Silence in the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge
The book finds a relationship between silence and such misty qualities as wonder, curiosity, and creation — qualities, Kagge fears, that are also being lost.
Silence, we’re told, is golden. It can weigh heavy. It is telling or deafening, breathtaking and stifling. It is both a blessing and a crime. It speaks volumes. Norwegian publisher and adventurer Erling Kagge sees it, like the old Coca-Cola slogan, as a pause that refreshes. It gives us a chance to rediscover the things that bring us joy. It’s the place, he states, where the world’s hidden secrets reside. He also believes that, under an onslaught of humming technology, it’s going extinct. That doesn’t bother him, even as he admits he has a “primal need” for silence. He knows how to find it within.
Kagge’s small book, with its few stark photos and illustrations, is more fizzy than the armful of others published on the subject in the last few years. It’s less focused on science, engineering, and noise than George Prochnik’s acoustical study In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise or George Michelsen Foy’s Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, two excellent volumes from 2010. Kagge’s book is a quieter, inward gaze at silence. It finds a relationship between silence and such misty qualities as wonder, curiosity, and creation — qualities, he fears, that are also being lost. Kagge travels easily between the physical and metaphysical. Much of his relative experience comes from long, often solo treks across frozen terrain. Silence follows him back to civilization. When he’s “unable to walk, climb or sail away from the world” he shuts out the “traffic noise and thoughts, music and machinery, iPhones and snow ploughs” and finds silence inside himself. “You don’t have to go to Sri Lanka” to find silence, he writes, “you can experience it in your bathtub.”
This casual, New Age approach to exploring one of life’s most encompassing mysteries can be a blemish on what is otherwise well thoughtout. Kagge’s monologue is widely informed, and not trivially. He quotes philosophers Heidegger, Seneca, Pascal, and Wittgenstein, as well as composer John Cage, novelist David Foster Wallace, and the historic Norwegian explorer and champion of refugees Fridtjof Nansen. He interviews a “world-class football player” about the noiseless space in which play happens, even as the crowd roars. He talks to tech magnate Elon Musk, who laughs at the mention of silence.
The book’s 33 short chapters seek to answer three questions that Kagge develops after conversations about silence with his teenage daughters and other young adults: What is it? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever? His answers to the first question transcend noiseless definitions based on sound’s absence. Kagge grants silence presence. It must “speak.” His best stories address the second question, recounting his own far-flung mountaineering and polar expeditions plus other enviable experiences, such as hearing the sound of a whale’s breath as it swims in tandem with his boat on a solo sailing journey. These adventures contrast with more noisy urban outings, including an illegal wee-hours climb to the top of New York’s Williamsburg Bridge and an underground journey through Manhattan via its gurgling sewers.
The most gripping tale is the one he uses to lure his three daughters into a discussion of his belief that the world’s secrets are hidden in silence. His daughters say that silence is fine when you’re sad but otherwise mostly useless. He wants them to feel its wonder, the kind he saw in them when they were small. He tells of climbing past the bodies of two friends he had last seen 22 years ago at the place where they died — near the summit of Everest, “freeze-dried” and “looking no different,” lying in silence amid shrieking winds, thunderous storms, and the infrequent perfect stillness. He tells how one had used his last moments to contact his pregnant wife via satellite phone to decide on a name for their expected child. The other died hearing only his thoughts. The story is met with an unusual quiet, which is only interrupted by the ping of a smartphone.
Kagge’s attempts to answer the third question are the least satisfying. Attaching value to silence is a bit suspect when it’s couched in quasi-spiritual assumptions about maintaining wonder or the world’s “hidden secrets.” What are these secrets, exactly? On the other hand, the author is good at wandering off, letting his thinking take him where it will. There is solid material here, like Kagge’s departures on the “dopamine loop,” luxury, and the ways technology seeks to control us through sound. He makes readers share his wonder and curiosity and agree with him that the world does, indeed, have hidden secrets. He frequently answers all three questions at once, often in a single exposition, as he does when he writes of gods who come in thunderclaps and gods who come in silence. Before we’ve finished the book’s first page, we know which one Kagge prefers. — Bill Kohlhaase