Learning to inhabit silence — with Stan Grant

There is no doubt that silence can be a form of cowardice: a refusal to speak up or speak out on behalf of others, an unwillingness to join our voices with theirs lest we be made to bear their punishment. In such a case, we could say, the absence of words is not empty but full — full of self-protection, of ego.

Being silenced, in turn, can crush the soul — to have our words treated with contempt; to speak into the void, knowing that there is no common medium that will bear our plaintive cries to the ears of another; to be consigned to inexpressiveness, to moral suffocation; to be rendered powerless, without voice, without agency.

There is the silence of mute incomprehension — to find ourselves overcome or overwhelmed by grief, by loss, by the injustice of the world. In such instances, it’s not so much that we choose silence as it is that silence seizes us. At such moments, it would feel obscene, indecent, to say anything.

These are three forms of silence that are like wounds or bruises on the soul. They may simply be, but none of them is desirable. But while there are forms of silence that are imposed, there are also forms of silence that are adopted. Even cultivated.

Consider the world envisaged by Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 — a world in which noise and incessant speech are compulsory. It is a world in which the stillness that often accompanies solitude, is made nearly impossible. For even when someone is alone, there are little electronic thimbles called “seashells”, radio devices that beam talk and noise and talk and noise directly into the ears. It’s unsurprising that, in Bradbury’s world, a world without silence is a world in which reading impossible and books are redundant. And the struggle of the novel’s central characters is how to cultivate something like a capacity for interiority.

But fully a century before Bradbury’s novel, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard lamented a prevailing condition of “talkativeness”, of “chatter”. And what is it to chatter, Kierkegaard asked?

“It is the annulment of the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can speak essentially, can act essentially. Silence is inwardness. Chattering gets ahead of essential speaking, and giving utterance to reflection has a weakening effect on action by getting ahead of it … When individuals are not turned inward in quiet contentment, in inner satisfaction, in religious sensitiveness … then chattering begins … But chattering dreads the moment of silence, which would reveal the emptiness.”

Interestingly enough, Kierkegaard said that the phenomenon of chatter began with the advent of the popular press, which gave so many people so very much to talk about, to the point of imposing on citizens an obligation to “have an opinion” on everything.

And perhaps it is the imposition of chatter, the expectation, the demand even, that we speak, that we make ourselves heard, that we hope to escape by cultivating a capacity for silence. For it is only when speech emerges from silence that that speech can have any weight. In such an instance, our words bear in them the silence out of which they emerged.

In our time, there is an expectation of expression, of speech, of noise. We are repeatedly told that “silence is violence” or that “silence is complicity”, that action is demanded and that inaction is “culpable”. And there’s no doubt this can be true. But it is also the case that speech can be little more than self-assertion, the bringing of ego to bear upon the world. Silence, by contrast, can be a way of cultivating attentiveness, of practising responsiveness, of tarrying with contradictions or uncertainty, of deepening speech rather than adding to the cacophony of opinion.

But perhaps most importantly, speech that emerges from silence can create opportunities for moral encounter and invitations for mutual understanding, as opposed to the zero-sum dynamics of self-assertion and persuasion.

Guest: Stan Grant is Distinguished Professor at Charles Sturt University and the Director of Yindyamarra Nguluway. He is a theologian, a prolific author, and he recently delivered the Simone Weil Lectures on Human Value at Australian Catholic University on silence, poetry and music.