Silence: A History

“Are there different types of silence? Do people experience it in different ways? And does it really exist?

Silence through the ages

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh. Given voice. A silence was shattered, and the dawn of creation broke over the long, dark night. A susurration moved the void – the first sound carrying the stirrings of life; the exhalation of a cosmic breath.

Bibilical beginnings

The death of silence is the birth of creation. Perhaps it’s like the Bible says: God spoke, and the words that rang out were the Heavens and the Earth, and the life of Men was the light inside Him. Perhaps it’s like the scientists say: two particles sprang into existence and collided, and the Big Bang they created was an ear-splitting echo of life reverberating through dark matter.

Science and Religion are united: sound is life; silence is death. This is the meta-narrative of the human condition. We emerge from the quiet cradle of the womb, from the barren wastes of stellar dust, before returning once again to the fearful finality of a silent grave.

The human cacophony

And so we fill that short space between with every species of sound: noise, babble, discordance, cacophony, hubbub, racket, uproar, tumult, commotion and din. We yell and scream and cry and shout. We make noisy, passionate love. We have loud and heated arguments. We make violent, clamorous wars. We fill our eyes and our mind and our soul with the narcotic buzz of bedlam. In our restless, angry, despairing consumption of sound we confirm that we are alive. And when we think of its opposite – if at all – it’s with a sense of impending terror. Senescent silence waits for us all: a dead silence, as quiet as the grave, an end to life’s clashing crescendo.

"The internet is the signature invention of our age: brash, adolescent and noisy."

Today, our retreat from silence is both multidimensional and multimedia. The internet is the signature invention of our age: brash, adolescent and noisy. If noise is life, when anybody can be heard by anyone, anywhere, we take a step closer to immortality. Where once the Delphic Oracle admonished adherents to ‘know thyself’, today the message has morphed. ‘Broadcast Yourself’ urges the oracular voice of YouTube: make noise, be heard and leave a piece of yourself behind forever. If you’re not online, you don’t exist.

Sound of the God[s]

Is this so different from the age of Apollo? The link between silence and death is as old as language. ‘Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles’ are the first words of The Iliad, the defining text of ancient Greek literature. Achilles was the hero of the Trojan War who was offered a long and happy life lived in obscurity, or a short and violent existence marked by glory. Achilles (whose name is derived from the Greek word for ‘fame’, which is itself derived from the verb to ‘hear’) chose the latter. “Short is my date, but deathless my renown,” he declared. To pass unremarked by history – to be met with silence – is the true death; to leave an echo of one’s name – to be spoken of after you have gone – that is to live forever. And so the goddess sang, and the song continues still.

Centuries later, the age of rationality waged a new war against silence. In the West, silence had been sequestered by the Christian eremites, hermits who disappeared into the desert to commune with God. At the root of their worship was ineffability – where language collapses into quiet rapture in the face of the divine. To be silent is to know an aspect of God.

"The link between silence and death is as old as language."

In The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis characterises the Devil himself as a hater of silence: “Music and silence – how I detest them both! Ever since Our Father entered Hell… no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied with Noise… We will make the whole universe a noise in the end… The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down.”

Silence and philosophy

In the post-Enlightenment era, ineffability, with its implications of divinity, abstraction and metaphysics, was an embarrassment to the tradition of secular scientism. As Pierre-Simon Laplace explained to Emperor Napoleon I, when it came to God, scientists had ‘no need of that hypothesis’. But when it came to silence – to a secular interpretation of its meaning, its values, even its definition – science found itself beset by the existential discomfort seemingly buried in us at a molecular level. Its response was an uncharacteristic and ironic taciturnity.

Fast-forward 200 years and the resistance to silence evolved as the great academic questions shifted. New social and political movements emerged from the shared experience of war. Suffragettes and former colonies both developed a narrative of self-identity after centuries of historical silence. In feminist and post-colonial studies, language and liberation were one.

