On Quiet Read online

  Do the socially awkward, who crave quiet, really need to be ‘treated’ by anti-anxiety drugs? Moran says he’s torn. There are certainly extreme examples of shyness where people can’t live their lives, but he thinks there’s a trend to medically treat things that may well be within the range of human experience.

  Socrates could enjoy a banquet now and again, and must have derived considerable satisfaction from his conversations while the hemlock was taking effect, but most of his life he lived quietly with Xanthippe (his wife), taking a constitutional in the afternoon, and perhaps meeting with a few friends by the way. Kant is said never to have been more than ten miles from Konigsberg in all his life. Darwin, after going round the world, spent the whole rest of his life in his own house. Marx, after stirring up a few revolutions, decided to spend the remainder of his days in the British Museum. Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye. No great achievement is possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement …

  Bertrand Russell

  Would you be aware of the shy people around you? Those of us so inclined often mask it well in the noisome world. I’ve not overcome my shyness yet have learnt to live with it. Hide it with social skills honed over the years, through sheer will; yet the blush still betrays me and sometimes with fellow blushers there’s a veritable feast of reddened faces as we recognise in the other what we hate in ourselves, but cannot stop.

  Shyness is about a loss of control—we like to feel comfortable, safe and quiet amid our surroundings. We can do close friends, one on one, small groups and prepared talks. We prefer listening to talking, asking questions to pontificating, writing to chatting, deep discussion to surface. That grand arena of small talk, the party, is often a shy person’s hell, as are strangers thrust upon us and off-the-cuff talking in public. We need to prepare for the world. We don’t like to be blindsided or exposed.

  After extensive research, Moran found that shyness is far more common than he’d thought. Many people—often those he’d least expected—confessed to regular feelings of social awkwardness. Moran explained that one of the mistakes you can make when you’re shy is to think that you’re unusual in the way you’re interacting—but that some of these problems are universal.

  Devotion is a word to cultivate. Devotion to quiet. Creativity. Absorption. To the power of the pause. Quietude is grace; a hand hovering lightly at your back.

  Driving into the city after sprawling days of writing solitude, I cannot bear to turn on the radio to hear the male sneerers that populate Australia’s FM radio landscape. The female simperers giggling and protesting alongside them. Every new Donald Trump affront. It’s all so noisy and graceless and petulant. The barrage of the jabbery, newsy noise on the radio is draining and cluttering and I slip back into a busy life yearning again for those clean, simple days out bush. When I felt washed of noise.

  Virginia Woolf walking into a river in 1941, with stones weighing down the pockets of her overcoat, is the opposite of quietude. It is soul agitation.

  We have to stop worrying. It’s white-anting our serenity, crashing into our lives. ‘Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. Was it worth it?’ Gandhi asked. Worry is the happiness eater. It is our taunter, exhausting and depleting us, crowding out far more productive thoughts.

  A friend Helena embodied quietude. A doctor who’d worked for years in accident and emergency wards, she told me how colleagues of a certain age—middle-aged women, who’ve seen a lot of life and death—knew when the soul was leaving the body. They’d seen it often in the course of their work. Yet never talked about it with younger colleagues for fear of being ridiculed. But they discussed it among themselves, and recognised it.

  Quietude is certainty. Living with uncertainty is the opposite of quiet. My mother lived with the extreme uncertainty of a chronic pain she could not control alongside an opioid addiction. Eventually, she committed suicide. It felt like a response to a consuming restlessness of the soul; a distressingly unquiet life.

  Helena had mastered quietude. There was her stillness, as a gift, when she was with her patients in the last moments of their living; there was the quietness of her staying with them to give them company, and there was quiet, as their soul departed the corporeal body.

  My mother’s death was bleakly lonely and despairing. It was a distressingly unquiet death.

  I saw Helena for the last time just before she boarded a plane to fly to Switzerland, to kill herself. She had booked herself into Dignitas, a clinic for assisted dying, after living for twenty-four years with chronic pain. The bullying pain was triggered by a chest virus in her late thirties and over decades the discomfort had spread throughout her body. Helena had tried everything to fell it; she was now heading towards life in a wheelchair. Repeated surgery hadn’t helped and her careful administration of opioids only provided temporary relief. She had four children who had all reached adulthood when she made her decision. They had been with her every step of the way.

  My mother wanted the peace of mind of some kind of euthanasia, some form of legally assisted dying. In the end, she couldn’t wait for any laws to catch up with her. No one, friends or family, knew she was going to kill herself. She died with the noise of uncertainty, and pain, and helplessness, and despair. The noise of being ignored by the world as an elderly woman.

  My last coffee with Helena was determinedly celebratory; suffused with a quiet knowing. It was time, she was ready, and in a week she would be dead. She wanted to celebrate. The last time I saw her she had a face of radiant certainty. A radiant, peaceful, ready certainty; beautiful in its quietness. It was a death not of despair, but release.

  The act of euthanasia gives a person who wants some form of assisted dying agency. A sense of control. Peace. A quietude to live a life of sprawling delight in the final months, and to die a good death.

