Robert Lynd
Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in stillness. In the interval he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and there are few things of which he stands in more fear than of the absence of noise. Even his conversation is in great measure a desparate attempt to prevent a dreadful silence. If he is introduced to a fellow mortal, and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a worthless person, and is full of envy of the emptiest-headed chatterbox. He knows that 99 per cent of human conversation means no more than the buzzing of a fly, but he longs to join in the buzz and to prove that he is a man and not a waxwork figure. The object of conversation is, not for the most part, to communicate ideas; it is to keep up the buzzing sound. There are, it must be admitted, different qualities of buzz; there is even a buzz that is as exasperating as the continuous ping of a mosquito. But at a dinner-party one would rather be a mosquito than a mute. Most buzzing, fortunately, is agreeable to the ear, and some of it is agreeable even to the mind. He would be a foolish man, however, who waited until he had a wise thought to take part in the buzzing with his neighbours. Those who despise the weather as a conversational opening seem to me to be ignorant of the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. Some of them are content if they are merely allowed to go on making a noise into other people's ears, though they have nothing to tell them except that they have seen two or three new plays or that they had bad food in a Swiss hotel. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing at immense length, they justly plume themselves on their success as conversationalists. I have heard of a young man holding up the monologue of a prince among modern wits for half an hour in order to tell us absolutely nothing about himself with opulent long-windedness. None of us except the young man himself liked it, but he looked as happy as if he had had a crown on his head.
Many of us, indeed, do not enjoy conversation unless it is we ourselves who are making the most conspicuous noise. This, I think, is a vice in conversation, but it has its origin in a natural hatred of silence. The young man was so much afraid of silence that he dared not risk being silent himself lest a universal silence should follow. If he failed as a talker, it was because he did not sufficiently realise that conversation should be not only a buzz but a sympathetic buzz. That is why the weather is so useful a subject. It brings people at once to the experience which is generally shared and enables them, as it were, to buzz on the same note. Having achieved this harmony, they advance by miraculous stages to other sympathies, and, as note succeeds note, a pleasant and varied little melody of conversation is made, as satisfying to the ear and mind as the music of a humming-top. The discovery of new notes of sympathy is the secret of good conversation. It is because this is necessary to good conversation that a conversation of a party of three is so often a failure. Two of them discover a note of sympathy and they begin to buzz on it enthusiastically, forgetful of the fact that it is an occasion not for a double but for a triple buzz. Two of them, perhaps, have been at the same college of the same university. They go on for an hour happily sharing experiences in sentences like "You remember old Crocker?" "You remember the day he --" "You remember the night he stole the policeman's helmet" "But the funniest thing of all was the day he threw the bowl of tulips out of the window and nearly brained old --" (naming a famous professor of Greek). Reminiscences are the best conversation in the world for two; they warm the heart and excite the brain like wine. But the third man is all the more conscious of being out in the cold, because these names and events, which are a sort of algebraic symbols of the emotions to them, are to him meaningless. He does not know who "old Towser" was, or "old Billy Tubbs" or "old Snorter Richardson". He smiles mechanically as the others laugh with dreamier and dreamier eyes over incidents that convey all the fun of youth to them but that to him seem mere inanities of the memory. A conversation of this kind is bad, indeed, because it condemns the third man to the torture of compulsory silence. You may have an excellent conversation of three where one man is voluntarily silent, but you cannot have good conversation where one of the three is necessarily silent.
