In Pursuit of Silence (7 page)

Brother Neal, a tall, slender, slightly stooped man with a face that tends to cock to one side and piercing, pale eyes that crinkle and gleam, had his own perspective. “How do you relate to the fact of God being incomprehensible to us?” he asked me. Citing the twentieth-century German theologian Karl Rahner, Neal answered his rhetorical question: “Ultimately the only adequate response to God is silent adoration.” This is another idea that crosses multiple traditions, though it was slow to catch on in ancient religions. For much of antiquity, prayers were said out loud since the ears of the gods were thought to resemble gigantic human ears, requiring worshippers to make actual sound. Silent prayer was also looked on askance because the rationale for praying inaudibly was often the wish to conceal what one was praying for—taboo sex, magical powers, and criminal plunder, for example. As the gods shed their physical sensory apparatus, attitudes began to change. The late Platonists believed that, in order to reach a transcendent being, prayer itself needed to be distilled
beyond the world of the senses.
“Let us sacrifice
in such a manner as is fit, offering different sacrifices to different natures,” wrote Porphyry, the third-century Neoplatonist. “For there is nothing material which is not immediately impure to an immaterial nature … Hence neither is vocal language nor internal speech adapted to the highest God … but we should venerate him in profound silence.” Rather than Alberic’s notion of silence serving as a reminder of dependence of being, what Neal talked about was the way that silence can represent a dissolving of all our habitual perceptions before some great truth.

This aspect of Neal’s faith brushes up against many secular ideals of silence, often in relationship to the natural world. A famous Japanese poem about the islands of Matsushima consists only of the words, “Oh Matsushima!” The poet is so overwhelmed by the place’s beauty that he can only speak its name before he falls into silence. Many early-twentieth-century philosophies of silence resonate with this idea of an incommensurability between truth and our powers of expression. Wittgenstein ended his first book of philosophy with the proposition:
“Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent.” Heidegger once declared:
“Above all, silence about
silence.” The French philosopher Max Picard wrote that the
“silence points to a state
where only being is valid.” In Picard’s view, this is “the state of the Divine.” Here Picard, a practicing Catholic, echoes many of the foundational ideas in Zen Buddhism. At one point in our conversations, Lushtak, my meditation-teacher friend, described silent meditation as an effort to “unplug from the mental story” we are constantly telling ourselves, in order to be completely attentive to the wonder of the ever-unfolding present moment.

The Apaches, among other
Native American tribes, are famous for their silence, and sociolinguistic research has found that the contexts in which silence dominates the dialogue include courtship and reunions after long separations, in which ambiguities about social roles abound. Silence seems a mark of acknowledgment of these uncertainties; the long pause gives people time to come into a new relationship with one another. The rest of us confront these same ambiguities all the time, but we often pave over them with speech and so deprive ourselves and our interlocutors both of the chance to know what it is
not
to know where we stand with each other—and to find new grounds for meaningful exchange.

In some folklore rituals, silence is invested with the power not just to enrich existing relationships but to conjure up future lovers. The English
tradition of the “dumb cake”
involves variations on the idea of young women baking and eating a cake in absolute silence. After the women go to bed—sometimes sliding a slice of dumb cake under their pillows beforehand—visions of their husbands-to-be are supposed to appear to them. (
In the eighteenth-century
Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia
, we find the young diarist on a visit to the house of Mr. George Washington trying to persuade a friend to join her one night in eating the “dum cake,” but her friend is too spooked to take part.) There are also rituals of
“Dumb Suppers
,” comprising midnight meals consumed in total silence. Sometimes these suppers were rites of divination that foretold a woman’s fate in marriage; on other occasions they enabled the guests to make contact with a recently deceased loved one.

In many traditions, silence forms a bridge to the unknowable
far side of human experience, whether the searcher is gazing forward or backward in time.

Before I left New Melleray, Alberic told me that he was going to “bend the rules a little” and take me down to a chapel reserved for the monks beneath the church that was, in his estimation, the most silent place in the abbey. He warned me that the silence in the room was so intense that it was likely to “take me outside of my comfort zone.” He knew of cases where people from the big city had found themselves physically unable to remain in the chapel for even five minutes.

We descended lower and lower, and then wound our way through interminable unlit corridors. Alberic gestured for me to wait against a stone wall in a low-ceilinged hall and went on ahead of me to investigate the state of the chapel. After a minute, he returned, whispering in a low voice that he would not be able to read me the passage he’d hoped to recite as preparation for the silence since there was another monk inside the chapel. He led me forward through another door, and then we passed around a barrier wall into a small room that was completely dark except for a tiny candle in a glass at the far end, suspended from the ceiling by a chain. In the center of a row of chairs directly across from the candle, I could faintly make out the silhouette of a large man sitting with his legs wide apart and his hands on his thighs, breathing quite loudly. Alberic and I lowered ourselves into chairs along the side wall.