“There is no silence without the act of silencing,” wrote feminist author Janet Batsleer to her friend Sara Maitland. “The silence of the oppressed can only be recognised in and through a language of freedom. That silence is a place of

"There is no silence without the act of silencing"

non-being, a place of control, from which all our yearning is to escape.” In the 19th century, violence and silence were the twin expressions of imperial instinct. The raising of social consciousness in the 20th century was a process of silent communities finding the voice they had been so long denied.

This fear of silence – ingrained, eternal – has prevented us from establishing what silence actually is, except in a broader, religious sense. Are there different types of silence? Do different people experience it in different ways? Is it a positive or negative force in our lives? And, more fundamentally, does it really exist?

Importance of the echo

In 1947, avant-garde composer John Cage entered a room at Harvard College whose walls were covered with a material designed to eliminate echoes. Standing in this anechoic chamber,Cage heard two sounds – one high, one low. The engineer in charge informed him that the high sound was his nervous system in operation; the low one his blood in circulation. Cage had already been experimenting with silence in music, but the experience at Harvard inspired his most famous work, ‘4’33”’.

Premiering the piece in New York in August 1952, David Tudor took a seat at his piano, closed the lid and waited in silence. He opened and closed the lid twice more to mark the end of the piece’s three movements. History has remembered the event as the beginning of ‘silent’ music, but as Cage himself contended, that misses the point. “There’s no such thing as silence,” he said. “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

The meaning of silence

Cage’s music challenged the classical definition of silence as an absence of noise. Janet Batsleer might write that ‘silence is waiting to be broken’, but outside of a vacuum or the artificial cocoon of an isolation chamber, what we understand as ‘silence’ is a constant flux of discreet sounds. A park, a bedroom, a study, a library – all these places of silent refuge are a quiet Babel of competing sounds: bird song, the distant hum of traffic, the rustle of paper, the scrape of chairs. In a post-industrial world, one that is globalised, shrinking and overcrowded, where even the deep silence of desert and mountain can be split by the noise of passing airplanes, we need a new definition of silence. Not a semantic definition, but a cultural one. Perhaps it’s not a new ‘definition’ we need at all, but a new ‘understanding’. A new meaning.

"Cage’s music challenged the classical definition of silence as an absence of noise."

Sara Maitland is an author, philosopher and intellectual. As the clock ticked on the 20th century, she found herself facing a new and uncertain future. The millennium coincided with her 50th birthday, her long-term marriage had recently ended, and her youngest child had left home. “I suddenly was in a completely new place,” she says on a crackly phone line from her home in a secluded part of Weardale. “I was living on my own for the first time in my life. I had none of those socialising responsibilities that I’d had for many, many years, and I thought, ‘What shall I do now? If I’m going to be alone what is the most interesting alone to be?’ And that’s when I started getting interested in silence.”

Inspired in part by religious conviction, but also by a simple desire to get away from a life defined by the deafening debate of Oxford University and the feminist movement, Maitland decamped to an isolated moor in the North East, determined to cultivate a lifestyle of silence.

That lifestyle was pitched somewhere between the secular and religious, a sort of humanist mysticism at once groping towards spiritual enlightenment but analysing the journey with scientific detachment. But the first experience in Durham proved to Maitland “how ignorant I was” – she found herself ill prepared for the extreme asceticism demanded by the ferocious climate and solitude. She regrouped on Skye, in a small cottage where, for six weeks, Maitland existed in a state of silent contemplation.

That was merely the start of a journey that has taken Maitland into the eremitical silence of the desert; into the tranquil hills of Galloway in search of Wordsworth’s ‘bliss of solitude’; to the potent zazen of Buddhist meditation; from Viriginia Woolf’s ‘roomof her own’ to the chamber in the heart of Catherine of Sienna.

Being still

Maitland’s conclusions – part philosophy of rapture, part neurological breakthrough – are both startling and controversial. “I think there are different kinds of silence,” she says, “and I think the way there are different kinds of silence is, for me, the proof that silence isn’t simply an absence of something, because if it was an absence of something all silence would be the same.”

