Speaking of silence, and of noise

When bread is scarce, corpulence counts as beauty; when garbage dumpsters stink with wasted food, slenderness is prized. Small wonder that in our noisy civilization we should speak so longingly of silence.

But most of us, most of the time, do not really desire silence. Something in us recoils from an utter absence of sound. The composer John Cage famously spent some time in a sensory deprivation chamber; he did not enjoy himself. Silence and noise have both been used as interrogation techniques. Both can amount to torture.

This is not to suggest that silence and noise are equivalent. Silence doesn’t elevate blood pressure or stimulate stress hormones or retard children’s learning the way that noise does. In terms of acoustical impact, noise will always hold the whip hand. Your noise can destroy my silence, but my silence is powerless against your noise.

The composer R. Murray Schafer, who gave us the word “soundscape,” referred to the dominance of noise as “sound imperialism.” Though noise may wrap itself in the mantle of diversity — if you don’t like vuvuzelas, you must not be multicultural — diversity is always the first casualty of noise.

Still, silence is hardly the answer to noise, and rarely its most attractive alternative. People who complain about noise are likely to be heard as silencers — and perhaps just as likely to fancy themselves as lovers of silence and therefore, in the minds of their antagonists, as haters of music, joyousness, the human race itself. An unfortunate mistake all around. The acoustic zone most of wish to inhabit is not silence but quietness (a few sounds) or conviviality (an ecology of many sounds).

Picture a small lake in summertime, then close your mind’s eye and listen to the sounds belonging to your picture: children laughing in the shallow water, mothers calling “That’s far enough,” laughter at the ice cream stand, ducks quacking in the reeds beside the beach, oars dipping into the water, a dog barking after a Frisbee, a radio playing softly next to two lovers cuddling in the sand, the aha of an old man who’s just caught a fish, the soft psst of an unscrewed bottle cap — all the diverse sounds of a diverse company of human beings enjoying their leisure.

Implicit in this soundscape are some choices. Set your blanket near the water if you like your soundscape spicy; walk a ways beyond the beach if you prefer it plain, understated, still.

But keep your eyes shut and your ears open for just a moment longer. Suddenly two riders strafe the shore on “personal watercraft.” Now what do you hear? The answer is simple. You hear personal watercraft. The takeover of the acoustical space accompanies a takeover of the lake itself. The fishing is ruined. The swimming is risky. The small boats are swamped. One sound rules. One activity predominates. Caesar has arrived: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

To be sure, many of us from time to time will want to experience the extremes of loudness and silence. (I said “experience,” not impose those extremes on someone else.) I know people who go to rock concerts or monasteries, or both, and whose lives are richer for the experience. I would not be surprised to learn that people go to rock concerts and monasteries for some of the same reasons. Most of us yearn for an escape from the humdrum world, the tyranny of the clock. We need to feel a part of something larger than ourselves, to know our mortal limitations in the midst of immense stillness or on the receiving end of some awesome, rocking sound.

But the rock arena and the silent monastery have other, less desirable things in common. Neither is a welcoming place for children, an ideal place for conversation, an inviting place for intimate celebration with friends. Neither place is political — or perhaps we should say neither place is democratic. The abbot calls the tune; the lead singer holds the mike. Between “rules of silence” and “Rock rules!” the operative word is “rules.”

In contrast, the quotidian zones of quietness and conviviality are more likely to be governed by negotiation. A neighborhood contains people who need to sleep and people who want to party. At its best, it contains people who go to the same party. But as soon as one sound owns the neighborhood, it is less of a neighborhood. It is in danger of becoming the petty fiefdom of the person or corporation making the most noise.

Let us take a moment of silence to honor those neighborhoods that are no more. But let us remember that our silence honors sounds: the vanishing sounds of nature and of human beings “acting naturally.” The sounds we love.

I recall a story about a Zen master who ordered a monk to rake the monastery grounds. When he’d finished, the monk went to inform the master, but after a quick inspection, the master told him that the work was far from complete. So the monk set to work with renewed attention, looking for leaves and twigs he had missed. Still, the master was not satisfied. With grim resolution the monk went to his task yet again, poking among the blades of grass for even the tiniest pieces of debris. Finally, the master seemed satisfied.

“This is almost perfect,” he said, “but one thing remains.” Reaching above them, he took hold of an overhanging branch and shook it so that a few leaves fluttered to the ground. “Now we are done!”

I think of those leaves as the beloved sounds that silence allows us to hear. Our job is not finished until they’ve adorned the ground in all their distinctive splendor. For the present, though, we have some raking up to do.

Garret Keizer is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise.”