In Pursuit of Silence

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE
Listening for the Unknown

CHAPTER TWO
Why We Hear

CHAPTER THREE
Why We Are Noisy

CHAPTER FOUR
Retail: The Soundtrack

CHAPTER FIVE
Sounds Like Noise

CHAPTER SIX
Silent Interlude

CHAPTER SEVEN
Soundkill

CHAPTER EIGHT
Freeway to Noise

CHAPTER NINE
Home Front

CHAPTER TEN
This Is War!

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Dragon Trap

CHAPTER TWELVE
Silent Finale

Acknowledgments

Notes

Author’s Note

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, I’m woken by traffic helicopters; I’m 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. I’m scared of becoming a noise crank, but I’ve 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,
from water burbling in the pipes, to the electricity zizzing behind the lights, to a cat thumping off the couch below, to the skirmishing of squirrels on a heavy branch outside. I like there to be an abundance of noises for us to listen to—not just one blast overwhelming the rest. When I start worrying that I’m making too big a fuss about conserving silence, I try to remember lofty examples from history of people who defended quiet. There’s a lovely quote from Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter that I come back to:
“The men whose labors
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 can’t say it completely assuages the anxiety associated with sensitivity to sound. And I’ve had my passion for quiet as long as I can remember. I’ve snitched on contractors who started work early. I’ve battled neighbors who hold large parties—and befriended them to get into their parties as a way of trying to befriend the noise itself. I’ve worn so many earplugs (powerful, swimming-pool-blue Hearos from the Xtreme Protection Series) that if they were laid end to end they’d 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 wasn’t 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 you—there, no—wait, I think that’s it. Isn’t that it? Maybe if you bend a little closer …”) It’s an incident I will never live down. But how could I explain that it wasn’t 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 I’d 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 ridiculous—or maybe worse, like the state of the narrator at the start of Edgar Allan Poe’s “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 God’s 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 things—all 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 can’t 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 couldn’t 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.

After the meeting, different people gave me their thoughts about Quaker silence. One heavily bearded frontier trading post of a man told me that there were different levels of silence and that while
“sometimes you feel everyone
sinking into it, sometimes
it sings.” A gentle female professor of medieval studies spoke of the idea of worshipping in silence as an antidote to the distraction of noise. A short, bald man with very dark eyebrows and very black mod glasses described the silence as “definitely a listening. Because basically Quakers believe there is that of God in all of us.”

The first book of Kings declares that God will manifest not in a great tempest or rumbling of the earth but after the cataclysm, in the
“thin voice of silence.”
In its essence, this idea is shared by many faiths. For many people, silence is the way God speaks to us, and when we ourselves are in silence, we are speaking the language of the soul. This was not my experience, exactly. My encounters with the religious life have been ever hopeful, and ever disappointed (if not with the particular faith, with my self; if not with my self, with the particular faith). But later I recalled how after only a few moments of being inside the high-ceilinged meeting room, surrounded by people all sitting in silence, I became more aware of the sun than I’d been while standing outside the building’s entrance.

I had another experience early on in my exploration of silence that pointed to the effect silence can have on appreciation of the natural world.