In Pursuit of Silence Read online

  Other intriguing possibilities for how silence might benefit us on a systemic level suggest affinities between certain stages of sleep and silence. With all the lingering mysteries surrounding sleep, we now have abundant clinical evidence that the suspension of our conscious activity brought about by sleep is essential for our health. Silence, which interrupts the general noise of our day-to-day lives, may carry some of the replenishing power we take from the full rest of sleep. If we can’t find a place to lie down in the midst of our working days, we may still reap some of sleep’s benefits by finding a relatively quiet space in which to take a sound break.

  There are numerous personal stories and considerable scientific evidence suggesting that silence can exert a positive influence on our individual lives and our relationship to the world. Nearly everyone I raised the subject with went into rhapsodies about how much they loved quiet, while lamenting the fact they did not have more of it to recharge their minds, bodies, and spirits. But if everyone values silence so highly, why is there so little of it? Why, I wondered, does there appear to be a growing consensus about the benefits of silence at the same time as the world seems, on so many fronts, to be getting noisier?

  Many people feel victimized by the loud noises besieging them from all sides. Traffic noise—road, air, and marine—undoubtedly represents a problem that extends beyond individual control. The same could be said about construction noise, heavy industry, and the sound of power generators. The stress of these forms of noise can be deadly, especially in the developing world, where loud generators are everywhere, and where some experts now suggest that 45,000 fatal heart attacks per year may be attributable to noise-related cardiovascular strain. But while much more can and must be done to reduce the impact of these macroscale sound offenders, they are not the whole story. Indeed, the biggest, most obnoxious noisemakers may actually be blocking a subtler, perhaps even deeper noise problem than that presented by our perpetually jammed highways.

  When I first began to speak with audiologists, cochlear implant surgeons, and neuroscientists about the benefits of silence, they were, if anything, even more worked up about the risks presented by what they saw as our increasingly loud world than the nonprofessionals had been. A study released by the Johns Hopkins University in July 2008 reported that the incidence of hearing loss in the United States is approaching epidemic proportions. According to this study, a staggering one in three Americans now suffers some degree of hearing impairment—much of it noise induced. However, the doctors and scientists I spoke with did not talk about jackhammers and jets, or about highways and factories. Rather, the experts spoke to me about personal sound devices. Tom Roland, director of NYU Medical Center’s Department of Cochlear Implants, told me, “Anytime you can hear someone else’s music leaking through their headphones or earbuds, that person is causing themselves hearing damage.” Hearing specialists also brought up cell phones and electronic toys. You can buy a Hannah Montana in Concert Collection Doll that reaches 103 decibels, and a Tickle Me Elmo that hits a rocking 100 decibels—acoustically comparable to tick ling a snowmobile. Computer games are often cranked higher still. Neuroscientists who work on the problem of hearing loss didn’t talk to me about noise in terms of single jolts of sound but rather about duration of exposure to adult and children’s gadgetry, like air conditioners and white-noise machines, that were turned on by the same people who were losing their hearing. The professionals brought up the hazards of what might have been considered by an earlier generation to be luxury noise: the sounds we choose to surround ourselves with, the discretionary clamor that shields us from the unsought tumult beyond.

  The special character of the new noisiness was driven home to me one summer weekend when I rode around Washington, D.C., with an officer from the Metropolitan Police to find out how the force responds to noise complaints. John Spencer was a large, unassuming, talkative man who’d grown up in high-crime neighborhoods of the city, worked all his life for the District police, and had retained few illusions about human nature or the capacities of the law to muzzle it.

  The first noise complaint arrived around one in the morning and took us down a dark, narrow street. Officer Spencer slowed the pace of his cruiser to a crawl. He turned off the blasting air conditioner, since it was impossible to hear anything outside the vehicle with the conditioner on full power the way he liked it. Still, nothing was audible. Officer Spencer pushed a button and cracked the window half an inch. He peered up at the houses, literally cocking his ear at one point and then shaking his head. At the end of the street he shrugged, rolled the window back up, and we continued on our leisurely orbit of the neighborhood. A little while later, we drove down a street full of bars with pounding music and mobs of people whooping on the sidewalk, shoving and spilling onto the streets. I looked at Officer Spencer expectantly. He shrugged again. As far as the police were concerned, if there were no complaints, there was no noise.

  When the bars at last shut, we were called to intervene with a disorderly trio of plastered young women hollering outside a closed restaurant. After this, a call alerted us to a boom box set up on a folding lawn chair on a small patch of grass in front of a housing complex. But it wasn’t playing very loudly, and there was no one around to tell to turn it down. We drove on. Although it was the Friday before July Fourth—a night that my liaison officer with the force had told me was a night of surefire noise—it seemed that, at least in the ears of the law, this was to be a silent night. Every so often the car radio crackled with the dispatcher reporting a fight somewhere. Officer Spencer would shake his head and tell me that the complaint was not in our precinct. When the dispatcher would repeat the call, he would shake his head again and repeat, with a harassed edge to his voice, that the problem belonged to another patrol.

