The Solace of Silence in a clamorous culture

I, like I am sure many people my age, am guilty of having headphones firmly lodged in my ears for most of the day. Whether I am eating, moving from place to place, or doing work, it is almost a guarantee that there will be some kind of music, video, or podcast on in the background to occupy that part of my brain that requires constant auditory stimulation. There are plenty of psychologists far more qualified than I to theorise why we are so ubiquitously dependent on background noise for such run-of-the-mill activities, but I’d guess that part of it is down to staving off boredom, to keep that part of the brain happy that has grown fat on surface-level distraction, and quickly becomes agitated by the terrible introspection and vacuity of silence.

Sometimes, however, for no particularly reason at all, I will elect to forego headphones while eating or doing chores, and simply allow the sounds of the spinning globe to be my only company. The first thing I am struck by is just how silent everything is. I must say now, that I am quite fortunate to live in the countryside, and so my experience would be quite different to one situated in the heart of some bustling metropolis, though I would also dare to suggest that one who has never taken the time to surround themselves with natural quietude would benefit from doing so. If anything, perhaps, it can serve as a reminder that the overwhelming, vitriolic clamour of social media, of yelling, screaming, spittle-flecking voices fighting to be heard over one another, is in fact confined to a very small space in the grand scheme of things, and the rest of the world appears quite unfazed by petty human discord.

This also got me thinking about how so much of our culture endeavours to attack our minds by route of our eardrums. They are perhaps superseded only by our eyeballs as the prime means of capturing our attentions— that oh so vital asset in this day of age, a resource more valuable than anything else. At media’s best, our admirations are earned through moving pieces of music on albums or soundtracks, or thoughtful, respectful and educational discussions on public platforms; at its worst, it seeks to startle the consumer into dumb, dazed submission through loud noises and obnoxious rants.

There are few areas of culture left outside of this struggle to colonise and commodify the human eardrum, and one of those happens to be literature.

Those oh-so-quick-witted of you will immediately think ‘what about audiobooks?’ with a wry grin and self-satisfied pat on the back, but I will stipulate that I am obviously referring only to the printed page. With the exception perhaps of sublime art, reading a great work of literature is the most challenging of the arts, simply because it requires the most effort. There are no visual cues to assist in visualising the scenes, and if illustrations are provided, I often find that they are more of a nuisance than an aid, for they never seem to portray the characters in any way how I imagine them at all. Similarly, there are no audio accompaniments either, to gently elucidate the tone of a character’s voice or the sounds of the land they live in. All that is reliant solely on the writer’s skill at evoking sense through vivid prose, and on the reader’s capacity to utilise their own experience of the world to colour in the blank space between the text. (This also has the entrancing implication that one person’s conceptualisation of, say, Dorian Gray will be ever so slightly unique to anyone else’s who has ever read the novel.)

Reading literature requires effort, for it is an act entirely dependent on the strength of one’s imaginative capacity. It has the potential to evoke far more breathtaking, awe-inspiring, and life-changing scenes within one’s own mind than could ever hope to be displayed on a movie screen— or, if the reader is not in the right mindset, or unwilling to focus, or the work of literature is poorly written, it could fail to conjure any sort of epiphany at all. To successfully envision a novel in your own head is the closest that we can get to dreaming, without the need to surrender our agency to sleep; and unlike dreaming, we can access that transcendental experience whenever we like, as long as a book is nearby. The words on the page could be as simple as Hemingway’s, but if they are positioned in the right order, the spell they can cast is as powerful and as endless as the potential scope for human thought itself.

As such, the sparsity of sensory information that reading provides, when compared to more modern mediums, both insists upon greater ardour from the consumer, but also promises greater reward if they are prepared to put in the effort. Reading, at least for me, also demands silence as well— I am always in envy of those who are able to bury themselves in a book whilst chaos rages around them, but I require relative peace to properly invest myself in prose or poetry. When I write fiction, I often find that it helps me to picture a scene by playing a piece of (instrumental) music that evokes the same atmosphere as that which I am attempting to write— a sombre piece for nightfall, a dramatic piece for action, a mysterious piece for intrigue, and so on. I could not possibly imagine that this would help when reading, much less if I was also listening to anything that contained actual spoken words. Perhaps this is related to what I wrote earlier, about my reliance on headphones to occupy that needy part of the brain that gorges on stimulation; it is also easily distracted, preferring mindless entertainment to hard graft, and so will flit off absently at a moment’s notice. The more complex the piece of writing, the more demanding it is on the brain, and so one cannot afford to allow a few truant cells of grey matter to shirk their labour.

Thank you for reading,