A Book of Silence

It is salutary to recall just how modern a concept this is: until the railway network spread out across Britain, with its need for timetables, there was no ‘accurate national time’

I found it harder and harder to maintain a sense of time passing. I ceased to have a ‘normal’ sense of how long I had been doing something or why I might continue or stop. This did not feel like absent-mindedness and was probably exaggerated because of the amount of the day that was dark, but it did make me realise just how clock-obsessed we have all become, marking our days ritually and shaken by anxiety, like Alice’s White Rabbit, if we ‘lose’ time

I was quite shocked to find how quickly and easily I abandoned many of the daily activities I’d assumed were ‘natural’ or necessary, like washing, or brushing my hair, for example

‘It is time to realise that a passionately held intellectual conviction is passionate.’

I did not want peace and quiet; I wanted to be ‘wholly a flame’. It is not chance that the words ‘whole’, ‘healthy’ and ‘holy’ are all derived from the same root. I incline to excess.

Perhaps it is a real, separate, actual thing, an ontological category of its own: not a lack of language but other than, different from, language; not an absence of sound but the presence of something which is not sound.

In terms of shaping a silent life this image raises some interesting questions – is the silence in the hearing or the speaking? If I keep a journal, say, with no intention of ‘transmitting’ its content to anyone ever, is that a more silent activity than writing this book in the hope that you will read it and hear what I have to say? Is writing, or even reading, which use language but not noise, ‘silent’ in any case?

We have reached a point in contemporary Western culture where we believe that too much silence is either ‘mad’ (depressive, escapist, weird) or ‘bad’ (selfish, antisocial)

In our noise-obsessed culture it is very easy to forget just how many of the major physical forces on which we depend are silent – gravity, electricity, light, tides, the unseen and unheard spinning of the whole cosmos

We romanticise silence on the one hand and on the other feel that it is terrifying