In Pursuit of Silence (3 page)

When I first began to speak with audiologists, cochlear implant surgeons, and neuroscientists about the benefits of silence, they were, if anything, even more worked up about the risks presented by what they saw as our increasingly loud world than the nonprofessionals had been.
A study released by the Johns Hopkins University
in July 2008 reported that the incidence of hearing loss in the United States is approaching epidemic proportions. According to this study, a staggering one in three Americans now suffers some degree of hearing impairment—much of it noise induced. However, the doctors and scientists I spoke with did not talk about jackhammers and jets, or about highways and factories. Rather, the experts spoke to me about
personal sound devices. Tom Roland, director of NYU Medical Center’s Department of Cochlear Implants, told me,
“Anytime you can hear
someone else’s music leaking through their headphones or earbuds, that person is causing themselves hearing damage.” Hearing specialists also brought up cell phones and electronic toys.
You can buy a Hannah Montana
in Concert Collection Doll that reaches 103 decibels, and a Tickle Me Elmo that hits a rocking 100 decibels—acoustically comparable to tick ling a snowmobile. Computer games are often cranked higher still. Neuroscientists who work on the problem of hearing loss didn’t talk to me about noise in terms of single jolts of sound but rather about duration of exposure to adult and children’s gadgetry, like air conditioners and white-noise machines, that were turned on by the same people who were losing their hearing. The professionals brought up the hazards of what might have been considered by an earlier generation to be luxury noise: the sounds we choose to surround ourselves with, the discretionary clamor that shields us from the unsought tumult beyond.

The special character of the new noisiness was driven home to me
one summer weekend
when I rode around Washington, D.C., with an officer from the Metropolitan Police to find out how the force responds to noise complaints. John Spencer was a large, unassuming, talkative man who’d grown up in high-crime neighborhoods of the city, worked all his life for the District police, and had retained few illusions about human nature or the capacities of the law to muzzle it.

The first noise complaint arrived around one in the morning and took us down a dark, narrow street. Officer Spencer slowed the pace of his cruiser to a crawl. He turned off the blasting air
conditioner, since it was impossible to hear anything outside the vehicle with the conditioner on full power the way he liked it. Still, nothing was audible. Officer Spencer pushed a button and cracked the window half an inch. He peered up at the houses, literally cocking his ear at one point and then shaking his head. At the end of the street he shrugged, rolled the window back up, and we continued on our leisurely orbit of the neighborhood. A little while later, we drove down a street full of bars with pounding music and mobs of people whooping on the sidewalk, shoving and spilling onto the streets. I looked at Officer Spencer expectantly. He shrugged again. As far as the police were concerned, if there were no complaints, there was no noise.

When the bars at last shut, we were called to intervene with a disorderly trio of plastered young women hollering outside a closed restaurant. After this, a call alerted us to a boom box set up on a folding lawn chair on a small patch of grass in front of a housing complex. But it wasn’t playing very loudly, and there was no one around to tell to turn it down. We drove on. Although it was the Friday before July Fourth—a night that my liaison officer with the force had told me was a night of surefire noise—it seemed that, at least in the ears of the law, this was to be a silent night. Every so often the car radio crackled with the dispatcher reporting a fight somewhere. Officer Spencer would shake his head and tell me that the complaint was not in our precinct. When the dispatcher would repeat the call, he would shake his head again and repeat, with a harassed edge to his voice, that the problem belonged to another patrol.

All of a sudden, at about three in the morning, Officer Spencer turned to me and said, “You know, I’ll tell you something.
The majority of domestic disputes we get called into these days are actually noise complaints.” What did he mean? I asked. “You go into these houses where the couple, or the roommate, or the whole family is fighting and yelling and you’ve got the television blaring so you can’t think, and a radio on top of that, and somebody got home from work who wants to relax or to sleep, and it’s just obvious what they’re actually fighting about. They’re fighting about the noise. They don’t know it, but that’s the problem. They’ve just got everything on at once. And so the first thing I’ll say to them is, ‘You know what, don’t even tell me what you think you’re fighting about! First, turn down the music. Switch off the game station. Turn down the television.’ Then I just let them sit there for a minute, and I say to them, ‘Now that feels different, doesn’t it? Maybe the real reason you were fighting is how
loud
it was inside your apartment. Do you still have anything to tell me? Do you?’ Well, you would be amazed how often that’s the end of it.”