  You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.

  Franz Kafka, in a letter to his fiancée,

  Felice

  Sprawl is such a beautifully relaxed, jovial word—but how to cultivate it? Because from the looseness that is sprawl comes a quietness of the soul. Les Murray’s deeply Australian poem ‘The Quality of Sprawl’ makes me realise how far, as a nation, we’ve drifted from it.

  ‘Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly, or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.’ Murray writes that it’s also the bloke who cuts down his Rolls Royce and turns it into a farm ute, but then again sprawl is most definitely not the company that ‘made repeated efforts to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.’ There’s a laconic cheekiness to sprawl, an endearing larrikin energy that’s selfless and smart.

  In a near-Orwellian world, manufactured fear is the way to control. And it feels as if we’re in the midst of a worry epidemic right now, thanks to the chest puffery of the bullyboy shirt-fronters. Will they be the death of us all? Our nation’s millennials are succumbing to the worry bug most of all—they’ve been crowned the world’s most miserable. Or, perhaps, the most unquiet in terms of their interior life.

  A Deloitte Millennial Survey looked at data of young people across thirty countries and found Australians aged between 18 and 35 are the most pessimistic of all about their future prospects. They’re jittery about the way their country’s being run and worried about job prospects as employers veer towards the cruelty of the casual and freelance position. They’re fearful of an increasingly tense planet in these heckling dark times, as races and religions jostle for hegemony. And only 8 per cent believe they’ll be better off financially than their parents. They believe they’ll never own their dream home.

  Sprawl was Bob Hawke declaring a national holiday after the country’s America’s Cup win and the dazzle of Paul Keating’s invective. Spraw
l is playful, which those who fear change never are. Sprawl is captivatingly individual, never the lemming-like leanings of the robotic and fearful herd. Sprawl is not the Australian customs officials who officiously destroyed 200-year-old plant samples from France before the email exchange was exhausted. It is flexible and easygoing, genial. As Murray explains, ‘It is the rococo of being your own still centre.’

  The fractiousness of the world is right at our fingertips now, tweet by instant tweet. Ever-present screens crowd danger into our thoughts 24/7 from all corners of the globe. ‘How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened,’ Thomas Jefferson once said. I spent much of my teens niggled by the stress of potential nuclear annihilation, watching the nuclear clock inch ever closer to midnight. And did it happen?

  Sprawl is most magnificently exemplified by the 12-year-old boy who drove 1200 kilometres from the NSW mid-north coast to Broken Hill, on his way to the relos in Perth, before he was pulled over by the cops. Sprawl is also the police who decided no conviction would be recorded and the matter would not be going to court. Sprawl is journalist Mark Colvin’s final tweet declaring ‘It’s all been bloody marvellous’ hours after his death. As Les Murray says, ‘It is loose-limbed in its mind.’

  Sprawl is not the haters knotted in their fury crowding the Twittersphere. Sprawl is not clenched. Not loud. And not Twitter. It’s the dog curled like a comma on the pub verandah with ‘No Food’ spray painted across its back, not the sign ‘No Public Toilets Here’ on the servo after a wearying six-hour trip. Sprawl is never, ever banks. It’s not being tutored from kindy so you can pass selective-school entrance exams seven years later—sprawl is not going to get too far in this hot-housed world. Or is it? There’s something to be said for emotional intelligence in our young, and the quality of sprawl has that in spades.

  Worry is joy-denying. Exhausting. Depleting. We can and should train ourselves out of worry. You can feel the souring drag that fret and stress have on you. The sky is not going to fall in. As Winston Churchill said, ‘When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.’

  ‘[Sprawl] listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail of possibility,’ Les Murray writes. Note, it listens.

  We have lost the quality of sprawl. There’s too much anger now, too many people who don’t have time for it, and that’s an Australian tragedy. People might argue that our nation can’t afford the quality of sprawl in the world that we live in now, but I say this quiet and lovely quality will save us.

  VI

  I was quiet, but I was not blind.

  Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

  Why practice the lost art of recital? To cultivate a love of literature. To boost self-confidence. To improve the speaking voice. To exercise the brain. To glean quiet.

  Novelist Will Self declared dinner parties should last only ninety minutes. Because he doesn’t drink, he gets bored. He doesn’t mind people drinking as long as they aren’t falling over. A stance I wholeheartedly concur with because the wolfish hunger for solitude is lean and mean within me.

  ‘I feel a real horror of people closing over me,’ Katherine Mansfield declared. It’s a horror that yowls inside whenever too many noisy demands nibble into your serenity. And the ability to cleave precious moments of quiet from within the great whoosh of family and professional life is becoming increasingly difficult. The ultimate social nightmare? A party far away, in a place devoid of taxis, fully reliant on someone else for a lift. Someone who lingers, agonisingly, over one more drink and anecdote, the bloated evening yawning on.

  Solitude is never overcomplicated, stressful or loud—and it most certainly is never lonely. You can be much lonelier in the midst of a family Christmas, or within a marriage that’s atrophied into indifference. Aloneness can have a vast restorative power; there’s something spiritual and consoling to it. There’s space for your mind to uncurl.

