As for their school environment, all of the students described it as “very loud.” One young man, who said he talked all the time, declared, “I can’t go quiet in a loud environment, so I fall into the habit of my environment!”

  On the other side of Brooklyn is a private Quaker Friends School. From the time they are in preschool, right on through high school, students are made to take moments of silence as a part of their everyday learning experience. They learn how to be quiet from the start of their education, and to understand why that experience is enriching. Jonathan Edmonds, an elementary-school teacher who has taught at Friends for seven years, told me that what makes the silence work is “practice, and a lot of it.” Although he is not himself a Quaker, Edmonds has found the silence “an important part of the school day and a huge part of what’s missing from many classrooms. Just the stopping and slowing down. The simplicity of silence helps kids get the right ordering of things. It’s the reflective element that’s sadly missing from so much of what we do.” He believes that the reflection that comes with silence helps children understand that “less is more” and builds their social conscience. He attributes the success of Friends at inculcating these values not to discipline per se but to the school’s own priorities, which it is able to establish free from the oversight of the city’s Department of Education. “I know from colleagues who’ve taught in the public schools about the insanity of public-school testing today,” he said. “That leaves no time for deep, contemplative personal thought.”

  It’s the old distraction of obsessive measurement at work once again.

  When people speak of changing the way Americans eat, they understand that the transformation will depend on both education and the availability of healthier food options. As we know, in many poorer neighborhoods the options outside of the fast-food chains are minimal. Exactly the same dynamic holds sway in the sonic realm. If we want more people to appreciate the importance of silence, we have to create more affordable environments in which to enjoy it.

  I cherish the memory of the time I spent on a silent retreat at an ashram, gazing at a group of people scattered across a grassy hillside like roosting birds—all of them concentrated on doing nothing but being still and listening to the natural world. But the people who go to ashrams, vipassana centers, and all the rich variants of silent-meditation retreats are, for the most part, reasonably well off. Like me, they had the money, the time, or simply the social context that enabled them to wake up one day and say to themselves, “You know what? I’m going on a silent retreat.” I’m worried about all the people who, for one reason or another, lack the resources to discover what silence can bring.

  We must encourage the kinds of urban-design projects that nurture appreciation of silence. We need more pocket parks. And bigger parks when the money can be found. But the quiet spaces we make shouldn’t be limited to the outdoors. Why can’t we show a little carnival bravado when it comes to creating silence? Why not take some of the money seized from drug dealers, gun runners, and financial crooks and use those funds to buy up a few dozen fast-food franchises that can be turned into contemporary quiet houses? Not recreation centers or computer labs. Places open late and early, filled with blank paper and pens, furnished with a few chairs and tables, pillows, plants—with no personal sound devices, cell phones, or conversation. Sort of like secularized Christian Science reading rooms. I’m sure they would be used and maybe in some cases become places not just of escape but of growth. How much could it cost to try?

  Or, for starters, what about taking one evening a week in recreation centers and officially designating them quiet times? Or what about getting a coalition of philanthropists to purchase empty lots and have students build Zen gardens inside them? Or what about starting a foundation that gives scholarships to young people who write essays or create artworks that promote the place of silence and contemplation? What about hosting not just Quiet Parties but quiet walks through our neighborhoods, adventures in silence after dark, and quiet festivals of silent arts? Let’
s hold a moment of silence in memory of silence! We have to find some means of giving more young people the opportunity of experientially learning why quiet is distinguished, or there will be no distinction between noise and signal left.