It is not only in our social life, however, that we dread silence. We love noise more than we know, even when no other human being is present. When we go from town to live in the country we deceive ourselves if we think we are doing so in order to exchange noise for quietness. We go ino the country, not in order to escape from noise, but in search of a different kind of noise. Sit in a country garden in May and you will notice that the noise is continuous. The birds are as loquacious as women: the bees are as inimical to silence as children. Cocks crow, hens cackle, dogs bark, sheep baa, cartwheels crunch, and the whole day passes in a succession of sounds which would drive us to distraction if we were really devotees of silence. When evening falls, and the voice of the last cuckoo fades into a universal stillness, we are aware of a new awe as of something supernatural. The fear of the dark is largely a fear of silence. It is difficult to believe that the world is entirely uninhabited, and, if it is not filled with the noises of men and animals, we begin -- at least, a good many of us do -- to suspect the silent presence of something unseen and terrible. Noise is companionship, and I remember that I, as a child, liked even the ticking of a clock in the bedroom. How good it was, too, to open the bedroom window and hear the pleasant prose of a corn-crake coming from the meadows through the darkness! There are sounds that are terrifying at night, but they are chiefly so because of the stillness that is broken by them. The breathing of a cow behind a hedge, as you pass along a silent road at midnight, may startle you, but it is not the cow, it is the silence, that has startled you. If Nature, indeed, could contrive to maintain all her busy sounds through the night, darkness would lose more than half its terrors.
For complete silence produces feelings of awe in us even in the full blaze of day. If you could imagine yourself the last living thing on earth but the plants, and if you knew that you were immortal and secure from danger for ever, what horror would you feel of a world in which there was no sound but the sound of your own feet or of your own voice if you had the heart to use it! If there were birds and dogs and cats and cows and sheep, you might endure your solitude with philosophy. I should not care for myself even then, but I should suffer less than if I were the last living creature on a silent globe, on which a motionless sea never broke the stillness on any shore. We speak of the silence of the grave, and without noise the world would be no better than a grave. To survive alone upon its lifeless surface would be to be buried alive, and most of us, if we were given the choice, would commit suicide in order to escape it. This is not to say we never enjoy the awfulness of silence. Travellers in the mountains and among the snows, discoverers of dead and deserted cities, can thrill us with their descriptions of the profound stillness of the scenes, as though to penetrate into such silence were to step into a new world. Silence such as this keys up to unaccustomed excitements and susceptibilities. London seen from Westminster bridge in the silence of dawn moved Wordsworth with a majesty unknown in the busy clamour of noon. In silence we seem to approach the border of some reality that has escaped us in the din of common life. Hence it is that, if we go into a cathedral, we are offended by those who bring into it noise and restlessness. The cathedral moves us most deeply in perfect stillness. It is no mere superstition that bids us be silent or, if we must speak, lower our voices to a whisper. We cannot even see the cathedral so that its beauty passes into the imagination and the memory save in perfect silence.
Certain religious bodies have recognised the value of silence, and mystics have told us that it is through speech that we arrive at a knowledge of the secret of life. Certainly the increase in the noisiness of mankind does not seem to lead to any great increase of wisdom. Cynics are doubtful wheter any useful end is served by the ceremony of the Two Minutes' Silence that has now become an annual event in England and some other countries on Armistice Day; but having been in a London street when all the traffic died down into perfect stillness, and every human being in sight stood motionless as a stone in a silent world, I, like a million others have felt the spell of the transformation. London of the bus and dray and warehouse seemed to be touched with a mystery and strangeness that meant more to the imagination than the hooting of horns and the hurry of trampling feet. One aged man, indeed, did advance through the deathlike stillness of the figures of his fellow creatures -- an aged man in a faded bowler and with a pipe in his mouth. I do not know whether he even noticed that men and women had suddenly become statues and that the traffic of the streets was as still as the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. There was no sound on earth for a time but the whisper and squeaking of the old man's boots becoming less and less as it disappeared into the distance. Instead of breaking the silence, it seemed to intensify it. And no one even turned a head to look at him. Perhaps, he had never hear of Armistice Day. Perhaps -- lucky man -- he had never heard even of the War. But how typical he was of his kind in his incapacity for remaining still! The rest of us, it is true, can succeed in remaining silent for two minutes. But, at the sound of the gun, with what a cheerful tumult we rush back again into the clamour of ordinary life!
