On Quiet Read online

  American Vogue editor Anna Wintour is legendary for lasting twenty minutes or so at a party and then vanishing, a technique I’ve perfected with hosts none the wiser. The child wails loudly ‘Are we there yet?’ at the promise of the new destination, the adult wails inwardly ‘Are we there yet?’ at the promise of home.

  The golden hour. An Aussie beach. An evening of clearness, a gift to us all. Several families around a fire. The glow sticks are losing their potency and the sparklers have all burnt down—whirly gigs and words in the sky, too brief. The world is settling, exhaling at last. Suddenly, a voice. ‘There was movement at the station …’

  Arrestingly, within the softening light. The entire Man From Snowy River, all 104 lines by heart. One by one we listeners are reeled in, caught; especially the children who’ve never heard of the colt that got away, never sat before the galloping rhythms of Australian recital. There’s a shine in the speaker as he sits there quietly and stuns us all.

  A TEDx talk. They’re meant to be memorised; it’s a feature of the tightly controlled rules of presentation. But the words in my noisy, scattered head feel like they’re hanging on by their fingernails. Mortified, I surrender to palm cards. Memorising is a lost skill of quietness. My mind refuses to relax and absorb. I will my brain to astound me and resolutely, disappointingly, it does not.

  Patricia Highsmith said her imagination functioned much better when she didn’t have to speak to people.

  Poets are big on recital. Joseph Brodsky demanded his students memorise a thousand lines per semester. To prepare them for later life, he reasoned, for whatever might be flung at them. And to provide solace. During his own forced exile by the Soviets in the Arctic he was grateful for every piece of poetry he had in his head. Politician and writer Aung San Suu Kyi exercised her memory during her own long imprisonment by learning a new poem every day. In the end she’d memorised Tennyson’s and Yeats’s complete works. The moving quietude, in all of that.

  The words of Banjo Paterson wash over each intently listening adult with a great calm of reverie and wonder. ‘Mum taught me as a kid,’ the reciter shrugs quietly afterwards, sifting his fingers through the beach’s sand. ‘I’ve never forgotten.’

  VII

  The house was very quiet, and the fog … pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.

  E M Forster, Howards End

  I’ve never been fond of architect Le Corbusier’s maxim, ‘A house is a machine for living in’. I prefer ‘a house is a mooring for living in.’ A place that gladdens your heart as you step across the threshold; that releases you into a space where you can be your true self. A sanctuary of stillness amid the great gallop of life. Simplicity is key.

  In winter’s clench the less reluctant I am to venture forth. Pour me into the flannelette sheets, tunnel me into the warmth. Oh, the horror of the event-packed week. The bliss of the dinner with friends cancelled at the last minute and it’s not you who’s done the cancelling. And I get twitchy if a night out is more than once a week.

  This is how I was as a child. Hated being forced into the noisy glare of Going Out, being told to act jolly and put on the mask. Do we become more like our younger selves in middle age? Perhaps, for some, yes. This is disconcerting yet deeply familiar. Not so much that I’ve found myself, finally, but that I recognise myself; a long lost person who’s now crawled out from under the rubble of who I was trying to be, for so exhaustingly long. Well hello, you find yourself saying to a 10-year-old self, I remember you. And just as you’ve let go, as your life’s loosening and lightening and quieting with age, and you couldn’t give a damn about being anything but yourself.

  Just as you can glean an insight into a person’s psyche—in all its ugliness or beauty—in an unguarded moment with a dog, a person’s attitude to a garden is like a door flying open into who they really are.

  Virginia Woolf’s last diary entry before committing suicide: ‘L. is doing the rhododendrons.’ There’s something so moving about that, a woman looking out for her husband, knowing that life goes on, will go on, in all its order and quietness; and that solace and connection will be drawn from that. The couple had a steady rhythm of work, garden, work; both needing that regular circuit breaker of earth and air after a desk’s intensity. What did Leonard do after Virginia’s body was discovered, three weeks later, in the River Ouse? Garden. The next day, for the entire day. No doubt drawing a quiet solace from it.

  This feels like a returning. I taught myself in adulthood how to be in the world, but perhaps through decades it was a weight somehow burdensome and now I’m slipping back into the ease of who I really am. I feel found. It’s a huge relief. That I don’t have to be who everyone else wants me to be; that I can be who I want to be. Quietly. In middle age I can shake the world off.