  THE PURSUIT BEYOND

  When I made my pilgrimage to the monastery, I concluded that one value of silence was as a restorative of the unknown. In an age when many of us are searching for a way out of patterns of life we feel we know too well, the value of quiet as a channel to reflection and awe is immense. Yet I felt I had to go out into the world to gain a better sense of what was known in order to distinguish between the realm of the heard and the still unheard. So I spoke to scientists who study the evolution of hearing, along with hearing specialists, neuroscientists, and psychologists who look at what happens in the ear and the brain when we perceive sound. The more that I learned about the delicate sensitivity of our hearing and the degree to which survival in the wild has depended for most of history on an ability to remain silent in a world rife with predators, the more it seemed to me that the real mystery lay in why we ever began to be so loud. This brought me to researchers studying animal mating calls and the vocalizations used to scare off rivals. It seemed a natural segue from the noises animals make in sex and battle to that of the noise deriving from our commercial and entertainment sectors. It was this noise that interested me most because it seemed to be the form of clamor that, with all the sound mitigation and regulatory advances made in the past century, remains defiantly on the rise everywhere.

  While it’s true that traffic is currently the dominant global noise source, it’s just possible that one day in the not too distant future the electric car really will dramatically quiet our highways. (Furthermore, the loud noise made by most cars is an unintended by-product of engine operation, not a sought-after effect in itself.) I visited different commercial environments, which many people today decry as being unconscionably loud, to try and grasp their owners’ motivation in ratcheting up the volume. Stores and restaurants make noise to seduce us, overstimulate us, and prove they exist. Fear of disappearing, of the stillness of eternity lurking in the recesses of silence is, of course, also a reason that individuals like to hear themselves talk, and turn on a television the moment they walk into an empty room. The people I spent time with whose personal sound devices provide the soundtrack for most of their waking and sometimes their sleeping lives told me that the louder the sound, the more their minds and bodies literally throb to the beat—and the better job it does at blocking out the undesirable distractions both inside and outside of them. For me, the litmus case of noise for noise’s sake was the realm of car-audio competition, where what seemed to drive the noise was twofold: a combination of sheer bass sensuality and the fact that most people driving boom cars have spent their lives immersed in the sound of loud traffic. There is a kind of sonic Stockholm syndrome at work in much of the noise of our contemporary world.

  From the world of noise I stepped back to look at what people were doing to fight loudness. Soundproofing is more effective than ever before in history, but by and large the better it is, the more expensive it is; and when it’s as good as it can get, it serves to isolate its users in a manner that has its own problematic social implications. On the policy front, though I admire the work of many activists fighting noise pollution today, I came away from their struggles feeling that they were fighting a war without winners. However enthusiastic different people I spoke to became about initiatives to quiet individual noise sources like leaf blowers, unmufflered motorcycles, and loud parties, nobody I talked with told me they thought the world in general was becoming a quieter place. Arline Bronzaft has been a dedicated antinoise activist for several decades—she conducted a pioneering study in the 1970s proving the deleterious effect of background subway noise on children’s learning abilities, and has advised four New York City mayors on noise policy. When I asked Bronzaft about whether all the hard efforts were paying off in a quieter world, she responded with a question: “Are people getting nicer?” I was silent. “Then you have your answer. Forget planes. Trains. It’s cell phones in restaurants. It’s your neighbors who won’t put some soft covering down on their floor. Noise is getting worse, even though policy gets better.”

  As I recognized the depth of this conundrum, I began to switch my focus from the battle against noise to the subject of how people succeed in making silence in the world. Here, at last, I found myself filled with excitement and hope. The best of the work being performed today by urbanists, architects, landscape designers, and soundscape experts draws extensively on both advanced techniques of acoustical engineering and the long, rich history of humanity’s efforts to construct communal spaces of tranquillity. In the middle of some of the largest, most cacophonous cities in the world, people are managing to produce oases of quiet in which sounds that nurture our sense of peace, compassion, and imagination—like falling water, rustling foliage, and birdsong—become audible again.

  In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, people now speak of a quiet-space movement. Nothing holds greater promise for rescuing us from the new noise nightmare. Bronzaft’s remarks could be taken to imply that the increasing loudness of the world means that people are actually becoming less nice. They’re certainly not going to become any friendlier if the only way they can be persuaded to turn down the sound is by humiliating and litigating them into sullen muteness. Which suggests, as one activist remarked to me, that the problem of forcibly silencing noisemakers will always resemble mole-whacking. When one source is silenced, the problem will morph into new forms as endlessly various as the parade of new gadgets we love to sound off.

