on silence
and its many faces
A few months ago, I met musician, entrepreneur and author Derek Sivers for chai on a balmy Friday morning. We talked about a lot, but mostly about what we had in common: writing. I remember mentioning quite offhandedly that I would give anything to go to the Himalayas for some peace and quiet to write in. Derek paused and, eyes shining like those of someone who had hit upon something, said: “You’re moving into a new house — why not use that as your place of solitude?”
A few months later, I have moved: the curtains hung, kitchen equipped, a new writing desk brought in. Here, there is a silence that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. It is a silence that I remember craving when living in a busy household filled with sounds of domesticity. It is a silence that, when stretched out too long, surfaces the deep-seated demons of Boredom and Sudden Awareness of the Self. The line between solitude and loneliness is razor-edge thin and just as lacerating. Modern society seems to agree, having cast solitude as an antagonist—an unnatural, antisocial state.
That the mind can occupy itself is a double-edged sword, expressed best by Michel de Montaigne:
We have a soul that can turn in on itself; it can keep itself company. It has the means to attack and defend, to give and receive.
Being alone with no external chatter instantly dials up the volume on my internal monologue, and suddenly the inside of my mind is as noisy and chaotic as a college house party. At the same time, silence imposes its own pace and rhythm on time, making it slide treacle-like. It’s jarring, and it clashes with my expectations that it’s a writer’s prerogative to design and live in a labyrinth of solitude. Much of my reading has shaped that belief, and left me a staunch theoretical supporter of silence for the same reason that Kahlil Gibran writes about in The Prophet:
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.
I know this, I know this by heart. But when the silence stretches too long, and starts to feel less like a weighted blanket and more like a weight, I wonder how they did it.
But once again, I commit the same mistake humans are guilty of committing time and time again: seeing something as uni-dimensional, when in reality it is kaleidoscopic. It’s the same with silence—and, by extension, solitude. Silence is a way of being, but it has different faces that I will rely on novelist, playwright and psychotherapist Paul Goodman to explain:
… the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, ‘This… this…’; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
Adrienne Rich asserts in Arts of the Possible that “the impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a tunnel of silence”. It is in that fertile tunnel of silence that the periphery atomises and communion with the cosmos is made possible. It is this type of silence that I find myself seeking.
Down the rabbithole
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
The Convivial Society: Impossible Silences
Farnam Street: Kahlil Gibran on the tension between reason and the silence required for thinking