"The meditative silence of religion is a form of spiritual self-flagellation."

There are two great traditions of silence in Maitland’s thesis. The first is Religious silence, as exemplified by Christian hermits or Buddhist monks who, in contrast to the social and political cacophony of early church movements, developed a new relationship with God and the universe by using extreme experiences of silence to destabilise the ego and open their inner self to the divine.

As Charles de Foucault explained in a letter to a priest in 1901, “It is [in the desert] that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as to leave all the room free for God alone… The soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things.”

In contrast, Romantic silence, as practiced by Woolf, Wordsworth and the English poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, is an attempt to use the solitude of the country not to eliminate but to explore the self, and to find within it the inner authenticity that will awaken

As Maitland explains, “There are different ways you can access silence, and therefore different results you can get from it.” The Romantics’ silence is one of self-discovery – it is, in effect, a rationalist, modernist silence. It’s the self-improving silence of The Priory. The meditative silence of religion is a form of spiritual self-flagellation.

Freedom without sound

In A Book of Silence, her document of the long journey she took, Maitland recalls her time among the eremites: “In the desert, I realised that there is something hideous, especially to a contemporary Western sensibility, about a systematic and determined attempt to break down, or thin out the boundaries of the self and become open to, participate in, the undefined, illimitable freedom of the divine.” And yet, “In the desert I learned that silence is in itself a form of freedom; it generates freedom, free choices, inner clarity, strength. A freedom from one’s self and a freedom to be oneself.”

The dark side of silence that Maitland discovered in the desert had also manifested itself during her stay in Skye. Here she documented the distinct responses that her mind and body displayed in this cocoon of quietude. They included the intensification of physical sensations like eating and hearing; she underwent a process of disinhibition, casting off various social norms, including her clothes; more profoundly, she experienced a breakdown in her perception of boundaries, a commingling of the sense of self with some greater force beyond it; alongside aural hallucinations and a serene sense of connectedness.

These experiences recur time and again in accounts of silence and solitude from polar explorers, solo mountaineers and round-the-world yachtsmen. But while, for Maitland, their manifestation was a cause for curiosity rather than alarm, in other contexts their effects can be highly damaging.

"she underwent a process of disinhibition, casting off various social norms, including her clothes"

“All the benefits of silence depend on it being voluntary,” says Maitland. “Solitary confinement in prison and the silencing of particular groups or communities or any form of censorship nearly always has very bad effects on the silenced person and are very bad for society.” In the 21st century, the war against silence has been subsumed, like so much else, by the War on Terror. In Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and the secret prisons of the Middle East, silence has allegedly been weaponised. The same techniques which, in Maitland, produced the serene effects of expanded awareness can also, according to a 1998 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, amount to a practice ‘of inhuman and degrading treatment’.

Maitland is just one of a growing band of intellectuals who are calling for a readjustment of society and a realignment of our relationship with silence. In his Manifesto For Silence, Stuart Sim reflects the thinking of the Romantic poets when he writes, “The ability to think, to reflect and to create are all to a significant degree dependent on our being able to access silence… It is an absolute necessity of existence, which the trend towards a 24/7 society is rendering more and more difficult for many of the population. Its loss would seriously impoverish our lives.”

Silent spaces

For Maitland, a more active role for silence in the modern world “would lower stress; if extended to children it would enhance creativity. I think that it would lower consumerism and violence, which I believe are linked.”

It’s Maitland’s contention that silence, far from being a purely abstract force, has real, physiological consequences: “Silence does something to your brain waves,” she explains. This, then, is the bedrock of our new understanding of silence, backed up by a definition that’s more sophisticated and multi-layered than ever before. But what about the meaning of silence? That, perhaps, can be found in a simple passage in Maitland’s book.

“As time passes, I increasingly realise there is an interior dimension to silence, a sort of stillness of heart and mind which is not a void but a rich space. What became obvious to me as I thought about this is that for me there is a chasm of difference between qualities like quietness or peace and silence itself… In my personal vocabulary the difference is similar to the one between happiness and joy.”