Escape to quiet retreats? Hole up in hotels? Unplug the answering machine? The things people do in search of . . . : The Soothing Sound of Silence

The fax machine was beeping insistently, the copier was threatening to explode, and the coffee maker was in Stage 2 meltdown.

Two visitors had just shown up unexpectedly at Bridge the Gap, a nuclear watchdog organization in West Los Angeles, and Daniel Hirsch, who heads the 22-year-old group, was fielding enough phone calls to make him feel like a crazed octopus.

It was “an insane day,” Hirsch recalls, the kind of day that might make some people want to run and hide--that might make them wish they could just disappear, speak to nobody, flee to some faraway spot.

This, in fact, is exactly what Hirsch does when, for six to eight months each year, he trades the cacophony of his native metropolis for the absolute calm of a Cistercian monastery in Northern California.

There, Hirsch sheds his politically active persona and sinks his hands into the soil. He becomes a gardener. He lives in near-total silence.

“I don’t believe one can be a healthy human being if you don’t take a substantial amount of time for solitude,” says Hirsch, 42. “It would be like trying to live a life where your garden never gets watered and your soil never gets turned.”

This urge to find tranquillity, to require and even to schedule a period of utter quiet, has moved a growing number of chaos-weary Americans to seek solitude wherever they can find it. Many are turning to the silent retreat, a largely church-sponsored ritual in which groups of people practice communal silence. Others take taciturnity into their own hands, fleeing toremote homes away from home or even a room at a nearby hotel. Others simply shut off their answering machines, close their doors or perhaps find 10 minutes for a walk by themselves.

But the very allure of being alone can also pose terror. Americans have a peculiar ambivalence toward solitude, experts say. Many people seek and embrace what they see as the serenity of solitude. But others regard loneliness and solitude as interchangeable; for these people, being alone is tantamount to abandonment.

Even the vocabulary of solitude is tinged with mixed messages, as people speak with equal measures of envy and pity for those who live by themselves. For those to whom isolation may imply loneliness, boredom or, worst of all, an unwelcome confrontation with themselves, the nonstop noise of a life filled with electronic playthings and technological timesavers may provide a perverse curtain of comfort.

“There are people who regard silence as something pathological,” says Anthony Storr, a British psychiatrist and author of “Solitude: A Return to the Self.” Some people feel guilty about taking time for themselves, he says, and others “have been brought up to believe that interpersonal interaction is the meaning of life.”

Yet solitude remains “a basic human need,” says Storr. “We need to get away from the noise and from being with other people.”

Such was the motivation of Marsha Sinetar, a writer and organizational consultant who moved from Santa Monica to Stewart’s Point, a tiny Northern California hamlet where “it would be bad form to honk your horn.”

Sinetar, whose books include “A Way Without Words,” about the virtues of silence, sees solitude as essential in a culture where overworked and over-stressed have become adjectives of choice. The sense of unremitting urgency reflected in the seemingly vital presence of overnight mail services, car telephones and a fax machine at the local convenience store only compounds the value of taking a break.

“The more chaotic things are, the more we need to regroup,” Sinetar says. “It’s like when we want to think about something, and we say to each other, ‘I’ll sleep on it.’ Just that little statement says that when we’re confused, it helps to step away.”

But over-scheduled lives often make that difficult. Juliet Schor, who teaches economics and women’s studies at Harvard University, has studied the way Americans try to download their lives.

“Certainly one of the things we’re finding is that for people who work these long hours, and especially people who are trying to balance work and family, what’s happening is that time for themselves is getting pushed out,” she says.

Under these conditions, solitude and isolation often become a kind of fantasy, Schor says: “Family time takes precedence over time for yourself, and this is especially true for women.” The consequence, in her view, “is a reduction in the quality of life.”

For Meinrad Craighead, solitude is the most important factor in maintaining an acceptable quality of life.

“I could not have worked in the past, and I could not now work without solitude,” says Craighead, an artist and former contemplative nun who lives in Albuquerque, N. M. Her painting emanates from her past and present solitude, says Craighead, who believes that the increasingly frenetic pace of contemporary life “gives us no time to stop.”

Craighead spent 14 years in “virtual silence” in a Benedictine monastery. Even when she left the order, her insistence on solitude remained with her: “On an ordinary day, I talk only to my dogs.”

Curiosity about how people find moments of isolation in their crowded lives was what impelled Sue Halpern to write her new book, “Migrations to Solitude.” Halpern and her husband had moved from Manhattan to a town in the Adirondacks, “where there are probably fewer people than there were in my building” in New York City. Soon Halpern came to realize that without her whirl of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and drinks with friends, without the subway and without the daily affronts to her senses, “the days got longer. The texture of our lives became smoother.”

