the power of silence chapter (01)
Silence? No thanks!
For many people in the West, the very idea of silence is strange and
unattractive, if not actually forbidding. You only have to think of the
way we commonly describe it to realise that it is not something most
of us look forward to. We talk about an uncomfortable silence, an
awkward silence, an embarrassing silence, an oppressive silence, a
stony silence, an ominous silence, a silence you can cut with a knife,
a deathly silence.
That doesn’t include all those people who regard the absence
of talk and noise and the activity which usually goes with
them as downright boring, a waste of precious time when you
might be doing something interesting or listening to something
entertaining.
‘Our culture in the United States’, said an office manager in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, ‘is extremely good at bombarding us with
words and images, so silence has become counter-cultural in this
country. The children I know don’t even have a concept of silence any
longer, except as a notion of emptiness, a scary void. They no longer
know how to be quiet and I’m afraid that’s true for Americans as a
whole’.Silence doesn’t have much of a take in this country’, agreed one
of her friends. ‘It’s thought of as something appropriate to a time
of sorrow and people would say “I don’t want to sign up for sorrow
today’.’ ’
As for giving time to silent contemplation, that – apart from
anything else – might cost money. ‘This is a very dynamic, gregarious
society’, said a neuroscientist in Iowa who practises Transcendental
Meditation. ‘It wants to build and create, so you shouldn’t sit there
with your eyes closed, but get the bricks and mortar out! If you
happen to be a lawyer and you close your eyes for a couple of
minutes, that’s billable, that’s 50 dollars.’
So, for many people, in the Western world at least, there is no
longer anything appealing about the prospect of being quiet. How
many of us ever talk about a delightful or enjoyable silence? It is
thought of as an impediment to social ease, a potentially malign zone.
The idea that conversation at a dinner party might suddenly dry up
fills the average host and hostess with dread.
Silence, in fact, is widely regarded as nothing more than a
disagreeable hole that must be filled at all costs and by whatever
means come to hand. Every combine-harvester driver worth his salt
has a stereo system in his cab. Joggers – even of the green persuasion
– are unlikely to issue forth without their earphones. Hundreds of
millions engage in a global talk-fest by text and mobile. We twitter
and tweet endlessly. And more and more of us turn up the decibels
to banish the tedium and emptiness of life with consoling or exhilarating sound. Noise has become our default setting, silence an ever
more alien concept.
Partly out of tradition, it is also considered to have some connection with religion and, for a good many people, that is yet another reason
to steer well clear of it. Even churchgoers do not always know what
to do with it. Asked by a friend who seldom darkens the door of a
church what he ought to do when the minister called for a moment’s
silence, one faithful member of the flock replied: ‘Oh, I just bow my
head, count to 20 and then sit up again.’ Phew! Thank goodness that’s
over, then!
Those in the Western world who go away on religious retreats
are apt to be regarded as dangerously introspective navel-gazers. To
most, it is as eccentric a pursuit as bungee jumping. Even churchgoers
suspect that there is something just a little unhealthy about wanting
that much quiet.
I asked a couple of female friends what they thought about silence
and both confessed that they did not like the idea at all, because
it made them feel uneasy if not downright apprehensive. ‘To me,’
said a farmer’s wife, ‘silence is eerie, deathly – and black. If there’s
something happening, I’m fine, but, when things go quiet, I get
nervous.’ A second woman, a retired teacher, also wanted none of it.
‘It means’, she said, ‘that you might suddenly start thinking, and most
people are afraid of what they might think.’
In her mind, in other words, there is no protection in silence. In
those potentially blank, wide-open spaces of the mind, you have no
defence against the fears and anxieties which most of us are prey to –
relationships which are not going well, unhappy memories we would
rather suppress, things we know we should do something about but
have not, ailments we would rather forget about. A protracted silence,
we sense, could open up that agenda of anxieties that we prefer to
keep at bay with activity and noise. Ironically, silence has come to be regarded, in the West at least, as almost the antithesis of peace of
mind.
‘Silence’, said Father Richard Rohr, an American Franciscan priest
whose books have sold more than a million copies, ‘would make
people in this country feel meaningless. Here, you make yourself
significant by saying smart things, making clever put-downs, using
words to fill up the moment. To Americans, silence feels like an
entrance into emptiness. And on the psychological level, there’s also a
fear of facing yourself, a fear of the self-knowledge which is invariably
incriminating.’
That hardly sounds like an inviting prospect, and there is certainly
nothing intrinsically benign about silence. It can deepen the loneliness
of the already lonely. It is the arena where we struggle with our
regrets, our yearnings and our resentments, which all too often are
unresolved and unhealed. Human beings, moreover, can use it in the
most merciless and callous of ways. It is apt to be a weapon of choice
in once-loving relationships that have turned sour. It can be deployed
to freeze people out, to cut them off from the oxygen of social intercourse. Things that should never have been spoken can leave, in the
ensuing silence, a terrible legacy of bitterness. Things that ought to
have been spoken but never were can blight whole lives.
Then there are the silences we impose upon ourselves because our
memories are too painful for words. Such is the silence of tens of
millions who have endured the horrors of war. Such is the silence of
many of those who survived the h*******t. Such was the silence of
Tomas Reichental from Slovakia who was sent to the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp when he was only nine years old.
