Few people would disagree that the world is becoming an ever noisier and more intrusive place. Even if one lives far from a cacophonous urban environment, with a tap or a click, it's easy to relieve the discomfort many people feel in quiet moments. 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.
Anderson brings to the project an inquiring spirit and a breadth of personal experience. 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 impressively diverse selection of both historical and contemporary source material to interrogate its myriad dimensions, among them the natural world, spirituality, and the arts. In that process, she can be both erudite and pleasantly eccentric. She shares the story of her encounter with Braco, the Croatian "Gazer" who took the stage at a London performance she attended in 2018 and did nothing but stare at the audience for 10 minutes. A Catholic with an affinity for the work of Thomas Merton, she offers a useful brief survey on the approach to silence of a variety of religious traditions, and she seems especially impressed by her visit to the oldest Quaker meeting house in London.
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, recognizing that "the challenge is to remain open and curious and to try to find it in unusual places and situations that can be close to home." In that, she is no absolutist, pointing out that her goal "isn't to create a totally silent world but to be more mindful about both sound and soundlessness." Anyone looking for inspiration to turn down the world's volume will find a useful starting point here. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Sarah Anderson believes everyone could benefit from more silence in their lives and makes that case from a variety of intriguing perspectives.