Care of the Soul: My Quest for Silence

Stillness and quiet are big things for me. If I had the power, I’d ban cars and trucks that make over a certain measurable amount of noise. I’d make quiet hospitals and restaurants, and I wouldn’t allow loud motorboats on any lake or pond smaller than the Atlantic Ocean. I think that the amount and quality of noise in our world are related to the anxiety characteristic of our age, and I understand why monks and nuns around the world create a lifestyle that protects their silence.

But we often misunderstand what quiet means. It doesn’t mean the absence of sound. Some sounds foster silence, like the Gregorian chant that I sang and directed when I lived in a religious order. Some sounds in nature add to the quiet rather than take away from it. Like many people, I love the throaty sound of a train whistle at a distance. I don’t suppose the people who live in the town through which the train is running care for it much.

The effect of hearing a waterfall cascading in the woods is similar to catching a glimpse of a sunset at the just the right moment. It’s captivating. It captures you and takes you to a refreshing place that you rarely find in the rush of daily life.

We might think of this as a form of synesthesia: where one sensory experience evokes an entirely different one. Listen to Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite and try not to picture beautiful scenery. Eat a perfect square of dark chocolate and don’t say anything about velvet. The same is true of sound and quiet. A certain painting may be quieter than an empty room and another as noisy as Times Square.

We can use this property of aesthetics to give our world the peace and quiet our souls need. We could make the most of architectural quiet — empty corners, lofted ceilings, muted colors — this last one a good expression of synesthesia. We could avoid placing noisy transportation near living spaces. We could give more attention to the noise that machines make.

Every morning I walk my dog for about two miles on the side of a road that goes through thick woods, and cars and trucks, all of them suffering mysteriously from rusted tailpipes and detached mufflers, zip past us at twice the speed limit. My dog doesn’t talk, so we are dedicated to silence on our walk. I consider it a monastic type of meditation, and I’m serious about that. But the noise of the vehicles, driven by people who probably wouldn’t understand why I’d be writing an essay as strange as this, assaults us. “Assault” is the best word I can think of.

Although I complain about such noise, I also am guilty of making it. People raise their fists at me when I drive past in my squat, high-mileage, putt-putting used roadster.

We live by a philosophy that hasn’t seen the connection between noise and immorality, illness, and existential angst. Silence resides in our vast unconscious. We are not aware yet of its value and purpose.
Monks know all about the benefits of silence, but then, in their archaic simplicity, they always have been ahead of the times. They are dedicated to a spiritual life, not to spirituality. For them, silence means not talking from evening to late morning. It means making a home in which there are spaces where no one talks. It means playing music sometimes and putting up paintings and making a little garden and baking and eating in a way that fosters quiet rather than shatters it.

It’s interesting that we use the word “shatter” with regard to breaking silence, as though it were fragile glass. Synesthesia again. Silence is very fragile. It takes just a little noise, literal or metaphoric, to annihilate it in a second. Some automobiles make a lovely quiet sound, but most are silence-shatterers. Maybe I should get a job at an automaker (I’m from Detroit, anyway) and spend my days inventing quiet cars.

Which reminds me of “quiet” cars on trains. By some magic — there is probably a railroad CEO somewhere who is a former monk — in some places you can get on a train and sit in the “quiet car,” where cell phones are prohibited and loud conversations discouraged. The conductors tend to enforce these rules, and the ride can be beatific.

Do you see how this job of mine in the auto industry would be part of my spiritual life, and I’d be making a contribution to the spiritual life of our society?

Thomas Moore’s new book is A Life’s Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do (Random House, February 2008). See careofthesoul.net.