  The only way out of this bind is to make the pursuit of silence itself a more broadly inviting prospect. The more opportunity there is for people who are being increasingly excluded from silence to feel its influence, the more chance there is that silence will begin to confer its singular graces on society at large. Who knows, given enough quiet time, perhaps people may even find themselves tempted to become a little nicer.

  At the end of my journey, I realized that what I meant by the unknown when I sat in the New Melleray Abbey pervades the whole of creation. Before I set out, I would never have imagined that the mammalian middle ear evolved from the jawbone; that the sound of the big bang might resemble a gathering scream; that a tea ceremony could become a theater of silences; or that the Deaf perspective on silence could reveal the possibilities of a more attentive sensory awareness for everyone. I was blessed with the opportunity to go out and listen to a few dozen places, people, and stories that I never dreamed existed.

  The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his last book that perception is differentiation, while forgetting is nondifferentiation. Earlier I took my stab at a definition of noise: sound that gets into your head and won’t go away. It might be enjoyable or not enjoyable, but noise is sound that makes us, for the time it’s there, cease to distinguish between the beings and objects outside us. Noise enables us to forget the larger world.

  Conversely, if I were to hazard a definition of silence, I would describe it as the particular equilibrium of sound and quiet that catalyzes our powers of perception. Quiet is distinguished because it enables differentiation, and the more we observe the distinction between things, the less mental space we have for our isolate selves. It’s not chance that even when we’re talking about quieting our own voices, we speak of “observing silence,” as though just by being silent we create something to behold beyond the self.

  What’s unknown, then, is the world around us; what’s missing is our awareness that we do not know. Silence as a state of expectancy, a species of attention, is a key back into the garden of innocence. We may not stay. But God knows we listen for the sound of that opening.

  Acknowledgments

  So many people contributed to this book, both with regard to sharing specific ideas and to clarifying its larger argument, that the book became very much a mosaic of the voices I
’ve had the good fortune to listen to while the work was in progress.

  My agent, Scott Moyers, masterfully guided the book through every stage of its development, from helping to shape the initial concept to giving the complete manuscript the kind of exceptionally close scrutiny that enabled me to find its final form. I’m grateful to my editor, Phyllis Grann, whose passion for the subject helped inspire this book. Her singular expertise enabled me to think through many key passages to points of greater resonance. At Doubleday, I’d also like to thank, in particular, Karla Eoff, my admirable copyeditor, along with Jackie Montalvo and Rebecca Holland. On the editorial side, Kathy Robbins gave generously of her time and wisdom as an early supporter of the project. Linnea Covington assisted me with notes for the book with exemplary speed and accuracy.

  I had most to learn in the realm of science and, in addition to providing her own manifold insights into different disciplines, Natalie deSouza deftly led me to many of the scientists and research environments that informed my approach to the interplay of noise and silence.

  In terms of the mechanism of the ear, the biophysics of hearing, sensory neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology, a number of researchers and doctors helped me repeatedly and were inestimably important to the composition of the book. I’m especially indebted to Jim Hudspeth, Andy Niemiec, Thomas Roland, Mario Svirsky, and Rickye Heffner. Michael Merzenich, Kachar Bechara, Lucy Jane Miller, Yehoash Rafael, Andrew King, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Roberto Arrighi, Brian Fligor, Alan Gertner, and Robert W. Sweetow also provided me with valuable insights. Various researchers into animal hearing and vocalization further expanded my thinking about the relationship between noise and silence from a biological survival perspective. Gregory McDaniels, Karen Warkentin, Peter Narins, Albert Feng, Elisabetta Vannoni, Alan G. McElligott, and Heather Williams were particularly important sources in this regard.