Hang up, switch off, stop tweeting – enjoy the silence
WE ARE a connected age, and proud of it. Most people live in cities — the World Health Organisation reckons that by 2030, six in ten of us will be urban. Tens of millions are online, linked by social media and instant messaging. Loneliness is the thing we most fear.
Yet, as Michael Harris’s elegant, thoughtful book reminds us, there are merits and consolations to be found in sometimes retreating into solitude.
He opens the book with an extreme: Dr edith Bone, a political prisoner in Hungary, spent seven years in solitary confinement — six months of it in total darkness — but emerged cheerful, ‘a little wiser and full of hope’, recounting how she recited poetry by heart, took imaginary walks through remembered cities and did complex calculations on an abacus made out of stale bread.
She was a learned woman and aged over 60 when she was captured, so she had enough in her head to keep her going. She was very much an individual.
Are the rest of us these days? Or is a world of instant information and opinion making us abandon creative individuality and develop a ‘hive mind’, a mass groupthink, as we fall in line with a blur of others in our chosen media echo-chamber?
eureka moments do not, Harris points out, occur at conference tables: great thinkers have always needed solitude.
And then there is the chilling remark made at the Nuremberg Trials by Hitler’s arms minister Albert Speer, who said: ‘Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to submit them to the will of one man.’
And that was half a century before the internet. Indeed, most of this fascinating book is concerned with our dependence on electronic media: Twitter addiction, rolling news, emojis that ‘scratch out the individual voice and offer a limited shopping list of feelings’.
If there is a flaw with this book it’s that, compared to the average mid-life reader, Harris has been borderline barmy in his screen-addiction in the past, unwilling to go anywhere without Google Maps or internet access. When he goes to an island
for a week alone without his phone, it is a very big deal indeed. He is nervous of the dark — there is ‘something utterly impossible about the night if one is not used to it’ — he misses Google and finds, staring at the sea, that he ‘keeps wanting to change channel, but the same water goes on and on . . . torture’.
But good for him. While he may be moving from one extreme to the other, he beautifully expresses the importance and experience of liberation from the battery-hen life of constant connection and crowds.
He quotes Picasso, who said computers were boring because they ‘only give answers’ and don’t ask new questions. He explores artificial intelligence and concludes that we are better.
Wild nature is important, not least because it is not impressed by us. He shakes his head over our ‘nature deficit disorder’ and the way that ‘we abhor the disconnection that the woods, the desert, the glacier threaten us with, in their heartless way . . . those who wander into the wild are lucky if they’re only considered weird’.
Even walking through a crowded city there are ways to express that lonely self-ownership.
Another of his heroes is Quentin Crisp, whose camp, public flamboyance earned him beatings in the street.
Crisp kept up his defiant style all his life, and as Harris admiringly points out: ‘To be truly stylish (as opposed to being merely “in style”, which is the opposite) is to be unabashedly one’s self, without reference to the fashions and demands of a sweltering crowd.’