On Quiet Read online

  Nikki Gemmell is the author of nine novels and four works of non-fiction. Her books have been translated into 22 languages. She is a columnist for The Australian.

  On Quiet

  Little Books on Big Themes

  Blanche d’Alpuget On Lust & Longing

  Leigh Sales On Doubt

  Germaine Greer On Rage

  Barrie Kosky On Ecstasy

  David Malouf On Experience

  Don Watson On Indignation

  Malcolm Knox On Obsession

  Gay Bilson On Digestion

  Anne Summers On Luck

  Robert Dessaix On Humbug

  Julian Burnside On Privilege

  Elisabeth Wynhausen On Resilience

  Susan Johnson On Beauty

  Nikki

  Gemmell

  On

  Quiet

  MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2018

  Text © Nikki Gemmell, 2018

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Text design by Alice Graphics

  Cover design by Nada Backovic

  Author photograph by Kathy Luu

  Typeset by Typeskill

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  9780522873238 (paperback)

  9780522873245 (ebook)

  All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

  Blaise Pascal

  I

  I turn towards quiet like a plant towards the light. Yet stillness and silence—a recalibrating stopping—seem antithetical to how we live our lives now. We exist in abundance. We are drowning in a cram of rich living. Our cities are an agitation of the soul. And the simplicity of Blaise Pascal’s longed-for room, with its rigorous demands, is beyond many of us.

  Noise means a loud, unwanted, unpleasant sound. It is derived from the Latin word nausea, meaning seasickness. And so I drown. Needing the antidote of intentional quietude.

  Quiet does not seek attention. It is an absence of bustle. It is a fervent wish for simplicity.

  One of my favourite memories of living in London was when an ash cloud in Iceland stopped all the planes flying overhead for several discombobulating days. We didn’t realise we lived under a flight path until there were no planes, suddenly, above us. There was noise, of course—all the regular noises of a city—but suddenly, crisply, the faraway noise that had accompanied us all our London days, for years, without us even realising, had gone. The world above us had, miraculously, fallen silent.

  Quietude is the first leakings of dawn into the night sky. The golden hour at sunset when the world is exhaling and the light is honeyed up. It is flicking an off switch on the great noise of life. It is minimal, humble, spare. Quietude is the hand held to yours unasked. An eyelid tenderly kissed. A spiritual surrender. It is a release from worry and envy, from sourness and strop. Quietude is the sleeping infant in your arms. The house that awaits the return of the children, its breath held. The roar of the seashell to an ear. The hum of silence in the desert. The arresting communal stopping of a minute’s silence at a football match. The pause; the necessary, listening pause. Quietude speaks to some yearning deep within us; a yearning for a replenishing peace. Quiet is strong. It is the observer and the listener, the distiller and the thinker. It is still. It is a gift.

  The absence of planes in that London sky was odd and unnerving—there was just a clear, deathly quiet blue that everyone looked up to and marvelled at. Then gradually, into that silence, that vast sky-silence, emanated something akin to God. In our frenetic and faithless world it was arresting to experience; stilling and releasing. It quietened us Londoners. We no longer had to compete. We recognised the beauty in something else. And this new quiet forced us all to look around and observe our surroundings in ways we never had before.

  The new urban quiet seemed eternally fresh. It constantly replenished itself and energised us all in days and days of exhilarating newness. And our ears felt like they repaired themselves, within the vast quiet, as did our grubbied souls.

  Then real life returned. And we slipped back.

  Quietude is not living in frustration, knowing you’ve never risked; but risking and failing, knowing you’ve at least tried.

  Noel Coward, in his play Design for Living, declared that the human race is a letdown to him. That it thinks it’s progressed yet it hasn’t. That it thinks it’s risen above what he calls the primeval slime yet it hasn’t. He said that we’ve invented a few things that make noises, but not one big thing that creates quiet. Endless and peaceful quiet—something that we can pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings.

  How to find that eiderdown, how to rescue ourselves? It feels like a time for risky living; to glean tranquillity.

  The quiet places are disappearing. Churches are being abandoned, rooms are cluttered and crowded, the bush is being logged; the contemplative places are vanishing from our worlds. What is this doing to our psyche? How is this agitating us in ways we barely know?

  We need to experience quiet’s bombastic opposite to truly appreciate it. Most of us exist amid cram; women especially. A crush of work in the home and the wider world, of family and of a myriad social snares, of life.

  In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf wrote about a state of longed-for quietude; a particular woman’s state of grace where she did not need to think about anybody so that she could just be herself, by herself. Quietude was what this woman often felt the need of—to be silent, and to be alone. And in that moment, all the being and the doing, so expansive and glittering and vocal, evaporated. One shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to just being oneself; something invisible to others, and free for the strangest adventures. It was a time when life sank down for a moment and the woman’s range of experience seemed limitless … her horizon seemed limitless.

