What is Silence, Really?

An introvert’s disappointment with Pico Iyer’s new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence.

As an introvert who finds quiet nourishing, I’m a sucker for any book that has “silence” or “quiet” in the title. So I eagerly dug into Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer, billed as the noted travel writer’s deep insights from some 100 retreats at a monastery in Big Sur, California. The words “silence” and “monastery” got me imagining a setting where robed men spent their days as mum as ghosts in the daytime, shunning the idleness of conversation and spending all their energy on manual labor, prayer and contemplation. I pictured a 24/7 version, expanded geographically, of the silent lunchroom at Kripalu, a retreat center in Western Massachusetts where I’ve taken several workshops: no talking or electronic media whatsoever. Eyes on plate. Relaxation. Peace.

The picture that emerged from Iyer’s book thus puzzled me greatly. First, it didn’t appear that the monastery had the sort of rules against social talk that I imagined. Putting down the book, I researched the order of monks at Iyer’s favored sanctuary – the Benedictines. Although the motto of the order – Ora et Labora, or "pray and work" – indicated that my assumption was somewhat along the right lines, Benedictines don’t take a strict vow of silence. The Big Sur monastery actually bills itself as both a “hermitage” and a “community.”

I couldn’t help noticing that along with some descriptions of spiritually charged episodes at the monastery, Iyer also recounted dozens of colorful conversational encounters with resident monks, as well as with other visitors there. They were the kind of lively, revealing episodes we get from amiable travel writers sojourning anywhere. Clearly he seized the opportunity to chitchat during his retreats. Since his retreats were not silent, in what way, then, was the book centrally, or even peripherally, about silence?

Halfway through the book it finally dawned on me that this mixture of a few solitary epiphanies and inquisitive socializing was an extrovert’s version of silence. That is, if your texture of daily life involves near-constant talking and listening, then cutting back to one-fifth as much conversation might feel like a revelatory amount of silence. But for someone like me, where many of my contented days don’t include even one conversation lasting more than a minute, Iyer’s retreats don’t begin to qualify as silent.

My big takeaway from the book, then, had nothing to do with Pico Iyer’s descriptions of his monkish cell, Big Sur’s rugged nature and the wildfires that often threaten California. It was this: Silence is relative.

People who connect silence and spirituality generally mean by “silence” not just a lack of noise, but more generally a lack of hubbub. Embracing silence signifies stepping away from ordinary life. Compared to one’s daily environment, a silent place has fewer distractions, fewer duties, fewer ties. Although Big Sur’s sublime magnificence practically puts it into a class by itself, almost any spot with few people and few signs of human activity might serve as a setting for silence. A mountain plateau, a desert, a dense jungle, a sailboat bobbing in the ocean.

Even a prison? In 1918, philosopher/social activist Bertrand Russell was jailed for six months for his pacifist activities. Allowed just one visit per week, he established a daily routine of four hours of writing, four hours of philosophical reading and four hours of general reading. He told a friend perhaps he’d missed his vocation as a monk. In his autobiography, Russell declared:

“I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy... and began the work for The Analysis of Mind.”

Compare that with the participants in a notorious recent study who couldn’t tolerate even 15 minutes alone with themselves. Two thirds of the men and one-quarter of the women chose to give themselves electrical shocks rather than just sit quietly on their own and think. They went to harsh lengths not to experience the value of silence.

Aflame does include scattered glimmers of what to me is the spirit of silence. For instance:

“How rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone.”

And:

“The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing.”

But Iyer felt it was vital to set such snippets alongside his conversational encounters with monks and visitors, as well as to name-drop friendly incidents with eminences like the songwriter Leonard Cohen and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Had I been at the monastery while Iyer was taking a break from his hectic travel-writer life, I think I would have found him annoying. Better portrayals of silence that I strongly recommend are The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati and The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.

Related Posts

Introverts’ Search for Quiet

Silence as an Introvert Advantage

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.