Encounters with Silence: A Kind of HushBy Jane Holtz Kay The cell phone wielders chatter on the subway and the cars honk on the sidewalk. The drills attack the street below, the planes above, and I reel from the scarcity of stillness in our lives. Has silence gone missing, I wonder. A generation-plus after the first Earth Day hallowed the planet's sacred space, and where is the silence in our encounters, or even our vocabulary? Dubious adjectives most often proceed "silence." There is oppressive silence, awkward silence. Uneasy... stilted... anxious... nervous... apprehensive... silence. A telling thing, these pairings, more like silence-be-damned words than the peace of a genuine encounter with soundless space, that gentle, tender noun of "silence." The quiet we seek for retreat-- some lingering island of seclusion, some hiker's peak --is more often recalled in its absence than in its presence. When was the last time you witnessed a joyful silence, a rapturous silence? When have you heard some raconteur relay a congenial encounter with silence. Rarely, I suspect, safe for the fossilized "companionable silence" of, say, Jane Austin. More often the word was evoked by some prim, testy, third-grade teaching uttering: "silence is golden" in my youth.
So it is that I mourn and envy those who choose or happen upon encounters with silence on vacation or enjoy the aloneness of "life not crowded upon by life," as Edward Abbey soliloquized in A Desert Solitaire. I am even jealous of those at the further end of the climate spectrum who find a chilly space of silenceŠ still as ice in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, And, yet, silence is there for the hearing. A seeker of stillness, I find approximations and tranquil encounters with silence, here and there--on the rocks outside a vacation visit to an island in Casco Bay, on the porch of a Brewster cottage overlooking a Cape Cod pondŠwhere the visual stillness of the water and the absence of frolicking youngsters accentuates the peace of dusk; on the steamy August rooftop when the neighborhood has been muted by the departure of its residents and the harsh steamy sidewalk is seared into silence; in Olmsted and other urban parks with their quiet, greenswards and manufactured urban green peace. In winter, too, in the first snow fall blanketing my brick street and on days when the snow is too deep to invite snow blowers or trespassers, there is an unexpected quietude of rowdy city life that calls up Robert Frost's surprise at finding "A Patch of Old Snow": There's a patch of old snow in a corner It is speckled with grime as if My rather conventional "how-do-you-do's" with silence go beyond the externals of New England life and are found in other, less settled places as well-in the pop lyrics of "Lovers in Love," who are surrounded by a "kind of hush all over the world," or, at the intellectual extreme, in the totally inaudible "music of the spheres" evoked by German astronomers Johanness Kepler. I sometimes pine for silence while looking for the comradery that rarely accompanies it. I like to think that once, in a less hustling century, I could have shared Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, untouched, silent and complete." I imagine this as silence at its most crystalline, as frozen as the landscape where, says Lopez, "it is very lonely, yet the absence of all human traces gives you the feeling that you understand this land and can take your place in it." But, in truth, I doubt that I would really have the fortitude to feel at home for long in "artikos," his pristine rendering of the North Pole. "In a world of silence, all becomes sign," Lopez continues; "images of ducks above whose feathers floated to earth as a kind of hoarfrost that built up like a veining of feathers on a ship's rig." Yet, in the end this extreme encounter with the deepest kind of silence sounds piercing to the seeking soul-- more a cacophony of images than true stillness. Silence can make some folks uneasy, to be sure. Absent the clatter of his beloved urban life, a young man I knew grew restless in the muted Berkshire Hills; for him, the roar of the freeway, the thrill of the crowd was pacifier. For others, sound wafting through silence can make loneliness more profound. For me, it works otherwise. I remember the blacker-than- black cloak of a sky whose stars sparked an even more forlorn sense of solitude in an isolated farmhouse in Prairie Crossing, Illinois, until a passing train whistle pierced the lonely night and became my companion. Some two decades ago, Beacon Press published eight books by "Victorian women travelers," a formidable lot of sojourners who visited Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys, as Amelia Edwards, one of this crew of called her travels through the Dolomites. Far more formidable than my wimpish meanderings after silence, this tribe of nineteenth-century women writers penetrated the quiet of wilderness beyond our ken in distant vistas. A century ago, they braved the unknown posts and strange environs of an unsettled planet. Not long ago, I undertook to leaf through their writings and follow their roamings into that void of the unknown. How brave they were to broach encounters with so fierce a stillness. In a world of laced bodices and full skirts, and even stiffer mores, in a man's world of lands still unexplored, theirs was no vacation retreat--scant possibility of comfort or companionship in that merciless, unknown turf. Uncharted in 1872, these nearly impassable lands lacked maps and paths to follow, and foreign tongues must have made for mute encounters and added mystery-a silence of incomprehension. I envy the silence of distance and strangeness these women encountered; no satellites in the sky, no buzzing planes no cell phone-wielding, chattering hikers. Far from the staples of our century, Amelia Edwards could enjoy a muted sky-high "view looking down on the leaning tower of Pisa or climbing unknown mountains near Contina." As enthralled by the silence in which she was enveloped as by the outline of this mysterious mountain, Amelia sighed ecstatically in her prose. And a reader from today's wired world sighs as well-at the "hush all over the world" that we have lost. This article appeared in Appalachia magazine, winter/spring 2005.
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Whatever happened to silence in this raucous, media-satiated nation where even John Wayne, the cinematic Quiet American himself, was scarcely a master of the art? These, to be sure, are the surly thoughts of a silence seeker, distraught by the back-up beep of construction trucks and the jackhammers that proclaim spring fixup. But even in the supposed still of winter, there is always a buzz inside--the heat humming from the electric furnace, punctuated by the click of the thermostat modulating the imperfect temperature; the refrigerator upping its audio to announce that it is shooting cold into the white box.