Few people would disagree that the world is becoming an ever noisier and more intrusive place. But as British writer and artist Sarah Anderson argues in her thoughtful The Lost Art of Silence: Reconnecting to the Power and Beauty of Quiet, consciously bringing more silence into our lives may be one antidote for the pervasive anxiety and stress of the modern age.
Since 1979, she has been the proprietor of the Travel Bookshop in London's Notting Hill, and she draws on her own travels to places like Antarctica, a silent meditation retreat in Spain, and Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia to add a personal flavor to the more academic aspects of her study. She wrote much of the book during a time that became for her, like many people, a forced encounter with more silence--the Covid-19 lockdown.
In her treatment of the subject, Anderson opts for breadth rather than depth, drawing on an impressive array of both historical and contemporary source material. In that process, she can be both erudite and pleasantly eccentric. But even as she advocates for more silence in our lives, Anderson acknowledges that it's not an unalloyed good. She devotes a section, for example, to what she calls the "darker sides of silence," especially the ways it has been abused in prison systems.
Invoking Blaise Pascal's observation that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Anderson concludes with some thoughts about how we might incorporate more quiet into our lives. Anyone looking for inspiration to turn down the world's volume will find a useful starting point here. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer