Variations on the Theme of Silence Why silence is not the absence of noise but its contrary twin

My boyfriend was a moody architect who wore black leather jackets and blared Nine Inch Nails. I worked for a broke little magazine so stressful the production manager threw her phone at the floor and screamed “Fuck” every afternoon at three, clockwork. About to turn thirty, I was beginning to hate my life.

In need of silence, I booked a room at a Trappist monastery. The following Friday, I snuck out of work early and headed south, not realizing that Ava, Missouri, was four hours away, down at the border of Arkansas. I sped down the interstate, glided off the exit ramp—and got stuck behind a livestock trailer. For the next hour, as we crept along a narrow country road, the wide face of a brown and white cow gazed back at me. Its fuzzy ears stuck straight out, like they had been glued on at the last minute. Lashes curled above steady brown eyes that held a lifetime’s observations.

There was no way to pass that trailer. I know because I kept trying, agitated, for the first three miles. The cow watched. Where it was heading, how idyllic or ominous its destination, I had no idea; nor did the cow know. Sighing, I downshifted, resigning myself to lost time. The cow held my gaze. The future fell away.

Slowly, a calm stole over me. By the time the road widened, I had no desire to go around. The placid look on that cow’s face—wordless, accepting—had righted my universe.

(Shutterstock)

• • •

I reached the monastery more than ready to obey its Rule of Silence. The cow had prepared me. No TV, phones, or email? Sweet relief. Only the schedule gave me pause: rising at four in the morning for vigils, then returning to the chapel at the first sliver of dawn for lauds? Sleep-deprived by deadlines and unnerved by a tense breakup with Nine Inch Nails, I was already planning an alarm malfunction when Father Ted showed me to my room.

“No need to set an alarm,” he called over his shoulder. “The bell will wake you!”

And so it did, brass crashing against brass time after time, unrelenting. I finger-combed my hair, threw a sweater over my T-shirt, and pulled on sweats that presented no challenge to celibacy. In the dark, stone-chilled chapel, I slid into the last pew and watched a young monk light candles one by one until the whole space glowed. The older monks entered and, on invisible cue, began to sing the day’s psalm in perfect unison. Each note was pure; none jostled, competing to be heard. The voices did not have to strain against accompaniment; they were the music, a tone poem flowing without punctuation’s jagged hesitations. Just a smooth rise and fall of deep, resonant voices, ordering the cosmos.

Later I would learn that Gregorian chant is based on the cadence of human breath. At the time, all I knew was that no other sound came this close to silence. The words felt like a prayer that could go on forever, old monks dropping dead and new ones slipping into their place, only God to hear their song. In its peace, space and time stood still.

The silence outside the chapel was just the opposite: alive and tingling, tuned to something deep inside me. I had expected an absence, a mortification, not this electric energy. It felt charged, like those seconds at the end of a magnificent symphony just before the audience jumps to its feet in a thunderclap of applause.

I did not yet know, on that trip, how many different kinds of silence there are, and how they can heal or harm us.

• • •

The blind double date two years later was a married friend’s idea. We were all struggling through grad school, and when she described the guy she had in mind for our other single friend, there was no denying he was perfect. Both loved Victorian homes and anything British; both were conservative and staid and proper. Andrew and I were the wild card, nothing like them and, as far as I could tell, nothing like each other, either. But for the other couple’s sake, I showed up, overcaffeinated and a little nervous, thus even ditzier than usual. Chattering about trivia, I banged my head on the pendant chandelier as I sat down. He took it all in calmly.

After lunch, we all went to the zoo—except that I could not walk any real distance, had what I would twenty years later learn was a congenital hip problem. I sank down on a low wall and told the others to go on without me; I would wait there.

Andrew settled himself next to me.

“No, no, you go on!” I urged. “See the zebras, for heaven’s sake.”

“No, this is fine. I’ll wait with you.” (Later, he would admit that he thought I was just hating the date, but since he was not sure, staying seemed more courteous.)

We chatted a bit, mainly about how cute, how obviously perfect for each other, the other two were. Then we fell silent, the spring sun warm on our shoulders, the only sounds the occasional giggling child or happy roar from the seals. Though clearly intelligent, he made no effort to dazzle me with words. Neither of us felt a need to pour chitchat into the breach.