  A goal, that limitless horizon. A quietude that involves a surfacing into light, and lightness, which leads to an expansive unfurling of the mind. Allowing us to become unfettered, and from that we create. But how to revel in that limitless horizon?

  Quietism is a word gaining currency. An old word, a new word, a possible movement for these troubled times. It means ‘devotional contemplation and abandonment of the will … a calm acceptance of things as they are.’ It is softly doing the rounds in this fractious, bewildered, belligerent age.

  Favete Linguis! Horace declared. With silence favour me.

  The search for quiet was ever thus.

  In quietude we become someone else. An earlier, simpler self. Absorbed, focused, lit; the childhood self. Happy in solitude, comfortable with it.

  It’s hard in this world to cleave quietude from our busy lives. Yet it is a compass into balm. For a lot of us it exists only on the edges and we have to journey to those edges to find it. But how?

  The physicist J Robert Oppenheimer said that scientists ‘live always at the “edge of mystery”—the boundary of the unknown.’ And so can we all, on the cusp of quietude; for dwelling within it we are on the edge of mystery and release.
We can feel the loosening in our shoulders and our neck and the softening of the clench in our face as we surrender to it.

  The Guinness World Records has decreed a room in the US to be the world’s quietest. It is an audio research laboratory at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, known as Building 87. It is a space where sound dies. The un nervingly silent room is known as an anechoic chamber—it’s insulated from exterior noise but also absorbs all reflections of sound and electromagnetic waves. It is entirely echo-free. Microsoft explains that the room has the lowest sound ever recorded, and is the optimal environment for audio tests.

  Can you imagine being placed in that room? With the lights off, all by yourself. Imagine the quietude.

  Solace, or threat?

  The hearing technology company Mimi has developed the Worldwide Hearing Index, an app that ranks cities according to noise pollution and hearing loss. It found that the average city dweller has an auditory loss equivalent to ten to twenty years older than their actual age. It’s hard to find the silent sanctuary in our urban environment, but if you want a quiet city, the Index recommends Switzerland’s Zurich. The Index identified Zurich as the least noise-polluted city in the world, based on the hearing ability of its inhabitants. No Australian city makes the top ten. The quietest cities were all located in Europe, except for Portland, in the US.

  The cities with the most noise pollution are Guangzhou, then Delhi, Cairo, Mumbai and Istanbul.

  An anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis held the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest room before Building 87 was constructed. You can book a tour of the complex, but visitors can’t be left alone in the chamber for any large amount of time without supervision.

  Journalists have visited this room. In the dark. Alone. Most lasted less than twenty minutes. They were tortured by the triumphant absence of sound apart from the noise their own bodies made. Owner Steven J Orfield says only two sounds are heard: your beating heart, which generates the gurgling sound of your blood moving, and spontaneous firings on your auditory nerve. Your brain is trying to seek out sound by turning up the volume of your auditory nerve, which results in high-pitched noises being heard. You hear the sound of your nerve working, valiantly, but you don’t catch anything in the way of outside noise.

  The quiet brewed by an Icelandic ash cloud made us yearn for it again. It unlocked something primal within many of us: a great stilling. That arresting time with our faces turned heavenward in wonder was talked about for days, months, even years afterwards.

  Quietude is a haze of calming white. A kitchen anointed by sunlight. A candle’s honeyed glow. The Sanctus in Fauré’s Requiem in D minor. Emily Kngwarreye’s desert washed by rain as well as Rothko’s humming entrapment. The person clean of agitation and envy, anger and stress and strop. Quiet is the holy places. A fern-crammed glade, an abandoned church emptied of people, a desert’s vivid silence. It is the intimate and the still, the mysterious and the contemplative. It is solitude, and a radiant contentment with that. It is the clean, shining hours and a tonic.

  I need the medicine of quiet because noise is making me sick. The noise of the city; of motherhood; of work-stress. Of school runs and commutes and people endlessly asking things from me, depleting me, because I am not very good at saying no. It is the noise of bills that need paying and deadlines that must be met. The city where I live is never quiet enough to think in. The jackhammer yabber of the world is constantly in my head and at my fingertips.

  And so I drown.

  II

  I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  There is no firm anchor in a political sense, no balm of protection. Solid and stable governments seem a long time ago. Will those we entrust to protect us actually do so? We are not sure. Political disquiet is vining its way through our worlds. We worry that the hot-headed will rush us into wars we do not want, recklessly endangering us all; we crave peace and the hush of quiet and ego-less leadership.

