MANILA, Philippines ? We live noisy lives. From the moment the alarm clock shocks us awake, to the last breathless news bulletin on the radio before we rest our weary heads on our pillows, we are assaulted by noise.
Close your eyes. Listen: the yakking of several 10-acre voices competing to be heard; thumping music on an iPod or radio; TV chatter; phones ringing, pinging. A dog barks; the fridge motor revs up; cars honk; a lawnmower drones on. We are assailed by construction and traffic noises; the thrum of a jillion computers; bubble-gum muzak inside shops and elevators; a muted Vivaldi in libraries and museums. Just an everyday concatenation of discordant sounds polluting the universe, dulling your senses and making you thoroughly ill. At all hours of the day and night.
Quiet, please!
I?m not an ascetic sworn to vows of silence; I?m a deeply socialized creature. In my youth, I studied and crammed for exams with rock music blaring away in the background. Always hoarse from shouting at pop concerts, I also danced like a dervish to ear-splitting music in discos. But after years and years of musical atrocities, rhetorical banalities, the coarseness and crudity of commotion, the noise has finally caught up with me.
All you need to become ill in our modern world is to leave all your appliances on, tune and log in, listen to all the spittle-flecked nattering and let the clutter and din into your life. It matters little that you scream silently away. People talk without speaking, hear without listening.
Noise, like global warming, is a grave threat to health. ?Noise pollution in our towns and cities is a growing problem and can have serious long-term impact on well-being. Noise not only annoys but also raises stress and associated hormone levels,? said Professor D. Prasher of University College London?s Ear Institute.
Chronic stress, hypertension, heart disease, insomnia and disturbed sleep cycles, lowered immunity, tinnitus and deafness, headache clusters and poor concentration have all been linked to noise exposure to over 80 decibels?the equivalent of an alarm clock constantly ringing loudly in your ears?when the acceptable level is between 40 and 50, the sound of a normal conversation.
Children growing up in noisy environments are known to suffer from poor cognitive growth, delayed language skills, impaired reading comprehension and long-term memory, learning difficulties and anxiety.
Eruptions of chatter
The noise is no longer just outside either; it is as well now inside our heads, so full of worry, fear and fury. We have all become so obsessed with ourselves that we?re spewing out great floods of words, blog boilerplate, a daily sufferance of blah and the relentless Twitter of everyone we allow to bore us all to death with a long riff of inanities. Great Vesuvian eruptions of chatter! All sense of modesty and privacy that stops us from just letting it all hang out?damn the consequences?out the window!
It is so noisy we can?t hear ourselves think! No spells of quietude, no salve to the interior life, no retreat from the rushing tide and sky-is-falling tumult! ?There?s a chattering in my head and it won?t stop!? wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. ?Oh, how I wish I could be silent!?
Mystics go to quiet places with deep religious dimensions?deserts, mountains, monasteries?to find calm and inner sanctuaries; to give their souls room for divine messages to rain down gently from heaven; to worship in elegiac whisper. It?s the Zen thing, but we cannot all lead monastic lives and we?re poorly equipped to withdraw entirely from the world. We can, however, go into silence.
So we switch off our phones, radio and TV during certain times of the day. Unplug computers. Turn volumes well down. Drown out sounds with insulation and earplugs. Learn to breathe. Hush. Recess into poetry, what T. S. Eliot described as writing with a lot of silence on the page.
We quietly read a book, go for solitary walks and cultivate a consideration for our environment and the welfare of others. Dedicate time to quiet and maybe solitude. Go into ourselves, or to a place of worship, to pray, seek solace or deliverance. God speaks in the silence of the heart, Mother Teresa said.
?In silence, we learn to feel happy in our own skin,? wrote Susan Hill. ?It is a rich and fertile soil in which many things grow and flourish, not least an awareness of everything outside oneself, apart from oneself, as well as everything within.?
In silence, we don?t say more than we mean; nor say anything unless it improves on silence. We suffocate our and other people?s babbling. We escape the company of cacophonous people who talk a lot but say nothing, who don?t converse so much as hold forth. We run away from people who speak in bold, capital letters, with gaseous words, who are too much in the morning, evening and in-between. Instead of the all-singing, all-dancing vacation in bedlam, we can retreat into a meditational place of transcendent peace and quiet.
Maybe silence goes with this new age of austerity, as we put back together shards of our lost selves. As we light a small fire of courtesy and civility, to recover the nearly vanished charm of keeping something back in reserve, reflecting before we speak.
We appreciate the silence because we have been in noisy places. Still and calm, watching a star-quilted sky and the moon move in silence. Because silence opens us up, it intensifies every feeling and sensation, so we feel and hear more, better: raindrops on a leaf, a sigh, pages of a book being turned, the first bars of Bach?s ?Goldberg Variations,? quiet conversations we have with ourselves.
?My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence,? wrote the poet Edith Sitwell. Amen. For in silence, we find a near-perfect serenity that helps us sail through life?s complexities, squalls and squabbles, with courage, a wing and a silent prayer.