The comfort startled me.

Still, a historian? How boring. He read, okay, but not the sort of books I loved. And what did I really know about him, anyway? He could be an ax murderer, a sociopath, a spy….

The minutes passed, and one by one, my reservations dropped away. That easy silence felt like all I needed to know.

• • •

It was good to wed, to hear and feel another presence in my home. Though I pride myself on my capacity for solitude and often hunger for it, if I am left alone too long I grow restless, turn on music, watch TV, call friends, talk to the dog. Become, in short, one of those fools I scorn: the people who cannot abide silence.

The household I grew up in was noisy with religion, my grandmother and great-aunts murmuring prayers for lost keys, temperamental furnaces, and a crashing end to any relationship they disapproved of. My-uncle-the-Jesuit (in our devout family, he was inseparable from his vocation) said Mass in the living room, in sonorous Latin. By dinnertime, holy curses rang out from the kitchen. “Jaysus, Mary and Joseph!” exclaimed my grandmother and great-aunts, appalled by one another’s deficiencies. Dessert was a round of gossip, most of it mean-spirited.

But oh, we were Catholic. Whenever tornado sirens wailed, we carried blessed candles down into the basement, and Grandpa cranked up his little black transistor radio, the weather updates echoing off damp concrete. At every commercial break, my imperious grandmother shushed him so she could summon Saint Medard, patron saint of bad storms.

These days, I own no blessed candles. Nothing is blessed anymore—or rather, everything is. Let the storms come. We might go to the basement—we did, once, my husband carrying our huge scared dog in his arms, and Buddy pushing with giant paws against two walls at right angles at the top of the stairs to avoid the descent, then scrabbling for purchase until he dislodged the waistband of Andrew’s sweatpants and Andrew had to stagger down those narrow open stairs with his pants around his knees and seventy pounds of panicked poodle in his arms. From the foot of the stairs, I watched, helpless to help. I had no special prayer to recite; I had stopped imploring God and the saints for favors, tricks, and ease. In this new silence, all I could do was laugh—and maybe that was a form of blessing, too. Because I knew he would somehow get the dog downstairs, and we would somehow all survive the storm. Or we would not. And while my grandmother would have called that God’s plan, I just call it the energy of a fast-changing universe, steadied only by love.

• • •

“Do you see them?” the old farmer asked. I squinted, then gasped as the white cross-hatch came into focus. An entire field littered with cow skeletons—skulls and long bones and stripey rib cages scattered atop clover and quackgrass and dandelion tufts. A cow cemetery? “You can take one if you want,” he said, and it felt like the best possible present. Was this desecration? Would their ancestors curse me? I took the chance, picking up a skull and running a possessive finger over its ridges and curves. Bleached by years of sunlight, it carried an old, clean peace.

Pillowing the skull in my car’s back seat, I thought of the cow who had soothed my impatience years earlier. If I ever lose my mind, I regularly reminded my husband, put me where there are cows. Left to their own devices, these calm creatures will keep vigil over their new dead, and I imagined them gathering in their cemetery. Every other animal takes the customs of its species seriously; only we humans have lost our rites. Our days are ordered by beeps and clicks and Netflix, none of it restorative.

I need, I crave, I’m obsessed with, I’ve gotta have—that secular jangle was what had driven me to the Trappists years earlier. Bad boyfriends and a hyperkinetic job were only surface irritants; I could see that now. I had turned up the world’s volume so loud, I could no longer hear my heart. Though I had no wish to return to the Catholic church, I wanted to be part of its rich silence again.

And now, for oddly similar reasons, I wanted this skull. Coveted it. Carried it the many miles home and presented it with a flourish and saw my husband’s face pale. A skull? In our garden? I nodded happily, and there stayed what was left of Elsie, or Bessie, or whatever her real, cow name was, until the bone cracked apart, crumbled into the petunias, and lent them, too, its contentment.

• • •

My mother-in-law was recovering from her second stroke. By a fluke (and what tragedy does not seem a fluke?) it had struck the exact same spot as the first but on the opposite side of the brain. This new stroke had zapped Jo’s ability to speak, though her mind was as fresh and sharp as ever.