  ‘For though many instincts are held more or less in common by both sexes, to fight has always been the man’s habit, not the woman’s,’ Virginia Woolf wrote. ‘Law and practice have developed that difference, whether innate or accidental. Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman’s rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us; and it is difficult to judge what we do not share. How then are we to understand your problem, and if we cannot, how can we answer your question, how to prevent war? The answer based upon our experience and our psychology—why fight?—is not an answer of any value. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed. Complete understanding could only be achieved by blood transfusion and memory transfusion—a miracle still beyond the reach of science.’

  Is the female impulse an instinct towards quiet? Peace and serenity. A nesting. And is the male impulse an instinct towards conflict, belligerence, domination? Noise. War is noise. We live in an unquiet world and it will always be thus, with the testosterone-fuelled boy-men constantly tipping us into it. What is left? The quietness of mothers grieving their sons and unable to speak out loudly enough. The women drowned out by the noise of men.

  Can quietude also be about women’s rage? Women are not meant to be quiet. Our true natures are loud and sparky and stroppy, outspoken and stubborn and strong. But women are told from a young age to be quiet, obedient, neat. To reduce that roaring spark within us to something contained, controllable and blessedly tame. Edith Wharton spoke of ‘the curtain of niceness’ that befalls young woman. Quiet is a tool of the patriarchy to silence, to render the female invisible, especially as they age. Women are consigned and bound to it from youth; when we are told repeatedly to still ourselves down into goodness. Politeness. Obedience. Perfection.

  Forgetfulness is the new niggle of disquiet. Battle plans need to be drawn up to combat it because more and more often now there’s the exhausting panic of Where are my keys? Glasses? Phone? I come into the kitchen—Why am I here? I find myself outside—What am I doing here? It must be for a reason, but what? This trouncing of order and calm is happening too often. Is it age, the mothering of four children from kindergarten to the final year of high school, the stresses of full-time work, the constant harangue of disquieting news, of doing a million things at once—or is it something more sinister?

  Religion scholar Sarah Sentilles wrote of plants, dubbed escapes, which spread beyond the area in which they have been cultivated, into an area where they’ve not been planted and do not occur naturally.

  We all have a little something of escapes in us; the yearning for an escape into quiet.

  Breaking news is now breaking my equilibrium. I wish I saw less of the fret-fest that is Donald Trump but I can’t tear myself away from the compelling train wreck in my hand, on my phone. Research shows many of us are now spending almost nine hours a day logged onto a screen, more than most of us sleep.

  The whoosh of news, too fast. Oh men, men, men. They shift allegiances in the playground, knife, name-call, spat. ‘You’re the king of the bedwetters!’ ‘You’re too posh to push!’ ‘He has an emotional need to gossip, particularly when drink is taken.’ ‘There’s a very deep pit reserved in Hell for such as he.’ ‘Et tu, Brute?’

  Meanwhile, no anchorage is firm, the iron is dragged on the seabed, lifting the people and casting them adrift. Screams and chaos, cries of doom.

  No one is listening to us! No one is helping us! They’re all out for themselves!

  The sly intrusion of the internet is constantly at our fingertips. Are our smart phones eating our brains? Veering our sex lives into something different or nonexistent? Changing how we work, socialise, sleep, stand and walk. Smartphones are our quietness-eaters.

  Billi
ons of dollars are being lost in productivity in US work places because of increasing addictions to phones. The staffing firm OfficeTeam found that US workers are spending an inordinate amount of time on their mobiles, gazing at screen morsels that have nothing to do with their jobs—so much rolling news to be checked, personal emails to be read and games to be played.

  We are witnessing the digital drowning of an entire generation right under our noses. God help the children who’ve grown up with this, who have no memory of the spareness of the non-phone existence. No memory of the expansiveness of boredom. Of quiet. And what it brews.

  The hot-headed are the old men who’ve waited too long, the prize in their sight but no grace in the seizing of it. Winning is all, but what about serving? What of the rest of us? We who are made to feel that we serve them, yet have not done it well enough. And so on they go and on; our leaders with their dirty work, their ambition polluting us all. It is vaulting cravenness laid bare. But fate is wily. Nothing goes according to plan. The wheel of fortune turns and turns again. And all the people crave is a haven to rest from the toss of the political world, yet no one is giving them one. Worry is not quiet.

  The time of the women is coming. A cultural shift, a correcting, the want for the quietness of honesty and a steady hand. Yet how long will it take for these women, who feel like the future, to make change? They are islanded in their power and at a remove from the boys’ club; the jostling, jockeying male spectacle paraded before us all; that peacock, belligerent, domineering strut when dignity flees, and grace.

  It is possible to be a quiet leader, despite what the example of the world is telling our children now. There will be correction. We wait.

  As women, let us not be quiet with our voices. Because by being quiet we are rendered invisible. Which is exactly what the men who are afraid of us want.