In Pursuit of Silence Read online

  Also by George Prochnik

  Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology

  For Rebecca,

  who knew when to speak and when to fall silent

  Contents

  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

  Introduction

  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 ab
out 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.

  I got it into my head that it was vital I speak with an astronaut. Astronauts, I imagined, were exposed to the most spectacular juxtaposition of noise and silence conceivable. What could be louder than a rocket launch? And what could be quieter than the depths of space? It seemed to me that the contrast between these two experiences, appearing as it did in so short a span of time, would give astronauts a unique insight into the essence of silence.

  After weeks of back and forth with Houston, I got the welcome news that astronaut Suni Williams would grant me a fifteen-minute interview. I read her NASA biography. She had logged more than 2,770 hours in space on 30 different aircraft, and had clocked a spacewalking world record. In addition to serving on helicopter combat squadrons and U.S. Navy diving details, and helping to develop the International Space Station Robotic Arm, she listed her hobbies as including “running, swimming, biking, triathlons, windsurfing, snowboarding and bow hunting.” Whatever Williams said about anything was not to be taken lightly.

  Quickly and unassumingly Williams shot down 90 percent of my suppositions. The noise of takeoff these days was nothing really to speak of—hardly louder than what you’d hear being on an airplane. In fact, for years NASA had been involved in some of the most advanced noise-abatement work on the planet, and the sleeping area of the space station was now one of the quietest places you could ever hope to find. Ventilation systems had been redesigned. New kinds of formfitting earplugs had been perfected. “Tonal measures” had been built into the walls and doors.

  Just as the launch wasn’t all that loud, Williams explained, walking in space wasn’t all that quiet. Ground control was in constant contact—“and when you have people from the ground telling you ‘do this, don’t do that’ all the time, you don’t feel the silence of space so much.”

  Of course, I thought, the sound from their support team on Earth was pumped directly into the astronauts’ ears, making sure they weren’t drifting away or otherwise deviating from the mission assigned them. I felt embarrassed at my ignorance and ready to truncate our interview. But then, after a short pause, Williams began to speak again.

  “Reflecting back, there was one time I remember feeling quiet in space. We were out on a spacewalk and were asked to wait for the night pass to go through.” (The night pass is the forty-five minutes of its ninety-minute orbit when the spacecraft is on the dark side of the planet.) While they were waiting, the chatter from Houston died down, then cut out altogether. “So we were just hanging out there, quiet, just hearing ourselves breathe out there at the end of the station,” Williams continued. “And it was like putting on a pair of glasses … Everything, all at once so clear, like after a wonderful rainstorm … You could see the stars really bright. You could see the depth of space.”

  In that brief spell of silence, Williams faced the brilliant, untethered magnitude of our universe.

  Henry David Thoreau writes in his account of a voyage he took on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that all sounds are, ultimately, servants and purveyors of silence. As he rows through the quiet of night, the splash and trickle from his oars lead his gaze upward: “the valleys echoed the sound to the stars.” Sounds, he declares, are but a “faint utterance” of silence, “and then only agreeable to our auditory nerves when they contrast themselves with and relieve the former.”

  This idea of a nourishing contrast works two ways. Just as certain sounds can throw the silence enfolding us into high relief, silences mold sound. In another expedition I made near the outset of my journey, this time to a laboratory, I saw how the current of silence flowing beneath our utterances enables us to segment what we hear into meaningful speech.

  Dr. Mario Svirsky is a professor of hearing science in the Department of Otolaryngology at New York University Langone Medical Center. Given his profession, it’s impossible not to notice the handsome Svirsky’s enormous Vulcan ears, which he’s chosen to highlight by piercing their lobes with gleaming hoops that shine like rings of Saturn. I had asked Svirsky to explain the process of sound filtering. I wanted to understand how we are able to pick out the voice we want to listen to in a room crowded with other speakers.

  He turned to his computer screen. “Here, I can show you,” he said. “Let’s make a sound.” He spoke into a microphone attached to the computer. “Hello. Hello. Hello.” As he spoke, multicolored jagged lines, representing all the different frequencies and temporal modulations of his speech, danced out across the screen.

  “You see how there are lots of little peaks—clusters of activity—and then there are long, almost flat lines,” he continued. “Those long lines are the areas where sound has windows—spaces of relative silence; spaces of lower energy. It’s when the windows line up that we’re able to pick out a single voice if more than one person is speaking.”

  I stared for a long time at the image of Svirsky’s analyzed speech wave. The idea that even when we’re talking there is silence embedded in our words seemed marvelous to me. When we make sounds, it’s often the silent falls built into those sounds that enable them to function as signals of communication rather than noise. Or at least that’s what’s supposed to happen. Svirsky indicated one of the bright clumps of sharp points on his screen and resumed talking. “At the places where the energy peaks overlap, it will obviously be hardest to make out what any voice is saying.” He shrugged. “It’s the windows of silence in our speech that may be in danger today with the rise of ambient noise.”

  The roots of our English term “silence” sink down through the language in multiple directions. Among the word’s antecedents is the Gothic verb anasilan, a word that denotes the wind dying down, and the Latin dēsinere, a word meaning “stop.” Both of these etymologies suggest the way that silence is bound up with the idea of interrupted action. The pursuit of silence, likewise, is dissimilar from most other pursuits in that it generally begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will an
d vision on the world. Not only is it about standing still; with rare exceptions, the pursuit of silence seems initially to involve a step backward from the tussle of life. The different stories that first drove home to me what the engagement with silence could bring were centered on a kind of listening that only occurs after a break in the circuit of busyness. But it’s as though, as a culture, we’ve learned to “mind the gaps” so well that they’ve all but disappeared. We live in an age of incessancy, under the banner of the already heard and forgotten.

  Part of what makes snowfall in a city magical is the way that muted sound and the sight of buildings and cars draped in whiteness go together. If we’re not too worried about missing appointments, we feel the excitement of moving into a new place where none of the old clutter and racket of our lives has yet arrived. We might think of sound, by way of contrast, as a force that stitches us in time and space. We twist when we hear the sound of our name. We wake to the alarm, the baby’s cry, the whiny grind of a garbage truck. Bells, gongs, whistles, drums, horns, and guns are “sounded” to announce the hour of the day and to launch significant events. A painter friend of mine once told me that he thought of sound as an usher for the here and now. When he was a small child, Adam suffered an illness that left him profoundly deaf for several months. His memories of that time are vivid and not, he insists, at all negative. Indeed, they opened a world in which the images he saw could be woven together with much greater freedom and originality than he’d ever known. The experience was powerful enough that it helped steer him toward his lifelong immersion in the visual arts. “Sound imposes a narrative on you,” he said, “and it’s always someone else’s narrative. My experience of silence was like being awake inside a dream I could direct.”

  While the extremity of Adam’s experience might appeal to only the most dedicated pursuers of silence, the larger idea of silence as a break, a rest, a road to reflection, renewal, and personal growth is one that resonates with many people. And beyond the many individual stories I heard that testified to this potential of silence, there are increasing hints from the world of neuroscience that support the notion of silence as a fertile pause. Recent studies using fMRI technology have shown that the brains of people who practice silent meditation appear to work more efficiently than the brains of people who do not. This may have something to do with ways in which silence enhances our powers of attention, subtracting auditory distractions that dissipate our mental energy. Neuroscientists at Stanford University have demonstrated that when we listen to music it is the silent intervals in what we hear that trigger the most intense, positive brain activity. In part, this reflects the way our brains are always searching for closure. When we confront silence, the mind reaches outward.