Five years earlier, when my mom’s lungs had collapsed with Legionnaire’s disease, she was placed in a coma. A twilight state, they called it, such a lovely phrase for purgatory. The illness had struck so fast, there was still a message from her on my phone. I pressed play and heard her voice, light and reassuring, telling me she was fine and not to worry, probably just bronchitis. Sickened by the contrast, I pressed save with a shaky finger.

Years later, when my father-in-law was dying, I sat by his bed with a tape recorder, tugging for his happiest memories, wanting to save his voice. After he died, Andrew could not bear to listen to the tape and hear his dad’s ghost, present without being there.

Now, home after a day at the hospital with his mother, my husband sits down hard, as though someone just cut the strings that held him. “I have just realized,” he begins, so little breath to it that I have to bend close to hear him. He pauses, draws in more air. “I have just realized that I will never hear my mother’s voice again.”

• • •

Voices carry. They bring you warmth, amusement, exasperation, reassurance. Never would I want to silence someone I loved. But when AI reconstructs our dead, pulling their favorite words from a database, finding their precise inflections, I cringe. The sound of someone’s voice is what we yearn for, almost more than their touch, but a disembodied voice can only be a delusion.

And what of a body without a voice? In the year after her stroke, I sat with Jo while she did the speech therapist’s drills. When her frustration mounted, we tried singing the exercises, which sailed her past the blockage. “Happy Birthday to you,” she sang on my birthday, unprompted. The words came out almost whole, and she punched the air with her fist.

But every gain would vanish the next day, as though someone had lifted the plastic sheet on one of those old Magic Slate writing pads and cleared all the words. Finally we gave up and bought her spiral notebooks. At least she could pour out her feelings, I thought, knowing this was how I would cope. But Jo’s thoughts sometimes flitted away before she could get them down, and her writing faltered, slanted off the page, grew fainter and smaller with every stroke. We tried a text-to-speech computer, but her typing mistakes made it speak an embarrassing gibberish. She waved it away and settled for printing stripped-down sentences in all caps.

Then the change began.

Jo’s emotions intensified—or seemed to, with no words to dilute them. Her exasperations were unmistakable, and when she was happy, her smile was a kid’s open grin, turning her eyes an even brighter blue. Her hands danced in the air, eager to express her thoughts. With painfully limited options, she had found a simple eloquence.

Now I looked forward to our conversations. Meaning and emotion flew back and forth easily, free of doublespeak and the need to decode. She had shown me how rare that was, and what a grace.

• • •

A Friday night, rain slanting hard against the blackened window. We chose a silly-scary show about a monastery with a strict rule of silence—only theirs was not a turning inward to reach God. These monks kept silent because a single spoken word would release a demon from a locked chest.

Unable to speak, the investigators scribbled notes to each other, and the long stretches of quiet made the episode, demon aside, almost relaxing. Then it ended, and Andrew flipped to the news, flooding the room with hollow words. Celebs divulging their vices, scandals, and pain; influencers hawking brands; politicians congratulating themselves; competitors one-upping their rivals. All of us, releasing demons daily.

Silence can be protective. Or, it can aid evil. Silence like a cancer grows, whenever power refuses to hear truth. Silence is an unblown whistle, a disappeared activist, a dismembered journalist. Silence slides down one generation to the next, keeping pain a secret. Silence is what neighbors remember about the shooter.

“Say their names!” protesters yell every time another unarmed Black person is killed by police. Yet we choose “a moment of silence”—that brief, ludicrously inadequate compromise of creeds—for our public commemorations. Silence is complicated. In “A Film in Which I Play Everyone,” Mary Jo Bang writes, “In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it.” Does she mean that silence protects her? Clothes her and keeps her warm? Hides her, covers her up?

What we leave unsaid weighs far more than what we say. My mother used to pout, though she would never have used the word; she saw her passive sulk as a dignified refusal to fight. Or maybe she was biting back words she would regret later? Talk can be dangerous, setting or springing a trap. Once I lost a friend who must have silently objected to some belief or behavior of mine. Instead of saying so, she simply retreated, ghosting me before that was even a thing. And though it hurt, I have done the same to others, neatly avoiding any explanation. My mother’s daughter, I thought cowardice superior to conflict. Yet the silent treatment is crueller than most words, and will chill a body to the bone.

