Does silence really exist?
By Harry Eyres
Published: February 27 2010 00:18 | Last updated: February 27 2010 00:18
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| The percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie is deaf but still seems to hear something |
I’ve never been one for silent retreats, or for any extreme forms of asceticism or self-abnegation. I was never tempted to become a monk, let alone a Trappist one. I do sometimes go away for short periods to somewhere quiet (for example, the beautiful Krishnamurti Centre at Brockwood Park in Hampshire), but never abjure conversation completely.
Reading Sara Maitland’s immensely stimulating A Book of Silence (I am discussing it with her at the Bath Literature Festival on March 3) has been a surprisingly noisy business for me – in terms, that is, of internal noise. The book itself is buzzing with ideas; this is more a book about silence than a book of silence, perhaps. And then I have found myself quite often, and quite violently, disagreeing with the author, sometimes out loud.
In search of silence (do you really need to search for silence, I wonder?) Maitland goes and spends 40 days alone in a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye.
This seems to me going too far, or asking for trouble, like the misguided hermit in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. It reminds me of my friend the writer Adam Nicolson who spent two weeks on an uninhabited island in the Outer Hebrides and ended up getting seriously spooked when his dog started growling at nothing, or perhaps a stray sheep. No wonder Maitland begins to hallucinate and hear voices.
Silence is in fact a curiously elusive concept. The moment we are quiet, we start to hear things we don’t normally hear: the sighing of the wind, birds, insects, even our own heartbeat or blood pressure. (I should make an exception for the profoundly deaf, but it seems that a profoundly deaf person such as the brilliant percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie still hears something). Perhaps, as the composer John Cage believed, silence doesn’t really exist; or, as Maitland’s friend Janet Batsleer writes to her in a letter, “all silence is waiting to be broken”.
Then there is the tendency to confuse silence with solitariness. This was the mistake of the Desert Fathers, and especially the greatest of them, St Anthony. Alone in the Egyptian desert he found himself assailed by noisy demons. During the years he spent in a ruined fort, as Adam Nicolson recounts, he could be heard groaning and weeping as he wrestled with them. One of my arguments with Maitland is that she takes the idea of silence too literally – moving around the country to more and more remote locations, which is not an option for most of us. And, in any case, are there not surprising opportunities for silent contemplation in the interstices of the noisiest city or day?
But as the book goes on, I find myself agreeing with Maitland more and more. I think she is right in her main and overarching point, that we have developed into a society or culture that is afraid of silence. The noise is now so great in many public places, partly because of all the mobile phone conversations conducted in them, that I am surprised people can actually hear the others they are phoning.
Constant noise appears to be reassuring, or at least to be thought so. That is why music or muzak plays in shops, restaurants and on aeroplanes when they are about to take off or land. But what happens when noise is so loud and ubiquitous that you can no longer hear yourself think?
Then the thought occurs that the whole point of all this din is to stop people thinking, or confronting themselves. The scary thing about silence is that you are left with yourself; the mirror which might have been conveniently darkened or blurred is now uncomfortably clean and unforgiving.
Beyond the terror of silence, as Maitland and many other writers on the subject have attested, lies a realm of joy. St Anthony survived his ordeal in the desert; he did not only survive but flourished; after his two decades of self-imposed solitary confinement, he spent years teaching and preparing other hermits, before setting off once more into the desert, and spending his old age in an oasis, where he died aged 105.
The deepest thought that Sara Maitland provokes for me is that by surrounding ourselves with noise we are cutting ourselves off from the possibility of bliss. Her book reminded me of another one, Richard Hughes’s The Wooden Shepherdess, the second volume of his ambitious historical epic of 20th-century history, The Human Predicament (the first is The Fox in the Attic).
At the end of The Fox in the Attic, Hughes’s clueless young British aristocratic hero is horrified that the beautiful blind German cousin he has fallen for is to be immured in a Carmelite convent. He has no idea that Mitzi is taking her vows not because of family pressure but because of an overwhelming vocation (nor does he know that within the walls she will find profound joy).
She will discover that “Carmel’s Enclosure is separate not from but deeply within the created world, like a beating heart”.
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