A Book of Silence (22 page)

If the volume of ambient sound increased in the nineteenth century because of urbanisation and industrialisation, in the twentieth century yet more noise arose as a side effect of technology, and indeed of increasing prosperity. Horses make more noise than feet; cars and trains make more noise than horses; and aeroplanes make more noise than any of these. Almost every labour-saving device – vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, liquidisers, central heating and air conditioning, computers, even hair dryers – makes more noise than the manual version of the task that it replaced. Radios, stereo sound systems and television – along with other recreational devices – also add volume. Our homes may be more private than they were but they are not quieter. Above all, communication technology has, in increasing human contact, decreased the amount of silence around us. The ubiquitous mobile phone (117 per cent of the population of the UK own one) is the latest form of instant communication.

In the Middle Ages Christian scholastics argued that the devil’s basic strategy was to bring human beings to a point where they are never alone with their God, nor ever attentively face to face with another human being. In the Christian tradition Satan has always been hampered by her inability to create anything new – she lacks both imagination and artistry. The mobile phone, then, seems to me to represent a major breakthrough for the powers of hell – it is a new thing, which allows the devil to take a significant step forward in her grand design. With a mobile, a person is never alone and is never entirely attentive to someone else. What is entirely brilliant about it from the demonic perspective is that so many people
have been persuaded that this is not something pleasurable (a free choice) but something necessary. Of course, I am fully aware that mobile phones have radically improved working conditions for some people – but oddly enough this is used in peculiar ways. Doctors, for example, have told me how much easier a mobile makes their house calls, without apparently noticing that at the very moment this ease was granted them they gave up making house calls at all.

In
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis, the Christian apologist now best known for his children’s books about Narnia, has his devil write:

This ambition seems very nearly to have been achieved. I believe it has psychological consequences. In 1985 Ernest Gellner, the philosopher and sociologist, commented, ‘Our environment is now made up basically of our relationships with others.’
¹⁴
And in
The
School for Genius
Anthony Storr developed this notion:

This idea, that we feel ourselves to be happy and fulfilled only when we are interacting with other people, creates a dissonance with the equally popular mythology that stresses individual autonomy and personal ‘rights’. If I need interpersonal relationships and I have a right to what I need, it is obviously very difficult to have relationships of genuine self-giving or even of equality. However, this problem is not addressed, is indeed concealed, within popular culture. The consequence of this, almost inevitably, is the creation of an increasing number of lightweight relationships – relationships that appear to connect people, but are not vulnerable to the requirements of love, and therefore tend to lack endurance and discipline. The overstimulation, of which noise is a major factor, of modern society has an addictive quality – the more stimulation and novelty you get, the more you feel you need.

Incessant noise covers up the thinness of relationships as well as making silence appear dangerous and threatening. The nervous chatter that is produced to cover over even brief periods of silence within a group is one manifestation of this. A more alarming one is the move away from honouring disaster by silence to celebrating the event with applause. What on earth is going on when groups of people gather to cheer and clap as a response to sudden or shocking deaths, as a crowd of strangers did outside Liverpool Cathedral at Rhys Jones’s funeral? It is a serious tragedy that an eleven-year-old should be shot dead on the street. What are we celebrating; why are we not silenced?

Noisy applause replacing silence as a way of marking these sorts of events is, moreover, a break with a very ancient tradition and one that seems to occur in a wide range of cultures. The traditional response to awe, positive or negative, has been silence. In the Apocalypse the whole of heaven falls silent ‘for one little hour’ before the mystical Lamb can ‘break the seal’ which will bring on the judgement day.
¹⁶
This idea seems to have been derived from the poetry of the psalms – ‘The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silent before him,’ or, ‘Be silent all flesh before the Lord; for he has roused himself from his holy
dwelling’ – and from classical Greek custom. Philip Howard outlined the history:

Awestruck and dumbstruck (struck dumb, and dumbfounded are similar terms) are almost synonymous.

Oddly, in the face of the increasing noise, the two-minute silence on Remembrance Sunday is one of the very few remaining acts of social ritual that commands wide support in Britain, and this annual ceremony seems to be increasingly observed, with about 75 per cent of the population participating.

The organised minutes of public silence in honour of the war dead and more recently of other groups has a complicated history, with various different countries and individuals claiming to have invented it. France was probably the first country to have a national annual period of silence after the First World War, although in 1912 large parts of the USA kept a ceremonial silence to mourn the sinking of the
Titanic
and the
Maine
, while the Portuguese Senate kept a ten-minute silence on the death of Rio Branco – the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Brazil. The British silence, originally on Armistice Day and subsequently on the Sunday nearest to 11 November, began in 1919 after a formal appeal by George V, through the pages of
The Times
. The foreign ministers of the EU asked for a three-minute silence following the destruction of the Twin Towers, a curious example of a war memorial occurring before a war. I cannot help but feel that such a silence is both more appropriate and more meaningful than inevitably artificial cheering.

