‘Silence’: We Need to Turn Down the Volume

A review of ‘Silence’, by Erling Kågge; Pantheon Books, 2017.

Blaise Pascal, creator of the famous ‘wager’, said that all of man’s problems sprang from his ‘inability to sit quietly in a room alone’. Such an inability will be familiar to many of us, given how used we are to living lives brimming with stimulation. Yet Pascal saw what many before and since have also seen, which is that our deepest insights can only be received, if you like, and that requires us to put ourselves in a receptive state. We need to let our thoughts settle and our mind go silent so that something new can arise.

Erling Kågge can speak with some authority on silence, given that he once spent fifty days alone in Antarctica with a broken radio. He has also scaled Everest and been to the North Pole (which made him the first person to complete the ‘Three Poles Challenge’ on foot); written a dozen or so books; worked as a lawyer; and studied philosophy — all while becoming one of Europe’s leading contemporary art collectors. In his book, Silence: In the Age of Noise, he explores the role that quiet plays, does not play and ought to play in his life and our own if we are to live with more wisdom, dignity, and joy.

Erling Kågge can speak with some authority on silence, given that he once spent fifty days alone in Antarctica with a broken radio.

For Kågge, silence is a pressing need in our world. Traffic, sirens, notifications — we are oppressed by noise, especially if we live in an urban area. As a result, silence feels alien, even frightening, to many of us. In silence, we must learn to listen and, ultimately, accept the thoughts that make up our inner monologue. In noise, we can distract ourselves from them. But silence, Kågge writes, is not just about acceptance. It is about increasing our capacity for the things that make life meaningful: wonder, for instance, and gratitude. These feelings come from without; we do not give rise to them ourselves by an act of will. Thus, if we never put ourselves in a position to receive, we impose limits on our potential for fulfilment.

There is a thoughtful and modest quality to the prose in Silence, just as there is in Walking.

There is a necessary irony in the fact that the value of silence must be communicated by breaking or denying us that silence, yet Kågge has done a fine job of rendering his thoughts in such a way as to quiet our own. There is a thoughtful and modest quality to the prose in Silence, just as there is in Walking. It is worth noting that when Kågge, (or Pablo d’Ors, or Thich Naht Hanh, or any other champion of silence) discuss the absence of sound, they are in the main referring to the silence of our minds, and not the silence outside of ourselves, even if the latter helps to bring about the former. For Kågge, this kind of mental silence can be found even when there is outside noise. There is a humility to Kågge’s book: he is not making huge demands of us: he is only asking us to seek out a few precious moments of silence.

But makes Kågge different from d’Ors, Thomas Merton and others who have spoken of the power of silence is that he is a thoroughly outgoing and active person. He is not a monk or hermit, but a doer who climbs mountains and travels to the ends of the Earth. For this reason, among others, his book will have more appeal to the quintessential Westerner, who rushes about her day with her bag on her arm, her coffee in one hand and phone in the other. Silence is good for us, Kågge says, and we do not need that much of it to benefit. We only need to carve out a few instances in which the train of thought stops and something new and beautiful can enter our lives.