Savoring the Sounds of Silence

Alan S. Miller

April 28, 2003

Whenever I go to the movies these days, I feel at times as if my hearing—and perhaps my mind—is going to be permanently damaged.

“That little bomb, signifying a probably distressing noise level, should be displayed in so very many areas of our common life today.”

The full surround, totally blasting sound systems in modern movie theaters are bad enough during the feature films. It’s hard to find a movie today without non-stop explosions, car crashes, machine gun fire, the screaming of every sort of vehicle and aircraft.

Even worse are the previews when the amplifiers are cranked up to what must be full capacity.

One recent day, when we saw a show at a local Marin theater, we retreated to our principal line of defense when the noise gets to be too much—the old “fingers in the ears” gambit.

Happily, the restaurant critics in the newspapers now give a sound rating for the restaurants they review. When there is a bomb in the graphic, that’s a warning sign!

That little bomb, signifying a probably distressing noise level, should be displayed in so very many areas of our common life today.

Why is it that the sound volume on the television increases exponentially whenever the commercials come on? Well, I think I actually understand why that happens!

Unless you drive one of the very expensive cars with great sound proofing, even highway noise can be unbearable. It’s not only the volume of traffic and all the related vehicle noises, it’s the boom box tape decks that blare out their earsplitting sounds.

I used to be wakened in the morning when the newspaper person (someone with musical tastes quite different from my own) had his radio going full blast at 6:00 a.m. when he tossed the paper in front of the house.

Happily, our Marin downtown areas do not have the screaming noise levels of San Francisco or Oakland. But I often wonder how people who live in the heart of our great cities are able to maintain their psychological equilibrium with all the urban clatter.

It does seem today that there is a kind of screaming for attention everywhere, a noisy pleading that characterizes virtually every effort to sell products or to otherwise get our attention.

An old friend of mine, a long-time editor with a major publishing house, recently noted that book publishers now don’t like to take too many chances publishing serious or unusual books. Books, he says, “don’t fit comfortably in the present, ever-widening entertainment package. Everything’s screaming, and it’s hard to make books scream loud enough to be competitive.”

Even the quality of our conversations seems to be changing. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote a lovely little essay titled “The Ministry of Listening” in which he characterized most of our traditional two-way conversations as often being essentially one-sided.

Most of us never really listen to our neighbor, he suggests, because we are so busy thinking about what we are going to say next. And it can be a ministry—a genuine service of love—to actually forget ourselves for the moment, and be quiet, and simply listen to the person we are with.

The great humorist Fred Allen once said that “Fifty years from now people are going to have eyes the sized of cantaloupes and brains the size of split peas because there is so much today for the eyes and so little for the brain.” The point applies, I think, not only for the visual insults of contemporary life but also for our auditory intakes.

Now it may not be that a high noise level can always be positively correlated with ignorance and avarice. But I suspect there is a connection. If you can’t convince the consumer with logic, then simply overwhelm him with noise. And, as with so many other things in life, less is usually more.

I am also convinced that every one of us needs a bit of silence—sometimes even solitude—in our everyday lives. So many of us seem to be afraid of spending time alone—really alone, just with ourselves.

We somehow need the stimulation of other people or things if we are to feel good about ourselves.

Barbara and I have learned something about the importance of silence and solitude from the Benedictine sisters who support their work with the poor in Cuernavaca, Mexico by running a retreat center.

The sisters work hard but have a good time in their free hours. They sing and dance—and even drank beer and ate hot dogs with us on one 4th of July a few years ago. But in every day there are required periods for silence. No talking before or during breakfast. Regular periods for meditation. No conversations after a certain time in the evening.

What these exercises do—and have done for thousands of years for folks in meditative communities—is to force a person to simply be at home with him or her self, to reflect on what this business of life is all about.

That’s something each one of us needs today, I think, if the screaming all around us is not to wear away our sensitivity and diminish our ability to think and act creatively.

Copyright © 2005 Alan S. Miller
Last updated: March 20, 2005