Here, in this darkness, I began to feel a real gravity to the silence of the monastery, an
inescapability
that made me glean
something of the rigor with which these men spend their lives preparing for death. The death of a monk is, in Alberic’s words, a “graduation ceremony. You haven’t persevered in the monk’s calling until you die. Death marks the point at which you’ve completed your transaction. There’s a lightness, even joy to the funeral. The night before a monk is buried, we light an Easter candle. We put two chairs on either side of the body, which has been placed in the center of the church. The candle is placed at the feet of the body. We take turns praying two by two over the body all night. And talk about entering into that silence.” Alberic shook his head. “You’d think it would be morbid or scary, but those are some of the lightest, most joyful moments in the monastery. The silence is telling you it’s going to be okay. Unless you have real psychological resistance, you know it’s going to be okay.”

In the chapel, my eyes were drawn to the candle in the glass. Though I couldn’t feel a breath of air where I was, the chain was being tugged gently this way and that by an otherwise imperceptible draft; the reflection of fire on the glass doubled the image of its burning orange glow and made it look like two wings fluttering tremulously open and closed, as though the proverbial moth had actually become the flame.

So far from being taken outside my comfort zone, I found myself wanting to remain and sink deeper into it.

The monks at New Melleray each, in one way or another, described themselves listening to silence for self-knowledge. Yet the self-knowledge that the silence of the monastery promotes is, in the end, less about discovering whom one really is, in our conventional use of the term, than about acknowledging the
limitations of our grasp on what lies within and without us. Indeed, the self-knowledge the monks advocate—and which they believe the quiet of monastic life reveals to them—is the knowledge that there’s something beyond the self.

All the time I’d been in the monastery, I’d been searching for some kind of clear, encapsulated lesson in the silence—something that I could take home with me. But what I’d received instead was a powerful reminder of the good that can come from not knowing, from lingering where the mind keeps reaching outward. I remembered speaking earlier to Vinod Menon, a neuroscientist who has done extensive fMRI studies of people listening to music.
Menon discovered that
the peak of positive brain activity actually occurs in the silent pauses between sounds, when the brain is striving to anticipate what the next note will be. The burst of neural firing that takes place in the absence of sound stimulus enables the mind to perform some of its most vital work of maintaining attention and encoding memories. I asked Menon what he took from this finding. His small, dark eyes twinkled.
“Silence is golden
,” he said. “Silence in the right contexts.”

Even brief silence, it seems, can inject us with a fertile unknown: a space in which to focus and absorb experience—a reminder that the person we are with may yet surprise us; a reflection that some things we cannot put into words are yet resoundingly real; a reawakening to our dependency on something greater than ourselves.

I wanted to stay in the chapel. But Alberic was already rising to his feet and beckoning me forward. I resisted his summons a few
moments longer, then stood. I don’t know how long we remained in the end. It wasn’t long enough, and I felt overcome with sadness as we stepped away—rising back up from the depths of darkness and stillness, into the light and echoing footsteps of the abbey’s upper stories.

Why We Hear

“You hear a snap
off in the distance, what do you do?”

The question was put to me—in a gruff voice that made me feel I should be paying better attention—by Rickye Heffner, a professor of psychology at the University of Toledo.

“I turn my head and try to see where the snap is coming from?” I ventured.

“You look for it! You want to know what made the sound and where it is. You want to orient your eyes toward it. Among mammals, the ears are animal detectors and they tell your eyes where to go to hunt for the animals they detect. So the ears have to have sufficient range and be able to hear the right frequencies to locate a sound source. That seems to be what’s driving the evolution of hearing.”

Heffner and her husband, Henry Heffner, have dedicated the last forty-plus years of their lives to producing a vast profusion of studies with titles like “Hearing in Glires: Domestic Rabbit, Cotton Rat, Feral House Mouse, and Kangaroo Rat.”
They seem to have explored the auditory mechanisms and evolution of hearing in every warm-blooded, young-suckling creature in existence. I telephoned Heffner because, after my initial ruminations on silence and noise, I realized that if there was something meaningful in the idea of listening to the unknown, I needed a better sense of what
is
known. It’s impossible to understand how noise or silence affects us without getting a handle on why we began to hear in the first place.

After all, on the face of it, the very notion of a pursuit of silence seems a bit of sensory nonsense. Who, by way of comparison, would want to pursue an existence in which there was nothing to touch? We don’t go in search of a place without taste or scent (however many fragrances we might prefer not to sniff). Why would so many people have come to believe there was something not just enjoyable but beneficial in pursuing a state where one sense was exercised as little as possible? What is it about the sense of hearing that makes the idea of having next to nothing to hear so appealing?