Prochnik - In pursuit of silence: listening for meaning in a world of noise

Also by George Prochnik

Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology

For Rebecca,
who knew when to speak and when to fall silent

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

One spring day I went in pursuit of silence in downtown Brooklyn. I live not far away from the place where I began my search, on a leafy street that is, relatively speaking, a haven of quiet in a relentless city. I have a small garden, and the rooms where I sleep, work, and spend time with loved ones are surrounded by old, thick walls. Even so, Im woken by traffic helicopters; Im aggravated by sirens and construction (often these days by music played on the sites rather than by sounds of actual building). And then there are screeching bus brakes, rumbling trucks unsettling manhole lids, and the unpredictable eruptions of my neighbors sound systems. Im scared of becoming a noise crank, but Ive just always loved quiet. I love to have conversations without straining to hear. I love, frankly, staring up from my book into space and following my thoughts without having any sound crashing down, demanding attention. I love playing a game with my child while he floats on his back in the bath in which I have him name all the different sounds he can hear at a given moment, brought forth the Constitution of the United States had the street outside Independence Hall covered with earth so that their deliberations might not be disturbed by passing traffic. Our democracy presupposed the deliberative process as a condition of thought and of responsible choice by the electorate.

The idea that quiet and the democratic process go together is an inspiring one. But I cant say it completely assuages the anxiety associated with sensitivity to sound. And Ive had my passion for quiet as long as I can remember. Ive snitched on contractors who started work early. Ive battled neighbors who hold large partiesand befriended them to get into their parties as a way of trying to befriend the noise itself. Ive worn so many earplugs (powerful, swimming-pool-blue Hearos from the Xtreme Protection Series) that if they were laid end to end theyd probably manage to extend all the way around a New York City block. My yearning for quiet has inspired family jokes, rolled eyes, and long sighs. My most notorious moment occurred when I called our cable company to come check out the volume of sound that the DVR made when it was turned off. I wasnt home when the cable man showed up, and my wife was forced to try and help him make out the faint clicking projecting from deep inside the machine. (There, can youthere, nowait, I think thats it. Isnt that it? Maybe if you bend a little closer ) Its an incident I will never live down. But how could I explain that it wasnt so much the noise the recorder made as the silence it took away from what had been an otherwise remarkably quiet room that made the sound so painful?

I reached a point a couple of years ago when Id had it. I was as tired of hearing myself complain about noise as I was about the noise itself. It was time to do something. I wanted to understand whether my sensitivity to sound and longing for silence was ridiculousor maybe worse, like the state of the narrator at the start of Edgar Allan Poes The Tell-Tale Heart, who observes, Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? If, on the other hand, there was something of real value in silence that was being placed at risk by all the noise of our society, what was it exactly? And was there anything we could do to cultivate more of it? Instead of just grumbling and weeping (or at least whimpering quietly to myself) about all the noise, what about trying to find something positive in silence to aspire to? Instead of being against noise, what about searching out reasons for silence? That was where my search began. And that search became this book.

My first sortie into silence was to the Quakers. Large numbers of people from almost every faith harbor associations between God, the state of godliness, and silence. Indeed, if one were to look for shared theological (as opposed to ethical) ground between religions, a good starting point would be silence. We all might be able to come up with a list of reasons for why silence evokes the holy, such as a kinship with peace and contemplation. But if we scratch the surface a little, the connection becomes less self-evident. Why should something imagined to be infinite and all-powerful be associated with soundlessness? And what about all the associations between silence and indifference, or even collaboration with evil, which somehow coexist with the positive, sacred notions of silence? I wanted to better understand what led people to think of silence as both a route to God and a reflection of Gods nature.

I visited the Brooklyn Friends Meeting, held in a lovely mid-nineteenth-century stone building with tall windows cut into walls the shade of lemon frosting. At first the room seemed almost supernaturally quiet. The shadow of one mullioned window frame slipped in and out of visibility across the light-brown carpet with the passage of clouds across the sky. No one around me was even coughing. Everybody sat very still, usually quite straight against the pews, with their legs together and their hands cupped or folded in their laps. More Friends came into the chamber, eventually forming a racially and generationally diverse congregation. I found the Quaker strain of quiet most appealing for the ways that it did not seem aimed primarily at the individual self. Though many people closed their eyes, not everyone did, and the silence felt less inwardly focused than communally aware. For what felt like a long time, there was no sound except for the door occasionally opening and closing to admit additional Friends, the creaking of the wooden benches as people shuffled their weight into place.

After about twenty minutes, there came a digital trilling, repeated several times before being shut off. A moment later, a heavyset man in his early forties rose to his feet. He had pleasantly fuzzy auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. I apologize for my cell phone having gone off. I forgot to turn it off when I came into the meeting. But before it went off I was thinking of all sorts of worldly thingsall sorts of things I had to do were running through my mind, and I was asking myself whether I really had time for this And then my cell phone went off. Chuckles relayed around the room. But we cant allow ourselves to become too distracted by worldly things from the things that matter. We have to make time for the meetings. He sat back down.

Over the next half hour, several other people rose abruptly to their feet and began speaking. At one point, I noticed a man of about fifty with a gray, drooping mustache sitting some distance away from me with his hands on his thighs. As I watched, his denim shirt began fluttering out from his chest in the most remarkable manner, as though there really were a turbulent, divine breath quaking to get out of him. What was most astonishing was that I couldnt see him move a muscle of his body; there was just that wild billowing of his shirt. Suddenly, he jerked up to his feet, stood rigid for a moment, then parted his lips. How much we know, and how little we do. And then he launched into a parable about the way the desire to save the whole world can be an impediment to taking even one small action to improve it.