  Trapped in holiday land. Which means four kids at home practically climbing the walls because of an endless dreariness of rainy days while one struggles to hold on to a career with the words of Katherine Mansfield, in the thick of trying to write, hovering in one’s head: a mind full of the ghosts of saucepans.

  That mind clanging with the guilt of unused cooking implements was what Mansfield believed working women were constantly living with. A sentiment relevant to the question of whether women can be artists and mothers at the same time; and, if they dare, whether they should limit their domestic ambitions to a single child. Because motherhood is just so darned noisy.

  Artist Tracey Emin, childless, has no regrets. She said she could never be a mother and a good artist because the emotional pull would be too much. Author Lauren Sandler declared women should restrict their families if they wanted to avoid limiting their careers. She highlighted a remark from Alice Walker about female artists having only one child. Walker had declared that with one you can move, but with more than one you’re a sitting duck.

  A sitting duck. Too close to the bone. But I’d be a far worse mother if I wasn’t working. Cagey and restless, raging and roaring with unfulfilled ambitions—and taking it out on the kids. I write because it releases me. Into quiet. As a mother you’re at the coalface of living, which is a great place to be as a writer, but work firms me—buoys me—amidst the great loss of control; the grand disruption to routine, equilibrium, energy, self.

  I gravitate to a tiny sliver of space in my house to meander with thoughts and work, and to observe the lovely heft of the seasons. As soon as I saw the high verandah, heard its quietness, I knew I finally had a room of my own. The quiet place. But like everything else in this cacophonous, brimful life the rest of them had other ideas. The tin lids gravitated to my little sanctuary; taking turns to sleep on the old cane daybed every night for its canopy of stars in the city and its curtain of lovely sound. And for its witching hour, when the space is anointed by a tranquil, golden, deeply Australian light.

  During my London years there was a corrosive yearning for the terrain in my blood and bones. And I realised it’s not only Aboriginal people who hold a monopoly on a profound and spiritual connection to this land—the craving can addle any of us. Our landscape is a vast seduction. Within it I feel more like the person I once was; a freer, lighter, less agitated, quieter childhood self.

  So I gravitate to this little verandah with its wondrous curtain of sound, and when I’m on it I’m like a lit candle. The journey to get to this verandah in front of a national park is the most beautiful and strange in my life, because it’s about coming home. It’s about paying attention to detail with an outsider’s eye yet a heart born in this place. I’ve always been a neophiliac, hungrily seeking the new, yet now, bizarrely, it’s all changed. And I’m content. With this, just this, the deep familiarity of home.

  In the lovely, glittery alone a door opens to possibility. It’s when novel ideas sneak in and titles roar with their rightness and surprising character arcs veer you back into excitement over a project that hasn’t been singing. It’s a brewing house for creativity; my Laboratorium of Wonder. Plotinus called it ‘the flight of the alone to the alone,’ yet as a mother it carries an enormous burden of guilt.

  Mothers shouldn’t feel guilty about working but we often do. What we mustn’t be doing, as women, is conveying that sense of guilt to our children. They need to see pride and chuff about female employment; they need to experience the quietness in our souls that work affords us.

  You can’t do it all, be it all, within the rush of modern motherhood; something has to give within that great, exhausting triumvirate of family, work and social life. Yet the clincher, as precious little jewels of alone are gleaned, is knowing that the more solitude you can filch from your days, the less you will shout later on. At everyone else. Within the thick of motherhood the restorative power of aloneness feels like a private miracle. It’s when things get done.

 
Is it just me or does the social world now feel a little more shouty, in your face, performative? Everyone’s so eager to talk at you—but to actually, quietly, enquire of you? To listen to you? Is the art of conversation morphing into something else? Demonstration. Display. Rant.

  We’re not listening. Deeply connecting. We’re skimming and flitting too much. Aristotle said wise men speak when they have something to say, but fools speak because they have to say something.

  Novelist Marilynne Robinson describes herself as ‘a solitary,’ yet tempers it. She says her solitary life is not exclusively that; she likes to come out and look at the world and talk with people, but it’s a matter of balance. I, too, scuttle out into the world for the odd party or dinner where my car’s close, for escape; but I’ve become more courageous with slipping off, unobtrusively. It’s my strategy for survival. The aim, to exist in quietness. So I can be better with everyone else.

  The film director Mike Nichols, renowned US broadcaster Diane Sawyer’s husband, said that one of the things that fascinated him about his about wife’s work, as she travels all over the world, is that no one ever asked her about what she saw. Nichols knew that people, by and large, would rather be talking, than listening. Even to someone like her.

  Learning by heart is a form of mental exercise. It demands quietude. Leave the skill untended and the ability rusts away. And like handwriting and shoelace tying and listening, its significance is fading. Memorising anything at length now is an agility, a marvel, that’s being lost amid everything instantly on tap; screens are constantly at the ready for whatever we want, slicing into our focus and thoughts.