Norwegian explorer, Erling Kagge, discusses Silence in his short and poetic book Silence In the Age of Noise. The book consists of thirty-three ways in which he musingly answers the questions What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever?
A lot of things in daily life boil down to wonder. It is one of he purest forms of joy that I can imagine…Wonder is one of the most powerful forces with which we are born.
…
My sense of wonder is first and foremost something in and of itself, wonder for the sake of wonder. A small voyage of discovery.
Erling Kagge, Silence In the Age of Noise
Kagge proposes that we are afraid of silence, afraid of being alone with our thoughts and getting to know ourselves better.
To speak is precisely what the silence should do. It should speak, and you should talk with it, in order to harness the potential that is present. “Perhaps it’s because silence goes together with wonder, but it also has a kind of majesty to it, yes, like an ocean, or like an endless snowy expanse,” [Fosse] said. “And whoever does not stand in wonder at this majesty fears it. And that is most likely why many are afraid of silence (and why there is music everywhere, everywhere).”
I recognize the fear that Fosse describes. A vague angst about something I can’t quite put my finger on. Something which causes me all too easily to avoid being present in my own life. Instead, I busy myself with this or that, avoiding the silence, living through the new task at hand.
Erling Kagge, Silence In the Age of Noise
This is the first link between silence and being present that Kagge brings up. In his seventh musing he comes back to the struggle to be alone with one’s thoughts. “This disquiet that we feel has been with us since the beginning; it is our natural state. The present hurts, wrote Pascal” in the sixteenth century. Kagge then points out that our many modern distractions, such as television or text messages or internet searches come from an in-built need. The devices are not the cause of our distraction, although they do make it easier to ‘go down the rabbit hole’, to give in to the disquiet that Pascal describes.
To Kagge “[s]ilence is more of an idea. A notion” than a decibel reading, and “the most interesting kind of silence is the one that lies within.” He believes it is possible for all of us to access this silence, even when surrounded by noise. The examples he gives suggest that to access this deep, internal silence, we need to have experienced it and so are accessing, or perhaps more accurately, invoking the memory of silence.
Deep down in the ocean, below the waves and ripples, you can find your internal silence. Standing in the shower, letting the water wash over your head, sitting in front of a crackling fire, swimming across a forest lake or taking a walk over a field: all these can be experiences of perfect stillness too.
Erling Kagge, Silence In the Age of Noise
His examples, too, come from finding silence in nature, and he makes that point that “if I hadn’t been able to experience stillness amid city life, my longing for silence would be too great and I would have needed to return to nature more often.”
Kagge uses similar examples to Dillard’s ‘unselfing’ in his descriptions of finding silence in being present.
Is it possible to both be present in the world and not present at the same time? I think it is.
To me, those brief moments when I dwell on the horizon and am captivated by my surroundings, or when I do nothing more than study a rock with green moss and find myself unable to pull my eyes away, or else when I simply hold a child in my arms, are the greatest.
Time suddenly stops and I am simultaneously inwardly present and completely distant. All at once, a brief moment can seem like an eternity.
Erling Kagge, Silence In the Age of Noise
Silence, then, according to Kagge, is something that we fear but also need. A need that is getting increasingly difficult to fulfill as our lives and our cities get noisier and are filled with easily accessed distractions. However, we must learn to seek internal silence, since silence is necessary for us to think, reflect, and rebalance our emotional lives. Silence, and the unselfing that comes with it, can most easily be found in nature but can be sought anywhere.
Nan Shepherd was familiar with this silence:
For the ear, the most vital thing that can be listened to here is silence. To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves…But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sounds. It is like a new element.
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
I have experienced such a silence on the dunes just south of the Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas. Sitting on the sand, looking at the light on Guadalupe Peak, that we had climbed just a few days before, the world fell silent. No humans spoke, no birds called, there was just the sound of the wind that seemed like a roaring across the whole earth. The sky was immense. In a West Texas winter the air has no humidity and seems bigger, more expansive in this high plain, which is so high already that the mountain just didn’t seem that tall, despite what my tired legs told me to the contrary. It was a time of absolute stillness – not empty, not a negation, but “full of meaning” as Hermann Melville put it.
It was only as I put the book on the scanner for this post that I realized how perfectly like that silent moment in West Texas the cover image is.