It was the recognition of this new noisiness that made me realize my search would have to be twofold. In order to understand the pursuit of silence, it would be necessary, also, to track the pursuit of noise. The two were bound together—each, in its own way, was reactive. Something seems to have made us as a society fall in love with noise. It’s a torrid, choppy affair that we are often in denial about, or tend to laugh off as a bass-heavy, summer’s night fling. But it seems to have a surprisingly tenacious hold on us, and if we are ever going to begin making a serious investment in the cultivation of silence, we have to understand how we became
so entangled with noise. We have to explore what silence has to offer, and the different factors that stimulated us to become so loud, as two halves of a single problem.

The two pursuits took me many places: from neurobiology laboratories to Zen gardens, shopping malls, and conventions of soundproofers; from a Trappist monastery to a manufacturer of noise-measurement instruments, and an extreme car-audio competition. Each place I traveled added another layer to the story, and I came, at the end, to understand the difficulty of pursuing silence—and the reasons why this pursuit has become more vital than ever before. I hope that what I learned opens other lines of thought about what a societal investment in silence might contribute to our lives, and adds a little awareness about ways we may be hurtling forward in flight from the very silence we profess to cherish.

Part of the challenge in this project is that, while the pursuit of noise is one we can undertake with supreme confidence of success, nobody really triumphs in pursuit of silence in the strict sense of the word until they cease to exist. The pursuit of silence in this life is fated to be endless and imperfect. This is one reason why the pursuit of silence often turns us deeper and deeper inward. In this spirit, Gene Lushtak, who leads silent Buddhist retreats in the Bay Area, told me a story about Ajahn Chah, the most prominent leader of twentieth-century Thai Buddhism.

A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in the town outside the monastery were holding a series of festivals in which they
sang and danced all night long. When the monks would rise at three thirty in the morning to begin their meditation, the parties from the night before would still be going strong. At last, one morning the young monk cried out to Ajahn Chah, “Venerable One, the noise is interrupting my practice—I can’t meditate with all this noise!” “The noise isn’t bothering you,” Ajahn responded. “You are bothering the noise.” As Lushtak put it to me,
“Silence is not a function
of what we think of as silence. It’s when my reaction is quiet. What’s silent is my protest against the way things are.”

This poignant sentiment recurred to me throughout my search. It represents, in fact, the great dilemma behind the advocacy of silence: To effectively promote silence, how does one avoid becoming louder than the sources of noise one is protesting against? If there’s a way out of this conundrum, I believe it involves the kind of acute listening I was introduced to at the outset of my own exploration. Throughout the course of writing this book, I found myself asking what it was that people were trying to hear, and what it was that they were trying to block out. The loudest argument for quiet may be a reflection on what otherwise remains in danger of going unheard.

Listening for the Unknown

On my second night in the monastery, I heard the silence. I was inside the church: a beautiful, vast chamber of limestone blocks that resemble lumpy oatmeal and were quarried from the Iowan earth by the monks themselves in the mid-nineteenth century. The monks had finished compline, the last of the day’s seven prayer services, and had filed off into the inner recesses of the monastery, where they would observe the Great Silence, speaking to no one until after mass the next morning. The last of the monks to leave had switched off the lights above the choir, and then the light over the lectern. Though the section of visitors’ pews where I sat still had a little illumination, the body of the church was now in total blackness except for the faint flickering of a votive candle suspended high in the distance against the far wall. For the first quarter hour, a few worshippers remained on the benches around me.

Although I sat very quietly, I found my mind busy and loud.
Mostly I was reflecting on the service I had just heard, which Brother Alberic, my gracious liaison to the world of the monastery, had described as a kind of lullaby. Compline is lovely, and I was frustrated that I had not been able to find it more profound. These weren’t my prayers. I yearned only for more quiet. My thoughts were noisy enough that I half expected to see them break out of my skull and begin dancing a musical number up and down the wooden benches.

Soon the other worshippers departed and I was left alone. For a moment or two, my experience was of literal silence. Then, all at once, there came a
ting
, a
tic
, another
tic
, a
tap
, and a
clang
. The sounds came from all around the enormous dark church. They ranged from the verge of inaudibility to the violence of hammer blows; discrete chips of sound and reverberatory
gonnngs
. Out of nowhere, I was treated to a concert by the sound of heat in the pipes. It was a grand, slightly menacing sound that I had been oblivious to not only during the prayer service but afterward in the din of my mental dithering. And it was worth that long opening pause. The ever-changing sonic punctuation of this empty space—which had first seemed soundless—gave me a tingling sense of elevation. This is it, I told myself. Silence made everything resonate.

And yet … Later that night when I retreated to my room, and my euphoria had subsided, I wondered why I had been affected so powerfully. Objectively, the only thing that had happened, after all, was that I had heard the metal of the pipes expanding and contracting as they heated and cooled. Why should that experience have made me feel that I was “hearing the silence”?
Why did I feel at that lonely hour that I had found what I was looking for when I came to the monastery?