Silence, even as an expression of awe, is becoming uncomfortable. We are asked to be silent less and less; churches and public libraries are no longer regarded as places where silence is appropriate, or even more simply polite. Even the acceptable length of silence in radio programmes is being reduced. Silence is not experienced as refreshing or as assisting concentration, but as threatening and disturbing.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that in 1994 the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act undermined a very specific silence: the right of a person accused of a crime not to answer questions, nor to have prejudicial inference drawn from such a silence. Although this right was only codified in statute law in 1912, it is a very ancient Common Law provision – probably emerging from the seventeenth-century protests against the Star Chamber and High Commissions, which could compel (by torture) the accused to answer questions without telling them what they had been charged with. This right to silence is based on a number of legal principles. People were held to have a ‘natural duty’ of self-preservation and therefore could not be ‘bound to accuse themselves’. In law people must be treated as innocent until proven guilty; it is not their job, as it were, to demonstrate their innocence – it is the prosecution’s duty to prove their guilt. Such ideas must have been connected to, or at least have drawn force from, the fact that at his trial Jesus declined to answer questions: ‘he was silent and gave no answer’.
¹⁸
The contemporary erosion of this right suggests to me that, consciously or unconsciously, silence is perceived as sinister, dishonest and contemptuous. It must not be permitted or encouraged.

Yet we know historically and emotionally that silence as resistance can have a bone-shaking power – as anyone who has had to deal with a sulking teenager does not need telling. Silent protest, the freedom not to speak, to challenge the supposedly rational speakers, to give no ground, to refuse to enter the arena, is not simply negative; it is an occupation of space with a symbolic and powerful meaning. The right to freedom of expression – the right
to speak out and be heard – loses meaning if it separates itself too far from the parallel right to be silent.

Nonetheless, despite the rising tide of noise, there are some real pools of silence embedded even in the noisiest places and I began to search them out and test them, starting with what was in easy reach of Weardale. One of the most obvious places to begin was with religiously inspired silences.

It was by lucky chance that there was a Zen monastery less than twenty miles from Weatherhill and by an even luckier chance that I discovered this. I will always think of Throstlehole with gratitude as well as affection; the monks were extraordinarily generous and hospitable, open to explaining their own faith tradition, while never probing into mine, just offering the resources of their evening meditation whenever I wanted to come and sit with them.

Zen is a form of Buddhism which emerged during the transmission of Buddhist teaching from India to China, although its principal development was in Japan and Korea. Part of Zen philosophy is that it is impossible to describe Zen; but individuals have tried. In the early twelfth century a seminal work,
Ts’u-
t’ing
shih-yuan
, attributed this description of Zen to the fifth-century master, Bodhidharma:

In
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas Hofstadter attempts a more modern description:

If words and truth are incompatible then you are better off not even trying to articulate your understanding of truth in language, but to explore other less logical
*
routes to realisation. The concept that everything is absolutely one allowed Zen to seek out many paths to enlightenment and this may account for its enormous cultural impact, since architecture, and especially landscape gardening, together with calligraphy and painting and even ‘flower arranging’,
ikebana
, are seen as valid ways of seeking an end to all dualities. But at the heart of Zen practice is a rigorously disciplined method of meditation,
zazen
(derived from the Japanese words for ‘sitting’ and ‘absorption’).

It was into this daily practice that the monks at Throstlehole made me so welcome: I would go to their evening
zazen
, which was entirely silent, and their silence was extraordinarily potent, rich. Whenever I was there, there were at least forty people present. Everyone sits facing the wall (or as it happens rows of lockers, because the
dojo
, or meditation hall, is also the communal dormitory for the novices who sleep on the floor. So other people are there, but because you do not see or hear them, they are present in a rather strange way. Each person brings their own
zafu
(cushion) into
zazen
with them, so there is nothing redundant or cluttered. The
dojo
is vast and airy, high-roofed, so it feels spacious even when there are a lot of people in it. The monastery is rural, isolated, surrounded first by its own garden and beyond that by the Cumbrian hill country – there is a silent ambience. Everything external is set up for good silence. Within the monastery itself there was always a strong flow of energy, silent energy; people seemed purposeful and engaged without ever seeming
busy
. The long hours of silent meditation flowed out into a gentle orderliness. As a neophyte silence practitioner I cannot say how supportive and enriching and moving I found this embracing, generous silence, and how much it has informed and shaped my own, profoundly Christian practice: at the most superficial level I now meditate sitting on the round black Buddhist
zafu
*