Silence
Robert Lynd
Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in stillness. In the interval he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and there are few things of which he stands in more fear than of the absence of noise. Even his conversation is in great measure a desparate attempt to prevent a dreadful silence. If he is introduced to a fellow mortal, and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a worthless person, and is full of envy of the emptiest-headed chatterbox. He knows that 99 per cent of human conversation means no more than the buzzing of a fly, but he longs to join in the buzz and to prove that he is a man and not a waxwork figure. The object of conversation is, not for the most part, to communicate ideas; it is to keep up the buzzing sound. There are, it must be admitted, different qualities of buzz; there is even a buzz that is as exasperating as the continuous ping of a mosquito. But at a dinner-party one would rather be a mosquito than a mute. Most buzzing, fortunately, is agreeable to the ear, and some of it is agreeable even to the mind. He would be a foolish man, however, who waited until he had a wise thought to take part in the buzzing with his neighbours. Those who despise the weather as a conversational opening seem to me to be ignorant of the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. Some of them are content if they are merely allowed to go on making a noise into other people's ears, though they have nothing to tell them except that they have seen two or three new plays or that they had bad food in a Swiss hotel. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing at immense length, they justly plume themselves on their success as conversationalists. I have heard of a young man holding up the monologue of a prince among modern wits for half an hour in order to tell us absolutely nothing about himself with opulent long-windedness. None of us except the young man himself liked it, but he looked as happy as if he had had a crown on his head.
Many of us, indeed, do not enjoy conversation unless it is we ourselves who are making the most conspicuous noise. This, I think, is a vice in conversation, but it has its origin in a natural hatred of silence. The young man was so much afraid of silence that he dared not risk being silent himself lest a universal silence should follow. If he failed as a talker, it was because he did not sufficiently realise that conversation should be not only a buzz but a sympathetic buzz. That is why the weather is so useful a subject. It brings people at once to the experience which is generally shared and enables them, as it were, to buzz on the same note. Having achieved this harmony, they advance by miraculous stages to other sympathies, and, as note succeeds note, a pleasant and varied little melody of conversation is made, as satisfying to the ear and mind as the music of a humming-top. The discovery of new notes of sympathy is the secret of good conversation. It is because this is necessary to good conversation that a conversation of a party of three is so often a failure. Two of them discover a note of sympathy and they begin to buzz on it enthusiastically, forgetful of the fact that it is an occasion not for a double but for a triple buzz. Two of them, perhaps, have been at the same college of the same university. They go on for an hour happily sharing experiences in sentences like "You remember old Crocker?" "You remember the day he --" "You remember the night he stole the policeman's helmet" "But the funniest thing of all was the day he threw the bowl of tulips out of the window and nearly brained old --" (naming a famous professor of Greek). Reminiscences are the best conversation in the world for two; they warm the heart and excite the brain like wine. But the third man is all the more conscious of being out in the cold, because these names and events, which are a sort of algebraic symbols of the emotions to them, are to him meaningless. He does not know who "old Towser" was, or "old Billy Tubbs" or "old Snorter Richardson". He smiles mechanically as the others laugh with dreamier and dreamier eyes over incidents that convey all the fun of youth to them but that to him seem mere inanities of the memory. A conversation of this kind is bad, indeed, because it condemns the third man to the torture of compulsory silence. You may have an excellent conversation of three where one man is voluntarily silent, but you cannot have good conversation where one of the three is necessarily silent.