  All of a sudden, at about three in the morning, Officer Spencer turned to me and said, “You know, I’ll tell you something. The majority of domestic disputes we get called into these days are actually noise complaints.” What did he mean? I asked. “You go into these houses where the couple, or the roommate, or the whole family is fighting and yelling and you’ve got the television blaring so you can’t think, and a radio on top of that, and somebody got home from work who wants to relax or to sleep, and it’s just obvious what they’re actually fighting about. They’re fighting about the noise. They don’t know it, but that’s the problem. They’ve just got everything on at once. And so the first thing I’ll say to them is, ‘You know what, don’t even tell me what you think you’re fighting about! First, turn down the music. Switch off the game station. Turn down the television.’ Then I just let them sit there for a minute, and I say to them, ‘Now that feels different, doesn’t it? Maybe the real reason you were fighting is how loud it was inside your apartment. Do you still have anything to tell me? Do you?’ Well, you would be amazed how often that’s the end of it.”

  It was the recognition of this new noisiness that made me realize my search would have to be twofold. In order to understand the pursuit of silence, it would be necessary, also, to track the pursuit of noise. The two were bound together—each, in its own way, was reactive. Something seems to have made us as a society fall in love with noise. It’s a torrid, choppy affair that we are often in denial about, or tend to laugh off as a bass-heavy, summer’s night fling. But it seems to have a surprisingly tenacious hold on us, and if we are ever going to begin making a serious investment in the cultivation of silence, we have to understand how we became so entangled with noise. We have to explore what silence has to offer, and the different factors that stimulated us to become so loud, as two halves of a single problem.

  The two pursuits took me many places: from neurobiology laboratories to Zen gardens, shopping malls, and conventions of soundproofers; from a Trappist monastery to a manufacturer of noise-measurement instruments, and an extreme car-audio competition. Each place I traveled added another layer to the story, and I came, at the end, to understand the difficulty of pursuing silence—and the reason
s why this pursuit has become more vital than ever before. I hope that what I learned opens other lines of thought about what a societal investment in silence might contribute to our lives, and adds a little awareness about ways we may be hurtling forward in flight from the very silence we profess to cherish.

  Part of the challenge in this project is that, while the pursuit of noise is one we can undertake with supreme confidence of success, nobody really triumphs in pursuit of silence in the strict sense of the word until they cease to exist. The pursuit of silence in this life is fated to be endless and imperfect. This is one reason why the pursuit of silence often turns us deeper and deeper inward. In this spirit, Gene Lushtak, who leads silent Buddhist retreats in the Bay Area, told me a story about Ajahn Chah, the most prominent leader of twentieth-century Thai Buddhism.

  A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in the town outside the monastery were holding a series of festivals in which they sang and danced all night long. When the monks would rise at three thirty in the morning to begin their meditation, the parties from the night before would still be going strong. At last, one morning the young monk cried out to Ajahn Chah, “Venerable One, the noise is interrupting my practice—I can’t meditate with all this noise!” “The noise isn’t bothering you,” Ajahn responded. “You are bothering the noise.” As Lushtak put it to me, “Silence is not a function of what we think of as silence. It’s when my reaction is quiet. What’s silent is my protest against the way things are.”

  This poignant sentiment recurred to me throughout my search. It represents, in fact, the great dilemma behind the advocacy of silence: To effectively promote silence, how does one avoid becoming louder than the sources of noise one is protesting against? If there’s a way out of this conundrum, I believe it involves the kind of acute listening I was introduced to at the outset of my own exploration. Throughout the course of writing this book, I found myself asking what it was that people were trying to hear, and what it was that they were trying to block out. The loudest argument for quiet may be a reflection on what otherwise remains in danger of going unheard.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Listening for the Unknown

  On my second night in the monastery, I heard the silence. I was inside the church: a beautiful, vast chamber of limestone blocks that resemble lumpy oatmeal and were quarried from the Iowan earth by the monks themselves in the mid-nineteenth century. The monks had finished compline, the last of the day’s seven prayer services, and had filed off into the inner recesses of the monastery, where they would observe the Great Silence, speaking to no one until after mass the next morning. The last of the monks to leave had switched off the lights above the choir, and then the light over the lectern. Though the section of visitors’ pews where I sat still had a little illumination, the body of the church was now in total blackness except for the faint flickering of a votive candle suspended high in the distance against the far wall. For the first quarter hour, a few worshippers remained on the benches around me.

  Although I sat very quietly, I found my mind busy and loud. Mostly I was reflecting on the service I had just heard, which Brother Alberic, my gracious liaison to the world of the monastery, had described as a kind of lullaby. Compline is lovely, and I was frustrated that I had not been able to find it more profound. These weren’t my prayers. I yearned only for more quiet. My thoughts were noisy enough that I half expected to see them break out of my skull and begin dancing a musical number up and down the wooden benches.

  Soon the other worshippers departed and I was left alone. For a moment or two, my experience was of literal silence. Then, all at once, there came a ting, a tic, another tic, a tap, and a clang. The sounds came from all around the enormous dark church. They ranged from the verge of inaudibility to the violence of hammer blows; discrete chips of sound and reverberatory gonnngs. Out of nowhere, I was treated to a concert by the sound of heat in the pipes. It was a grand, slightly menacing sound that I had been oblivious to not only during the prayer service but afterward in the din of my mental dithering. And it was worth that long opening pause. The ever-changing sonic punctuation of this empty space—which had first seemed soundless—gave me a tingling sense of elevation. This is it, I told myself. Silence made everything resonate.