Hush money, non-disclosure contracts, secrecy oaths, and death threats—people have tried to silence each other for millennia. Yet silence reveals rather far more than it erases. Awkward pauses tell us more than the sentences that follow. Hesitations are dead giveaways, whether you are asking for the truth or a favor. Omissions can turn language into poetry—or mark its failures.

George Bernard Shaw called silence “the most perfect expression of scorn.” “Love me, hate me, but don’t be indifferent to me,” my grandmother used to mutter to my retreating grandfather’s back. Silence is the ultimate cancellation.

• • •

Some sounds terrify us. We hurry to hush a loved one’s sobs, as though dry eyes will make their misery disappear. Bailiffs move even faster to demand, “Silence in the courtroom!” Bereaved, we are silenced forever, enjoined not to “speak ill of the dead”—just when it could finally be harmless and cathartic. “It wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops,” a recently widowed friend remarked dryly. But once someone beloved is gone, people want only sweetness coating their memory. A custom designed to protect the rest of us when our turn comes.

Silence, though, can also terrify. We crave response, feedback, reassurance. Delivering tragic news, the police routinely ask, “Is there someone who can come stay with you?” They know we cannot yet bear silence; cannot be alone and lost. When my mother was dying, t’ai chi calmed me, but in the days after her death, I could not practice. Scared to feel any more, my body refused the stillness.

In this country, we pathologize the quiet, goading them into loud conformity. Grade-school report cards called me “reserved,” meaning I had best muster some social skills asap. Even in adulthood, struck shy at a party, I know that if I do not throw myself into the fray, I will be thought either haughty and aloof (if I carry myself erect) or pathetic (if I hunch into myself and hide on the darkened periphery). Silence has been framed as society’s enemy. It broods, holds hostage, cannot be trusted. Worst of all, it spells boredom. We are accustomed to entertaining ourselves by filling all the empty space with noisemakers and firecrackers.

Yet nothing is more boring than a lot of noise.

(Shutterstock)

• • •

Anyone can play John Cage’s three-movement composition 4’33.” You need only sit at the piano for thirty-three seconds, open and shut the lid, sit another hundred-sixty seconds, open and shut the lid, sit for eighty seconds, then bow and leave the stage.

Cage wanted the audience to listen to all the other sounds that surrounded this choreographed silence. “Try as we may to make a silence,” he said, “we cannot.”

So why seek the impossible? All the glorious music, conversation, and machinespeak swirling around us in a sound cloud reminds us that we are still in the game, not exiled to some green room with no audio feed. Sound is exciting—it changes the world. But it has to stop now and then. Without

spaces in between, you cannot parse the words. Without stretches of silence, you cannot hear yourself or anyone else.

• • •

Stitching quilts by hand, artist Joe Cunningham works long hours in complete silence. “It makes me feel wealthy,” he says, and I know right away what he means: that sense of abundance. Talk, after all, is cheap. In silence, time stretches out, languorous as a cat. Silence is not transactional; it is as deliberately useless as the Hanukkah candles. Because it cannot be measured, it suggests (though this is not always true) that you have enough time. It refuses to fret.

As a reporter, I know how to shut up until the quiet grows so uncomfortable that the truth bubbles up. But the minute I close my notebook, the skill dissolves. At meetings, I babble, driving my colleagues crazy with my enthusiasms. To make sure a friend knows I am not judging, I stick in too many assurances that I get it, understand completely, of course. If Andrew comes home with a problem, I rush to help and can almost see him pull back, exhausted, because now he has to bat away advice he did not want and explain why my solution might not work, and really all he wants is dinner.

Shy as a child, I waited six decades to form opinions, and now I am perhaps too eager to voice them. I also add anecdotes—I have stored up quite a few—plus anything I have read on the topic.