‘I was silent about it for 55 years’, he said. ‘After I married I never told my wife or my children about the camp. We lived in freezing
conditions there, I was starving, there were thousands of bodies
lying around, the stench was indescribable, and I just couldn’t bear
to speak about it. Whenever there was a TV programme about those
things, I used to switch it off. It felt like a heavy burden inside me for
all those years. It was terribly painful. It was always there but I tried
to bypass it.’
‘I only began to speak of it when a teacher at my grandchild’s
school here in Dublin asked if I would talk to the children about
those unspeakable horrors, that living death. The first time I spoke, I
broke down in tears, and so did the teacher.’
Thus too Annette, who lives in the English Midlands and who
lost many of her family in the h*******t and still, to this day, has
nightmares about it. She does not speak about it even to her husband.
Best to try to forget, she thinks, but she still carries a terrible silence
within.
So is there anything either positive or useful about silence? Or is it
nothing more than either a mental attic where terrible memories have
been stowed away or else a series of damnable longueurs that have to
be negotiated by any of the means available to us?
Some religious folk, though by no means all, venerate silence as
the space in which we can hear the voice of conscience (or even
God), transcend the ego, rediscover our better selves, reconnect with
‘the essence of our being’ (in the case of Hindus) or attain a state of
enlightenment (in the case of Buddhists). That is hardly surprising.
They have traditions to be honoured, creeds to propound. But what
about the irreligious multitude, who may recognise and practise
virtue better than some ‘believers’ but yet want nothing to do with doctrines which seem to them either irrational or downright bizarre.
What, one might think, can silence possibly hold for them?
Yet, as I have discovered, it is not only the religious who regard
silence as precious. Without what it brings forth from their patients,
psychotherapists would find their job infinitely more difficult, if not
impossible. Actors insist that playing the silences in a drama is just
as important as speaking the words; musicians that the pauses are
as vital as the notes; while, as Sir Neil MacGregor, director of the
British Museum, points out, silence is ‘an absolute sine qua non’ in
the appreciation of art.
It is also valued, even revered, by some rather more surprising
people. ‘In the big mountains,’ said Stephen Venables, the first Briton
to reach the summit of Everest alone and without the aid of oxygen,
‘noise equates to danger. The ice under your feet can go off like a
pistol shot in the middle of the night, there’s the terrifying roar of
cliffs collapsing, rock faces falling apart, snow avalanches, huge
masses succumbing to changes in temperature and gravity – and you
certainly don’t want to be in their way.’
‘By contrast, silence means that everything is still and safe. So I
love silence. It’s what I want. And it has never intensified anxiety in
me when I was alone.’
‘When I got to the summit of Everest that day in 1988, it was late
afternoon and just starting to snow, but the wind hadn’t got up so
there was a sort of blanketing effect and that silence had the most
powerful quality. I was potentially in a very dangerous place, utterly
alone with five or six billion people down below, and yet I was in that
calm, serene silence. It felt almost like a blessing.’
For Ian Player (brother of the golfer Gary), who over the course anks!
7
of many years has taken thousands of people on trails into the South
African wilderness, silence was a necessity as well as a blessing.
All the walking, he said, had to be done in complete silence,
because some animals can hear the sound of a human voice as much
as two miles away. It was also an essential safety precaution because
‘the different calls of birds will tell you if there are buffaloes or hippos
around, so you have to have your ears about you’.
The rigours of the trail, he went on, were always a challenge, but
‘without doubt, by far the most difficult job I had to do was ensure
that people kept quiet while we were trekking. It often took me three
days to get them to shut up and listen. For the first couple of days
they hated it, in fact they could hardly stand it. Not surprising really,
because they had come from a world which is drowning in noise.
‘People now are just afraid of any kind of silence and I had to keep
on telling them to shut up – and in no uncertain terms, because they
would just go on talking. The worst were the Americans and the
Germans.
‘Yet, you know, in the end the silence had a profound effect on
many of those people. After all, if you go to a place like the Umfolozi
Reserve, you’re going back 250,000 years, to a primal part of yourself
when nobody had cellphones or watches or computers – and, by the
end of the trek, the people who came with me had had a little taste
of that primal world. When they left many of them would weep, the
men as well as the women.’
I had just a taste of the same primal world in the Swiss Alps, the
Rockies and the Egyptian deserts, places where a profound silence is
still in command. In this book I want to explore the world of those
who regard silence as a valuable companion, a source of inspiration, who find in it not an emptiness but a plenitude, a richness which
those who shun it are missing.
What exactly does it mean to actors, musicians and psychotherapists? Does it have a use even for those who are condemned
to spend many years of their lives behind prison bars? And what of
those who turn to it as a way of transforming their lives, who regard
it, as one Christian put it, as ‘a meeting place where I am looking for
God’s love and He is looking for mine’. Such ardour suggests that it
could be a good deal more than a blank and boring space.
It is very easy to see why so many people run away from silence,
but it is, after all, our own little world, the mental space we carry
around with us all the time, and it does seem rather odd that we
should care so little about it and its potential value – as little, in fact,
as most of us cared about our planet even 50 years ago. Might it not
be worth considering what our own private planet has to offer us?
At the moment, for most of us in the West, it is just one of the great
unknowns.
Not so in the East. There, a very different philosophy prevails.
‘Silence’, said a dentist friend from Bangalore in India, ‘is very much
part of our culture.’ I cannot conceive of anyone in the West making
such a statement. It does seem to come from another planet.
Why do Indians, why does the East, have such a different mind-set,
a mind-set which reverences silence instead of shrinking back from
it? What do the Indians see in silence that most of us plainly don’t?