In her own sylvan semi-exile, Halpern became interested in “the ways in which people are alone and live alone, and the ways in which we can’t be alone.” Halpern began to correspond with a prisoner in solitary confinement. She befriended a woman whose son was dying of AIDS, and whose world had shrunk to encompass only the Los Angeles hospice where he would spend his last days.

She explored the incongruity of solitude among patients, physicians and family members in the intensive care unit of a big-city hospital. She tracked down a pair of hermits whose nearest neighbors lived in towns called Severence and Paradox.

Halpern concluded that the romantic notions about solitude with which she had embarked on her project did not hold: “I had set up this paradigm, in which you either live in solitude--you are completely alone--or you live as the rest of us do.”

Now, says Halpern, “I see that it doesn’t work that way. I see now that there are degrees of solitude, and that it’s more about calmness.”

For many people, that calmness carries spiritual overtones. Lisa Meyers, a La Canada wife and mother, attends a local seminary and leads retreats to a Benedictine monastery where silence is maintained except during designated periods.

Prayer is the ostensible purpose, but Meyers believes that the “affirming” nature of the experience is why more and more people are signing up for the retreats. “I wouldn’t say that it’s an escape per se, but more a sense of understanding,” she says. “There is a sense that, yes, it is possible to find time away from all the hecticness, and from all the sense of responsibility.”

Conditions are Spartan on the retreats Meyers conducts. Yet participants often drive up in their Jaguars or Mercedes-Benzes, then act as if shedding their worldly goods for a weekend was as much a part of the appeal as the silence. Some, says Meyers, find it difficult to do either.

“There are people who say, ‘I could never be silent for a whole weekend, and I can’t understand why any of you would want to,’ ” she says.

Seeking their own variation of solitude, those people might be more likely to follow the example of mystery writer Agatha Christie, who, says Marsha Sinetar, was in the habit of checking into a luxury hotel for a day or two and speaking to no one when she needed some time to herself.

Joanna Lennon, the director of a youth service program in the San Francisco Bay Area, adopted the same tactic when after more than a year of sleep deprivation following the birth of an insomniac child, she slipped off alone to a hotel in her hometown.

“I just needed the time to myself,” Lennon says. “I decided it was worth whatever it cost.”

Sinetar, like Sue Halpern, says she has become fascinated by the lengths people will go to in order to spend time alone. “I think that is the place that health spas take,” she says. “We put pads on our eyes and turbans on our heads and go sit in a steam room so we don’t have to talk to people.”

The burgeoning number of residential colonies for artists and writers also reflects a quiet institutionalization of communal solitude, Sinetar maintains. Many businesses, she says, have moved in the same direction.

“Twenty years ago, we didn’t have corporate retreats,” she observes. “Everybody went and golfed. Now people go and philosophize together. Frankly, people are not always very happy when they’re asked to go to happy hours.”

If the fear of loneliness scares some people away from solitude, Bill Creasy, who teaches writing at UCLA, believes that crowds may be among the most forlorn of gatherings. “I know many of my students, with their constant round of parties and classes and so forth, and they are among the loneliest people I’ve ever met,” he says.

Creasy’s own need for separation from his day-to-day existence is so powerful that each year he flies to “the boonies” of South Carolina to take up residence in a Trappist monastery.

After a few days of “a kind of withdrawal,” he says, “you get into the rhythm.” Creasy says he treasures “the time of confronting oneself and being alone with God.” But there are risks, he notes: “You shine the light into the dark corners of your heart, and my goodness, who knows what you’ll find?”

Back home in Los Angeles, Creasy says he lives an otherwise ordinary life as a teacher, a husband, the father of two and the owner of a golden retriever. His wife applauds his yearly three-week treks to the monastery, he says, reasoning that “it’s a whole lot better than Club Med.”

In Albuquerque, Craighead says she works alone, painting as long as the daylight and her own energy will allow. Each evening, she takes an hourlong, solitary walk by the river. “I think you need to let the soul rest, the body rest, the mind rest,” Craighead says. “If we don’t allow ourselves time where we can go to another place in our souls, we are so impoverished.”

Daniel Hirsch agrees, pausing for a moment from the crush of worldly crises at Bridge the Gap. “In our society, we don’t understand that it takes silence to produce clear thoughts and clear words,” he says.

Getting away, as he does, is one way to pursue solitude, Hirsch adds: “But there’s a voice within us, and we can all hear it if we listen. Solitude is one of the few things that’s free.”