It is not only in our social life, however, that we dread silence. We love noise more than we know, even when no other human being is present. When we go from town to live in the country we deceive ourselves if we think we are doing so in order to exchange noise for quietness. We go ino the country, not in order to escape from noise, but in search of a different kind of noise. Sit in a country garden in May and you will notice that the noise is continuous. The birds are as loquacious as women: the bees are as inimical to silence as children. Cocks crow, hens cackle, dogs bark, sheep baa, cartwheels crunch, and the whole day passes in a succession of sounds which would drive us to distraction if we were really devotees of silence. When evening falls, and the voice of the last cuckoo fades into a universal stillness, we are aware of a new awe as of something supernatural. The fear of the dark is largely a fear of silence. It is difficult to believe that the world is entirely uninhabited, and, if it is not filled with the noises of men and animals, we begin -- at least, a good many of us do -- to suspect the silent presence of something unseen and terrible. Noise is companionship, and I remember that I, as a child, liked even the ticking of a clock in the bedroom. How good it was, too, to open the bedroom window and hear the pleasant prose of a corn-crake coming from the meadows through the darkness! There are sounds that are terrifying at night, but they are chiefly so because of the stillness that is broken by them. The breathing of a cow behind a hedge, as you pass along a silent road at midnight, may startle you, but it is not the cow, it is the silence, that has startled you. If Nature, indeed, could contrive to maintain all her busy sounds through the night, darkness would lose more than half its terrors.
For complete silence produces feelings of awe in us even in the full blaze of day. If you could imagine yourself the last living thing on earth but the plants, and if you knew that you were immortal and secure from danger for ever, what horror would you feel of a world in which there was no sound but the sound of your own feet or of your own voice if you had the heart to use it! If there were birds and dogs and cats and cows and sheep, you might endure your solitude with philosophy. I should not care for myself even then, but I should suffer less than if I were the last living creature on a silent globe, on which a motionless sea never broke the stillness on any shore. We speak of the silence of the grave, and without noise the world would be no better than a grave. To survive alone upon its lifeless surface would be to be buried alive, and most of us, if we were given the choice, would commit suicide in order to escape it. This is not to say we never enjoy the awfulness of silence. Travellers in the mountains and among the snows, discoverers of dead and deserted cities, can thrill us with their descriptions of the profound stillness of the scenes, as though to penetrate into such silence were to step into a new world. Silence such as this keys up to unaccustomed excitements and susceptibilities. London seen from Westminster bridge in the silence of dawn moved Wordsworth with a majesty unknown in the busy clamour of noon. In silence we seem to approach the border of some reality that has escaped us in the din of common life. Hence it is that, if we go into a cathedral, we are offended by those who bring into it noise and restlessness. The cathedral moves us most deeply in perfect stillness. It is no mere superstition that bids us be silent or, if we must speak, lower our voices to a whisper. We cannot even see the cathedral so that its beauty passes into the imagination and the memory save in perfect silence.
Certain religious bodies have recognised the value of silence, and mystics have told us that it is through speech that we arrive at a knowledge of the secret of life. Certainly the increase in the noisiness of mankind does not seem to lead to any great increase of wisdom. Cynics are doubtful wheter any useful end is served by the ceremony of the Two Minutes' Silence that has now become an annual event in England and some other countries on Armistice Day; but having been in a London street when all the traffic died down into perfect stillness, and every human being in sight stood motionless as a stone in a silent world, I, like a million others have felt the spell of the transformation. London of the bus and dray and warehouse seemed to be touched with a mystery and strangeness that meant more to the imagination than the hooting of horns and the hurry of trampling feet. One aged man, indeed, did advance through the deathlike stillness of the figures of his fellow creatures -- an aged man in a faded bowler and with a pipe in his mouth. I do not know whether he even noticed that men and women had suddenly become statues and that the traffic of the streets was as still as the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. There was no sound on earth for a time but the whisper and squeaking of the old man's boots becoming less and less as it disappeared into the distance. Instead of breaking the silence, it seemed to intensify it. And no one even turned a head to look at him. Perhaps, he had never hear of Armistice Day. Perhaps -- lucky man -- he had never heard even of the War. But how typical he was of his kind in his incapacity for remaining still! The rest of us, it is true, can succeed in remaining silent for two minutes. But, at the sound of the gun, with what a cheerful tumult we rush back again into the clamour of ordinary life!