A Book of Silence (24 page)

I realised that the ambiguity I pointed out in the meaning of the word ‘silence’ itself became crucial, though tricky, here. If you take the first OED definition and understand silence as an absence of
language
then simply there is and can be no silence on a printed page, because it is made up entirely of language. If, on the other hand, you take the second definition, that silence is an absence of
sound
, then written language is silent, because whatever else it does, a printed page of text does not make any sound.

What does it mean to say that a blank piece of paper is ‘more silent’ than one with writing on it? Or with writing in a script that the person looking at it cannot decode at all; for me that would include cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Chinese ideograms or Cyrillic.

I began to speculate that it might be easier to understand written-and-read English as a different language from spoken-and-heard English. Reading, like British Sign Language, is a hand–eye language not a mouth–ear language, even though they start from the same place, both in the large historical perspective and in individual readers. Beginners tend to read ‘aloud’ or at least moving their lips, full ‘reading competence’ is usually judged by the ability to read silently. As a person learns to read fluently the connection between the arbitrary black marks on the page and aural language evaporates and practised readers absorb meaning from texts entirely visually, as can now be neurologically proven. Spoken English and written English (for example) have a different vocabulary and a different grammar as well as a different function. They generate different genres of literature – the distinction between storytelling and fiction writing is now fully recognised; ‘performance poetry’ is understood as a different form from written poetry. These differences are extensive, though usually invisible.

If the page ‘speaks’, it is not silent, but everyone who can do it knows that reading silently feels
different
from reading aloud or being read to. This is treated as so normal now that it comes as a surprise to discover that it was not always like this. Until the fourth century everyone who read, read aloud.

Around 385 Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, learned to read silently. The young Augustine saw him do it, recorded this and was immensely influenced by it.

Before his conversion Augustine was a teacher of philosophy and rhetoric. Along with his contemporaries, he followed Aristotle and saw writing as ‘signs of sounds’. He was explicit about this: ‘When a word is written it makes a sign to the eyes whereby that which pertains to the ears enters the mind.’ It is in this context that we have to see Augustine’s account of Ambrose reading.

In 385 Augustine was thirty-one. He was very brilliant, very troubled and highly sensitive. He ran away from home in North Africa and went to Rome, where he was laughed at for his provincial accent – for his speaking voice – and was unable to make a living as an independent teacher, so he accepted a government post in Milan. Once there, he went to call on Ambrose who, as well as being the bishop, was a friend of his mother.

Clearly this way of reading was a novelty and a bit of a puzzle to Augustine. It is the first explicit description of someone reading silently (without moving his lips). There has of course been considerable debate about whether Ambrose was the very first person ever to do this
²⁸
but I am persuaded, partly by Augustine’s
Confessions
themselves and partly because in 349, less than half a century before Augustine watched Ambrose reading, Cyril of Jerusalem exhorted the women in his congregation to read during gaps in the ceremonies, ‘but quietly, so although the lips speak no other ears may hear what they say’. Following Paul’s exhortation
that women should not speak during worship
²⁹
there was considerable anxiety in early Christianity about keeping women
silent
in church. I cannot help but feel that if silent reading had been known to him, Cyril would have urged it upon them.

We know that Augustine himself quickly learned to read this way, because his famous conversion scene in the garden in
The Confessions
pivots around reading. After a long day talking about faith and reading aloud with his friend Alypius, Augustine had worked himself up into something of a state. Finally he went off alone, burst into floods of tears and heard the famous child’s voice saying, ‘
Tolle, Lego
’ (Take, read). There was a codex of the Epistles lying near by, so he ‘seized, opened and
in silence
read the section that my eyes first fell on’ and immediately, ‘No further would I read, nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a serene light infused directly into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.’ What works, what dispels his doubts, is silent reading, which infuses the light of knowledge ‘directly into the heart’.

Ten years after his conversion Augustine wrote
The Confessions.
Their publication marked a distinct turning point in the history of self-understanding. The role that silent reading played in this shift felt to me like yet more evidence that we cannot treat silence simply as a lack or absence – here we see it as a passionately strong positive source in the making of the modern self. One way to understand this is by looking at some aspects of modern reading and seeing how things have changed since Augustine watched Ambrose read without moving his lips.

