silence as luxury good

Chloe Schama writes about silence as a “luxury product”:

But the impossibility of silence says something about why it remains so alluring. Noise-related annoyances stem from emotion—frustration, disorientation, fear—as much as actual audible irritation. During late nineteenth-century industrialization, “The noise of [the railroad’s] steam whistle,” writes Emily Thompson in The Soundscape of Modernity, “was disturbing not only for its loudness but also for its unfamiliarity.” When a 1926 study determined that an individual horse and carriage was actually louder than an individual automobile, The New York Times perceptively responded that the it was not the nature of the sounds that was the trouble, but the fact that “the ear has not learned how to handle them.” In a 1929 poll of New Yorkers, noises identified as “machine-age inventions” were the ones that bothered them most. And by the late 1920s, activists and engineers had a way to quantify their irritations. In 1929, the decibel was established as standard unit of sound. Science contributes to noisiness in more than just audible output: New means of measuring heightened peoples’ awareness of their aggravation.

For what it’s worth, I wrote about this topic in my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, at first in the context of the history of reading aloud:

This much is clear: the more noise surrounds us, the harder it is to read aloud. Reading aloud, and still more murmured reading, requires a quiet enough environment that you can hear what you speak; otherwise it is a pointless activity. And it might be worth pausing here to note that city life has always been loud — that is not an artifact of modern times. Bruce R. Smith’s extraordinary study The Acoustic World of Early Modern England gives us a full and rather disorienting sense of just how cacophonous the world was for many of our ancestors half-a-millennium ago. And Diana Webb in her book Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages argues, convincingly, that many people, men and women alike, sought monastic life less from piety than from a desperate need to find refuge from all the racket. Maybe they just wanted to find a place where they could be left alone to read.

The conclusion we may draw from all this is simply this: the noisier the environment, the more readers are driven to be silent. It is only in “privacy and solitude” that reading aloud or murmuring can ever be a reasonable option, and rarely have our ancestors had that option. The boy trying to study at the kitchen table while the clamor of family life goes on around him is a typical figure in the history of reading. No one could plausibly claim that we late-moderns are uniquely challenged in this respect: surely a higher percentage of human beings today have regular access to silence that at any time in human history. Most Americans and Western Europeans, and many people elsewhere — not all, mind you — live in environments with quiet rooms, or quiet corners. And many who lack quiet homes have had access to libraries, which have for centuries been dedicated, as it were, to silence.

For the thrilling conclusion of my thoughts on this subject, you’ll just have to buy the book. (Spoiler alert: not everyone wants to keep libraries quiet.)

the sound of silence

There appears to be no end in sight of essays deploring what Modern Technology is depriving us of. Some of these are right, but not many of them, and the vast majority that are wrong — or greatly overstated, anyway — go awry because of their lack of historical context. Take this essay by William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone.

I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she'll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?

To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value.

I don't think this complaint is wholly misplaced — there is a kind of obsessive connectivity fed by our current social networks — but it’s vital to understand that solitude, like silence, have rarely been available to human beings. Try reading Bruce Smith’s extraordinary (though too jargony) account of The Acoustic World of Early Modern England if you’re prone to think of the pre-industrial Western world as a silent one. Especially in cities, the noise — often literally deafening, in areas where blacksmiths and other craftsmen lived — went on twenty-four hours a day; though of course things were quieter in the countryside.

But not more solitary. In country and city alike, whole families slept in single rooms, often sharing those rooms with animals. Only the enormously wealthy could spread out into multiple rooms. (It’s worth remembering that throughout human history the vast majority of couples have had to have sex in the same room, and often in the same bed, with other people.) And all of these noisy and crowded conditions that we see in our studies of the European past are, of course, present-day realities for many people today; perhaps most humans on the planet.

As Diana Webb has recently shown in her new book Privacy and Solitude: The Medieval Discovery of Personal Space — reviewed here — medieval Europeans in general simply accepted their lack of “personal space,” but others valued it and desired it sufficiently to retreat from the world, as hermits and anchorites, in order to get it. But these were necessarily special cases. Until the nineteenth century in Europe and other economically developed parts of the world, very few people have been able to find either solitude or silence. (Deresiewicz actually acknowledges this, though without seeming to be aware that such facts compromise his argument.)

If our technologies are making solitude and silence harder to come by, they are merely returning us to the condition of our ancestors and many of our global neighbors. Welcome to the human race, then.

I recently wrote an essay for First Things — not yet online — about a movement in contemporary evangelicalism calling itself “the new monasticism.” But it seems to me that such a movement will truly be like the great traditions of monasticism if its adherents are willing to pay a great price in order to acquire silence and solitude.