  And yet … Later that night when I retreated to my room, and my euphoria had subsided, I wondered why I had been affected so powerfully. Objectively, the only thing that had happened, after all, was that I had heard the metal of the pipes expanding and contracting as they heated and cooled. Why should that experience have made me feel that I was “hearing the silence”? Why did I feel at that lonely hour that I had found what I was looking for when I came to the monastery?

  What brought me to the New Melleray Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa, was the desire to learn from people who had made a lifelong commitment to devout silence. Trappist monks, a branch of the Cistercian order, do not make a vow of total silence, and today there are times when they engage in conversation; but silence is their mother tongue. Saint Benedict, who is credited with founding Western Christian monasticism in the sixth century, most famously at Monte Cassino, southeast of Rome, wrote a document known as the Rule that remains their guide to this day. In the Rule, monks are defined before all else as disciples, and the defining quality of the disciple is “to be silent and listen.” Trappists are among the monks known as “contemplatives.” Their interaction with the world outside the monastery is minimal. Much of their worship is silent. They study in silence. They work almost entirely in silence. They eat primarily in silence. They pass each other in the monastery corridors without speaking. They retire at 8 PM to separate cells and rise at 3:15 AM, when they gather in silence to pray. They avoid idle talk at all times. And even after the morning mass, throughout much of their demanding day, they are discouraged from speaking. Almost everything the Trappist does takes place in silence—is pressed close by its weight, or opens out onto that expanse, depending on how you look at it.

  Monks have, moreover, been at the pursuit for quite some time. Alberic remarked at one point that while it is often said that prostitution is the oldest profession, he believes that monks were around before there were prostitutes. This struck me as unlikely, but it still gave me pause.

  There was a personal stake in this journey as well: I needed a break. I’d had a hectic, noisy winter in the city—medically harrowing, filled with bills, the hassles of insurance claims, technology fiascos, and preschool worries. Plans to visit friends in the country had fallen through several times. I’d tried to go to a Zen retreat in New England that taught the breath-and silence-based meditation practice of vipassana, only to be told at the last moment that although I could come and sit silently with the retreatants, the guesthouse itself was overbooked and I’d have to stay in a bed-and-breakfast in town. The thought of beginning my daily practice over fussy French toast in a dining room packed with antiquers—where tasteful classical music would be piped in to glaze over the gaps in conversation—didn’t conduce to inner quiet. I had to get out of New York. Yet it was hard to arrange anything. Just because we have a nagging sense that silence is good for us doesn’t make it any easier to actually commit to.

  I didn’t think of quiet only as one of those overdue restoratives. Beyond the idea of wanting to learn something about the Trappist path and get away from the noise in my own life, I was hoping to find some truth in the silence of the monastery that I could take back to New York. I’d packed a stack of books and volumes of photocopied pages representing different theological and philosophical traditions—everything from Martin Heidegger and Max Picard to kabbalistic disquisitions, an array of Buddhist tracts, and enough Christian monastic literature to envelop a monk from tonsure to toe. I needed help.

  THE DESERT

  From the air, the Great Plains in winter look like silence. During Advent week, when I made my trip to the monastery, the freeze of the landscape was so extreme that I couldn’t imagine an
ything down below ever vibrating. On the approach to Dubuque, the snow-covered squares of the farms resembled bathroom tiles painted over with primer that had bubbled and cracked. As we descended, the topographical buckling intensified; clumps of frayed brown trees bristled up through the white; little snow-crusted settlements traced ghostly circuit boards. We flew past clusters of red farm buildings with steep, snow-caked roofs. Then we circled 180 degrees, a seam of pale orange-gold suddenly opened across an endless gray horizon, and the plane touched down.

  After we exchanged greetings, the first thing Alberic said was that I was in for some particularly ugly weather, even by Iowa standards. His voice was sad.

  Alberic is a solidly built man a little above average height, in his early fifties. He wears round, dark-framed glasses over dark, shadowed eyes. His black hair is cropped close to the skull, and whenever he is at home he wears a full-length white robe beneath a long black apron with a pointy hood. Alberic “entered the monastery to stay,” as he puts it, in 1984. At the age of twenty-six, he was working as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, spending his free time painting and living a kind of bare-bones bohemian existence. Though he’d grown up with some degree of wealth, mostly in the suburbs of Atlanta, he had never liked “stuff” and had always sought out a life of austerity. Raised a Catholic, and always seeking silence—his mother called him “the little Buddha”—Alberic had given up active involvement in the church long before moving to New York. After several years of work at the museum, mostly on the night watch, he began to sink into a spiritual malaise. Then he learned that his sister was dying of cancer. Three weeks after her death, he was diagnosed with the same disease. “That was my wake-up call, and the beginning of my monastic formation,” Alberic told me. “It took the cancer for me to look in the mirror and ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’”