#50: Silence
If darkness is the absence of light, then silence is the absence of sound. We have all experienced the natural phenomenon that our eyes adapt to darkness over time.
What about our ability to cope with various degrees of sound and silence?
More than 300 years ago, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal would have insisted that there was no such thing when it came to silence:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.»
What does that tell us?
Nothing much has changed since the 17th century. If anything, than we would expect the sound level to have gone up significantly since the days of Don Quixote de la Mancha.
That is definitely true when it comes to anthropophony, also known as «human-made noises». On the other hand, biophony, which is the collective sound of all living organisms, has been decreasing over time. One worrisome example would be our oceans going quiet in the wake of climate change.
The third and last category of sounds is geophony. We have all heard the sound of waves crashing on rocks or the sound of wind blowing through trees. These are all natural processes creating familiar sounds without human intervention.
While there are different categories of sounds, are there equally multiple types of silences? Can silence even be heard?
Simon and Garfunkel would “whisper in the sound of silence” in their response to that question.
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh refers to the «sound of no sound» in his book Silence - The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise. He paints the picture of the Niagara Falls freezing during a particularly cold winter and their familiar sound stopping with the water stopping to fall. Anyone used to the constant background sound of those bombastic volumes of water would have suddenly heard the sound of no sound for the very first time.
This leads to a truly fascinating question.
Can we learn to hear what we don’t hear?
Assuming for a moment that we practiced the art of hearing what hasn’t yet been heard, could we then also improve our ability to see what hasn’t been seen before? What about saying what has never been said?
This is what 8 people hear when on a Zoom call at the same time:
«too much»
«interference»
«my other voice»
«cacophony»
«emergence»
«the past»
«call of the wild»
«computer fan»
What do you hear right now?