First, there has been an enormous social change in reading. Literacy is now seen as a necessary life skill. In the sitcom
Friends
, Joey always moves his lips as he reads – this is a stock joke to show that he is thick and uneducated and viewers understand this. Before Augustine’s time it was seen much more as an aristocratic accomplishment. There is a nice little story in Petronius’s
Satyrica
, where a character excuses himself by saying that he did not kiss a particular youth because he was beautiful but because he ‘could read a book on sight’: there is no modern version of this excuse.
The level of interpretation required to read sensibly meant that fluent reading was subsequent to an extensive education, rather than prior to it. For instance we have records of an argument about whether the phrase from Virgil
collectamexiliopubem
(in scripta continua) should be read, ‘
collectam exilio pubem
– a people gathered for exile’ or ‘
collectam ex Ilio pubem
– a people gathered from Troy’. Obviously you need some considerable knowledge of the plot of the
Aenead
before you can hope to decide; reading could not be about unravelling plots and discovering secrets. This limitation was not as extensive as it would be now because one of the effects of easier reading is that it has radically reduced the depth of textual memory in even the well educated, just as calculators have reduced people’s capacity to do mental arithmetic.

The ability to read is now also far more closely linked to the ability to write (the single term ‘literacy’ covers both). Because reading was so much more of an aural skill in the late classical world, most writing was dictated to scribes. The modern literate person has access not only to silent reading, but also to silent writing. Reading and writing were social events, whereas now they are deeply private activities.

Adam Phillips explores some of this new privacy in
Promises,
Promises
where he links it specifically to dreams and silence:

Along with this social change in reading since Augustine’s time there have been enormous physical changes in the written text. For example, silent reading strips away certain aspects of language like pace, volume and inflection, which we primarily use in speech to insert emotional rather than intellectual content. To replace this loss, punctuation was invented. Punctuation marks both assist sense (especially because the natural rhythm of breath has also disappeared; you cannot speak on an in breath but you can carry on reading perfectly well) and emphasise mood or emotion.

Silent reading also changed our relationship to both books and readers. A person reading is ‘private’ even in public places. It would be considered rude to lean over the shoulder of a person reading a book on a train and share the text; but we will shamelessly listen to and engage with other people’s conversations. Within that privacy readers ‘own’ the text in a new way; they can read subversively, secretly. Augustine himself was aware of this. He became very anxious about independent ‘interpretations’: private (silent) reading could – and he was right it
did
, as Luther was happy to confess – lead to heresy. The practice of silent reading led to individual, or independent thinking. This sense of independent ownership of a text established itself quite quickly. From this new relationship between reader and text stems the long struggle about Authority in the interpretation and translation of sacred writings – still a rather crucial issue for all text-based faiths like Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

If reading is a separate language by which authors communicate with readers, in what sense can we properly describe it as ‘silent’ at all, particularly if we think of silence as predominantly
an absence of language? Should a person seeking true silence be reading?

Here there have been a variety of traditions. In mainstream Western Christianity reading – scholarship – has been seen as central to the contemplative, or silent, life. Protestantism maintained this part of Catholic practice even when they abandoned the monasticism, which had originally promoted it. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, laying down his rule in the sixth century, was very clear that reading was a part of the harmonious rhythm of monastic life. He argued that ‘a cloister without books is a fort without armoury’.

In classical Buddhism, on the other hand, reading has generally been seen as antipathetic to meditation and enlightenment. The Eastern Orthodox Churches have, broadly, taken up an intermediate position; while scholarship and books were preserved through intensely difficult periods within the monasteries of Greece and the Middle East, there is also a strong ascetic revulsion from too much reading. In
From the Holy Mountain
William Dalrymple relates a contemporary encounter with this approach. He is visiting the monastery of Mar Saba in the West Bank – a notoriously austere community – where Fr Theophanes, the guest master, is shocked to discover that Dalrymple is a writer. He announces that,

I read; of course I read. I cannot really imagine not reading. But I gradually became aware that, through silence, I was beginning to read in a new way. I still, too often, use reading as a way to escape from silence, either into a noisy mental dogfight with authors I disagree with, or simply by being sucked into fictional worlds. This often happens in certain sorts of genre novels, particularly (for me) romance. Such writing can leave me entranced rather literally – feeling empty at the end and even slightly nauseated, as lost to myself as those characters who were stolen by the fairies and could not calculate how long they had been away but were left semi-enchanted, deranged and febrile when they returned. Lost to the real. These are not ‘silent’ reading experiences – they are overwhelming, even oppressive. Such novels are too easy, too successful; they don’t ‘nourish’, they drain; they are escapist in the technical sense of the word, and even addictive.