  Peace is drawn from my tiny patch of earth. When we first moved into this house the soil released its secrets over the coming year and I learnt. Noting exuberant little cackles of colour blooming in odd corners, unfolding freshly week after week, so thoughtfully planted by unknown hands. There was the thrilling pageantry of it all, and a gratitude for the person who once loved this garden so much.

  My symphony of wonder. The shy white camellia bush tucked in a corner. Heady jasmine blaring the arrival of summer. The cascade of sudden bougainvillea. Blousy hibiscus. Bullying bamboo, overbearing and intent. The first, thrilling, gardenia. A puckish West Australian flowering gum. We’ll quieten you yet, it all seems to be saying—astonish, delight you, smile you up.

  I need the earth. I lived apartment-high in my twenties yet it felt tetchily too far from the soil and the trees, from the singing green; dizzily detached and unsettled. At one stage I lived in a tiny London mews house that once stored Portobello Road Market carts and I drew endless delight from two exuberant window boxes, our sole patch of green. I tended to them as lovingly as babies. In England I planted a slender gum, so pale and silvery and shy, amidst the robust British greens in every back garden that we had.

  The joy, now, is to exist simply and quietly. To be with children veering too quickly into adulthood. Every day they seem a little more removed from our orbit, particularly the teenage boys. They’re so beautiful, these child-adults before us; cusped so precariously and ever more unknowable. And I never see them raucous in the outside world now, loose and large with their mates; that goofy, risky, beautiful tribal world of intense loyalty and fat happiness. As we age we experience an inexorable drawing towards nature. A desire to enfold ourselves quietly back into the sights and smells of our own childhoods, when we lived closer to the sky and the earth. The anaesthesia of the known: that’s what the modern exile often flees from. We are all escapes to some extent.

  Yet there comes a time for most of us when we want to reconcile with the known. Corrosively. And now I have returned to a cascade of Australian, childhood green. It’s incalculably restorative.

  A nun I know says that people bless houses, spaces and rooms that they abide in with their energy, their presence, and their soul. Anyone can be the sower of that blessing, religious or not. And it can be the opposite scenario, of course; a dwelling can be a place of sourness and disquiet that can mirror the inhabitant’s soul.

  The last words of George Orwell’s domestic diary, as he lay in bed with lungs bleeding: ‘Snowdrops all over the place. A few tulips showing. Some wallflowers still trying to flower.’

  As we near death there can be a softening to quiet wonder as we note the beauty and resilience of the natural world around us. We are moved in a way we are not when younger. It’s the great, endless turning of the plants—all the little miracles of creation, stoicism, obedience—that will still be there, presumably, long after we’re gone.

  A new bliss: sending my teenagers GIFs, animated videos of several seconds’ duration. They turn into the infuriated disciplinarian trying to control the glee-brimmed child. It is Ultimate Embarrassing Mum, and endless joy. It is connection, and as a mother of teenagers I crave that in any way I can. I can�
�t do GIFs on a night out so might as well stay in. Which I do, most often, drinking in the replenishing quiet like a draught. Watching the children grow, marvelling at their catapulting into being grown ups.

  And happiness these days is not so much those big noisy waypoints in life—births, birthdays, weddings—but in the spaces in between. The small moments, like the arrowing of a GIF into a teenager’s phone, and the watching, in quiet wonder, for a return. They’ll never know how much joy that incoming missive gives me—a silent little implosion of bliss, tight in my heart.

  Inventor and entrepreneur Steve Jobs knew simplicity’s potency. ‘Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.’

  Planting trees has significant health benefits. Researchers in Toronto have found that having ten or more trees lining your street has cognitive and psychological benefits similar to being seven years younger.

  The researchers compared satellite imagery of trees and health data. Team leader psychologist Marc Berman said that people who live on tree-lined blocks are less likely to report high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease and diabetes. But they can’t pinpoint why. Berman wondered if it’s the trees cleaning the air, or encouraging people to go outside and exercise more, or if it’s merely, wondrously, their aesthetic beauty.

  So to the wonder, for me, almost every morning. That sure path into quiet—a walk in the bush. Tree-brimmed, glad of heart, as I stride into the city of birds. An everyday exhilaration, but it has to be alone. I don’t want anyone else’s chitter chatter and mind swamp and twig snap. I need the free alone.

  I can feel myself straightening within it. The posture correcting, the back uncurling, with a hand on a scribbly gum’s cool trunk and the thick vellum folds of the paperbark and a face strong to the sky. This is what it is to be alive. Connected. Quiet.