Craving knowledge, I too often equate it with wisdom. Yet as far as I can tell, every wisdom tradition since time began has praised silence. The stillness they urge is a letting-go, a slowing down, an unclenching of our hands and our stubborn, intractable desires. It empties us, yet is far from empty.

When sound waves rush into our ear canal like high tide, the whoosh vibrating our eardrum, we call this percussion “noise.” Silence makes no waves, so we have defined it only as an absence of noise. Silence, though, is always present. Noise is simply what obscures it.

Until this year, scientists assumed—we all assumed, without even bothering to attach words to common sense—that our brains react to the “absence” of silence as a lack, an in-between time devoid of interest. But in fact, our brain reacts to silence as though it were a song, a roar, a bang. In test after test, people fall for silence illusions (guessing a stretch of silence to be longer if it was continuous than if it was broken, for example) the same way they fall for auditory illusions. They are processing silence, just as they process noise. “I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it,” a character in one of Chaim Potok’s novels remarks. “It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”

Silence, the brain insists, has substance.

• • •

No wonder the monks pick four in the morning; it is the quietest time. Even our bodies drop their defenses, the immune system taking a quick break. Unable to sleep, I sit on our porch in the dark, letting the silence envelop me. If asked, I would describe it as soft, thick, and balmy, but I would be confusing it with the night air. Even after reading that study, I still cannot manage to define silence except by what is missing: voices, car engines, barks, birdsong, the scrape and whir of a neighbor’s chainsaw.

“The ability to relate to absence is a defining feature of all psychological creatures,” says Nico Orlandi, a philosopher of mind. “Humans, for example, are distinctive in their ability to relate to things that are not immediately present to them.”

If I met Orlandi at a party, I would toss back a glass of champagne then tell him I have no idea what “the ability to relate to absence” even means. It sounds (note that omnipresent verb) like the capacity for loneliness, but is that distinctively human? Other animals grieve, miss those who are not there, grow ill when isolated. The ability to use absence, though—now that could be a human trick. We can listen to silence and hear our thoughts rise. We can sense our brain untangling, cooling, renewing itself. And we can allow silence to deepen our compassion—which is another way of saying our humanity.

Silences that close us off, refusing connection, shoring up the ego at others’ expense—those are dead silences. But the letting-go sort, the silences that hold space or keep vigil for someone else? They are alive.

(Shutterstock)

• • •

The sight of that brown sign welcoming me to the Illinois Ozarks drops my blood pressure, and as the trees start to outnumber the houses, something tight and sad inside me unwinds. I take the back way: it winds up and down the aisles of a cemetery and then onto a road that looks like it is going nowhere, which is where I want to be. My right hip is now made of shiny white titanium, and I climb hills and scramble over rough terrain like an Alpine goat. Andrew, who spent so many nights massaging away the pain and forgiving me that first-date recalcitrance, understands my eagerness to hike, just as I understand that he would rather avoid ticks and poison ivy and prep his class lectures.

At the trailhead, I let the dog romp a bit. He dives into a pile of leaves and bops the stiff switchgrass with his nose. When I take out his lead and hold it up—no need for words—he trots back and lets me fasten us together. Then we are off, climbing over storm-struck trees and veering off the trail to explore mossy boulders that rolled down the bluff a century ago. Ferns soften the crevices of a rock wall, eating light and drinking rainfall. Birds call to one another from the hill prairies and soar across limestone glades. Rainwater pools around chinquapin oaks and shagbark trees. Celandine poppies dot the grass, but they will be gone in a week; spring is fragile. The bluffs are not. Theirs is a quiet like nothing in civilized society. A deep quiet, not silent at all, layered beneath rustlings and chirpings and tiny scampering feet, the slither of flathead and rat snakes and plains scorpions.

Most days, life’s demands come at me like flung Frisbees, but here, they cannot reach me. Here, I feel at home in a way I do not even feel at home, because here, all I need do is be. This is the silence I craved all along: not an absence of noise but a freedom from my tiny, petty self. As I move through the trees, I am listening, but not hard-focused for connotation or tone. In nature, I eavesdrop on what I once thought of as silence and realize it is only the gentle noise of a world going on without me. This world does not need me to hoist it on my shoulders, spin it dizzy, or yell instructions. I can let go.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.