(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.)
When I first came across these lines from Yeats’ poem “Long-Legged Fly” as a college student, I was struck by their metaphorical cleverness, by their unexpected accuracy; yes, I thought, like that long-legged fly moving on the surface of the water, the mind in a state of flow is a nimble and powerful but at the same time a fragile and easily disturbed thing.
Yeats’ lines are the refrain to verses that describe three figures engaged in silent activity: Caesar in his tent poring over battle plans, a juvenile Helen of Troy discovering her own mysterious beauty (Yeats ardently believed that for a woman to be a great beauty was a vocation in itself), and Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel.
In order to allow these touchstones of our civilization to flourish, the poet says we must “Quiet the dog, tether the pony /to a distant post . . . move most gently . . . (and) keep those children out.”
Yeats’ poem has stayed with me because it expresses a truth that I’ve come to internalize as I get older, which is that silence is essential to civilized life.
We writers obsessively protect our silence. Out and about, we cherish the world for its brute colorfulness and cacophony; back in our studies, we want nothing but monastic quiet. The French writer Marcel Proust composed his masterpiece “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” in a cork-lined room. In a profile of his then-friend V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux noted that Naipaul “considers most music as disquieting as a pneumatic drill” and soundproofed his own home with costly double-glazed windows.
The constant vigilance necessary to maintain silence can be costly for the writer’s spouse, as well. In Philip Roth’s novel “The Ghost Writer,” the wife of the reclusive writer E.I. Lonoff rages at him for making her tiptoe around the house all day: “I have to catch my toast before it pops up so you won’t be disturbed in the study!” she wails.
But no writer was as adamant or as funny on the subject of noise as Vladimir Nabokov. Asked by an interviewer what he would change if given absolute power he said: “I would abolish trucks and transistors. I would outlaw the diabolical roar of motorcycles. I would wring the neck of soft music in public places.”
In his poem “The Refrigerator Awakes,” Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac, describes the nocturnal noises of a refrigerator “like this giant / waking in the torture house, trying to die / and not dying.” Nabokov gave his own prickly aversion to noise to his most affectionately rendered character, the Russian emigre professor Pnin; the sensitive Pnin complains to his landlady, in his uniquely broken English of “Sonic disturbance . . . I hear every, every thing!”
Irritating noise was the metaphor Nabokov often used to dismiss unwelcome interpretations of his work: He compared his critics’ glosses to “distant whining” and to the disruption of a quiet picnic by interlopers with transistor radios.
These reflections are inspired by the appearance of a timely and necessary book: “In Pursuit of Silence,” by George Prochnik.
“In Pursuit of Silence,” like many contemporary nonfiction works, begins with the personal note. Prochnik, a freelance writer, describes the noises around his downtown Brooklyn home and confesses to something all writers will be intimately familiar with: “an anxiety associated with sensitivity to sound.”
Prochnik admits:
“I’ve snitched on contractors who’ve started work early. I’ve battled neighbors who hold large parties — and befriended them to get into their parties as a way of trying to befriend the noise itself. I’ve worn so many earplugs . . . that if they were laid end to end they would probably manage to extend around a New York City block.”
The genesis of the book is the writer’s decision to be not just “against noise” but to “search out reasons for silence.”
His searches lead him to extremes of noise and silence; first, seeking silence, to Quaker meetinghouses, monasteries and retreats in the middle of prairies or deserts, then to the opposite end: to developers of earsplitting, booming car stereo systems.
He interviews the experts: professors of hearing science, soundproofing technicians, acoustical engineers, ancient music specialists. He gives us the history, the technology, the brain chemistry, and the psychology of both noise and silence.
The experts tell us what we already know or suspect: that constant loud noise has severe physiological effects. Besides a contemporary epidemic of hearing loss, it leads to cardiovascular strain, mental illness and learning disorders; that from a neurochemical viewpoint the crying of a baby is one of the most irritating sounds in existence; that the modern world is louder than ever; and that we are engaged in a kind of sonic arms race with one another.
Prochnik describes a world in which silence is, increasingly, an expensive commodity. For the pedestrian in a dense urban environment like New York one of those dramatic sonic contrasts he can observe is to walk off the streets and through the front doors of one those luxury apartment buildings that line Park Avenue: It is to pass almost immediately from sheer noise to almost complete silence.
At the other end of the social scale, in housing projects, shelters and jails, silence is virtually unobtainable; Prochnik notes that our schools are filled with students “for whom, especially those from difficult socioeconomic backgrounds, there is simply no positive experience of silence.”
Conversely, people who live in prolonged silence have many mental and physical benefits. Among other rewards, meditation “enhances the ability to make discrimination between important and unimportant stimuli.” The benefits of silence, Prochnik observes, are manifold; they are even available, it should be noted, to those who don’t make their living with words:
“Even brief silence . . . can inject us with a fertile unknown: a space in which to focus and absorb experience . . . a reflection that some things we cannot put into words are yet resoundingly real; a reawakening to our dependency on something greater than ourselves.”
John Broening is a freelance writer in Denver.
NONFICTION
In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
by George Prochnik, $26
