The joy of doing absolutely nothing
In today’s overly rowdy world, books on silence are making quite a bit of noise
Silence: In the Age of Noise Erling Kagge Pantheon The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism Kyle Chayka Bloomsbury How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy Jenny Odell Melville House
Now with a pandemic, newsworthy crises are the realm of responsible readers. But instead of partaking there, I find myself drawn to different books, filled with another flourishing, but quieter, theme.
I’m referring to a growing library of self-help guides for the self-care generation. Clothed in minimalist cover jackets, bathed in soft hues, these books promise calm and reprieve: Silence: In the Age of Noise, The Longing for Less and How to do Nothing. The literature of silence is having its moment, and for this reader, it feels especially resonant.
Silence is more than the absence of noise. It is the cumulative experience of personal space and a mind at rest, with room to think and contemplate. For a long time, I thought I was alone in my inability to be present. When I bought my first guide to silence, aptly titled Silence, by the Norwegian writer and explorer Erling Kagge, I was comforted to learn that I wasn’t alone in my struggle. Kagge’s book was a visual feast of hazy horizons and poetic sentences about the value of silence. “Shutting out the world is not about turning your back on your surroundings,” he writes, “but rather the opposite: it is seeing the world a bit more clearly, staying a course and trying to love your life.”
Two years after it was first published, Silence is in its eighth printing and has been translated into 37 languages. Meanwhile, similarly themed books have proliferated. New Yorker writer David Owen’s Volume Control warns that loud noise in the modern world has become a deafening threat to our physical and emotional health.
The artist Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy appeared on literary influencer Barack Obama’s recent list of favourite books. In her elegant tome on the dangers of Big Tech’s exploitation of the “attention economy,” Odell writes that “solitude, observation and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.”
Georgetown professor Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism provides a step-by-step guide to online withdrawal in pursuit of deeper work. And, in January, journalist Kyle Chayka published The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, a travelogue through the art history of minimalism movements, including an entire section devoted to silence.
What unites these books is the authors’ alarm that the sheer volume of physical, digital and political “noise” is fraying our state of mind. Some authors offer practical solutions to restoring balance; others offer more poetic ruminations. Chayka traces a geographic path to quietude, writing about the ancient Japanese city of Kyoto, where soft footsteps through rock gardens and Buddhist temples offer a seductive vision of paradise.
But fetishizing silence as a destination runs the risk of turning noise cancellation into a mere commodity. Meditation rooms and sound baths are arriving in cities, and expensive silent retreats are already a pillar of the wellness industrial complex. If silence becomes a luxury good, is it a worthwhile aspiration as these books suggest?
As with most self-help books, it is impossible to live up to the prescriptions for sonic reduction. Somewhere among the discipline of abrupt digital withdrawals, walks to the South Pole and the structural blame on booming cities is the unavoidable rhythm of daily life. Each of us has a different tolerance for noise and available time for silence.
In choosing the book form to explore noise, these authors are making an implicit argument for reading as the ultimate gift of silence. The reader who appears quiet to the outsider knows the symphonic river of ideas and conversations that flow between the pages of a great book.
The Washington Post