  Someone close to me has lived in a succession of council flats over the years, and with every visit the heart flinches at the noisy soullessness of these places; they’re concrete boxes of the depleted human spirit. Why no rampant green? Why is the tonic of the tree not instinctively recognised here, that invigorating shot of nature? For these fragile people—of all people—it seems like a relatively cheap life-enhancer.

  The poisoning of the mighty trees is not unknown in these parts, and every time a council sign draws attention to the fact I’m enraged at the sheer selfishness of the communal transgression. It’s an almost spiritual rebuke, a soul-retraction. What are we doing? The natural world too often bears the scars of our noisome shortsightedness. As Wordsworth lamented, ‘I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.’

  CSIRO researchers have coined a most beautifully quiet word for a familiar smell in our thirsty land. Petrichor. The distinct scent of rain in the air. Or more precisely, the name of an oil that’s released from the earth into the air before rain begins to fall. It’s derived from the Greek petra, meaning stone, and ichor, which is the blood of the Gods in Greek mythology. That intoxicating smell of the earth opening out to receive its benediction is the most intoxicating smell of all and never fails to give pause; to still one’s soul into quiet.

  Our great good place is often connected to childhood, if not physically then in memory; it is the stirring of some happiness from long ago like a Chinese whisper of solace. There’s something spiritual in the urge to embrace a homecoming as we age; the way we’re quietly drawn back to the places where we began. It is the great circularity of life, and it’s often acutely connected to landscape.

  ‘We wove a web in childhood, a web of sunny air,’ Charlotte Brontë wrote and how beguiling that sounds, how understandable the want to recapture the sheer, unadulterated happiness of childhood, the very air of it. The shift of its seasons, insects, light. What quietness of the soul did these childhood immersions in nature give us?

  The Libyan revolutionary Muammar Gaddafi was captured in his childhood town of Sirte. There’s something intensely human and vulnerable about the idea of the besieged man, on the run, returning to where he began. Marilynne Robinson wrote in her novel Gilead about loving a town so much that you think of going into its ground as a last, wild gesture of love.

  Great good places often involve that quiet, humble, undervalued quality: simplicity. They’re almost ridiculously anti-materialist. Shining hours in simple places, with not much in the way of furniture or possessions; sometimes just a swag in a desert by a certain tree, in a cherished riverbed, a secret place where the silence hums. Life is a process of simplification. A stripping back to unearth the seam of quiet.

  Writer John Bunyan said that if we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.

  The word quiet derives from the fourteenth century French, meaning ‘peaceable, at rest, restful, tranquil.’ It is directly from the Latin, quietus.

  At rest. A necessary luxury.

  The only way to soothe an agitation of the soul is to acknowledge it, and to stop pretending that everything’s alright. I’ve tried controlling it by simplifying my life—saying no, more often, and not feeling guilty about it. And by having a bath at night to ease me into sleep. And by filching some restorative pocket of ‘me’ time every day, somewhere in the day. And by never getting to that point again of wanting to smack my child. And by surrounding myself with positive people, which has meant distancing myself from some friends who’ve flattened me repeatedly over the years; I’ve found the courage to say no, enough, I want to be surrounded by heart lifters not heart sinkers; for the opposite gives me an agitation of the soul. My love for my family is weighty, voluptuous, all-consuming, and I have to glean some kind of quietness amid everything—for their sake, as much as mine.

  For a quiet existence, turned like a plant towards the light, this I have learnt: That a life driven by love is preferable to a life driven by greed or ambition. That it’s wise to distance yourself from people who want to flatten you. That forgiveness is releasing, for yourself most of all. That kindness is life-affirming. That the most intense happiness is to be found in the simplest of things—the sight of your father laughing uncontrollably during a film, a bedroom filled with the sleep of your children, requited love. That a turning to quiet feels like a turning towards authenticity. That a great solace, and stillness, can be found in faith; it helps you to let go. That at the end of our lives the question should not be what have we noisily done, but how well we have loved.

  By writing this I have found a way into quiet. Because it is doing what I really want to do. By writing and thinking about quietude, I have slipped myself into it. And am released.

  Quietude is about shedding. Simplifying. Listening. Saying no to the noise. Quietude is holy whether you believe in a God or not. You are paused. With a radiant certainty. The gigantic eiderdown is pulled over you, finally, and you rest. Do you aspire to become a reaper of the quiet?

  It rescues.