If Keats tried today to hear the soft pipes and spiritual ditties he imagined coming from a Grecian urn, he would fail. The conversations of other museumgoers would drown out his private looking and listening. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he finds a temporary escape from living company and real sound through a communion with an imagined art object. He does all the talking; until the very end, the urn remains silent. His personification of the vase takes up, significantly, most of the first stanza and the entire final one of his five-stanza poem. In the middle three, he describes and addresses the figures and scenes depicted on the marble, but at start and finish he addresses the art object itself as a form. He humanizes it tellingly as, in turn, a “bride of quietness,” a “foster-child of silence and slow time,” a “sylvan historian,” a silent teller of tales, who can express certain truths “more sweetly than our rhyme.” Its silence is the very essence, as well as the opposite, of sound. These paradoxes gently remind us of what silent art can do. In the last stanza, Keats returns to his personifications but in a different, now negative tone: “O Attic shape! Fair attitude!” and “Cold Pastoral!” The urn “tease[s] us out of thought,” because it will give up so little of its mysteries. But disappointment and frustration lead to a modest reconciliation as the urn becomes “a friend to man” and speaks its calming companionable consolations—“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”—in the poem’s famous conclusion.
Whenever I think of art and the warm friendship it offers, I think also of Thoreau: “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” He was not entirely right. The fourth traditional public venues of what I have called tranquillity are religious sites. Many of these are now in the business of hosting guests, like the journalists I mention above, ordinary secular people who want a weekend away from this world. Even without an elaborate effort to house, feed, and entertain the laity, a religious edifice can offer unintended welcome. An empty chapel encourages contemplation and reverence. You come into a great cathedral from the noisy street to refresh body and soul. And people also gather in the company of like-minded believers—a congregation—for organized worship, in which silent prayer sometimes plays a part. Even those of us without strongly devout leanings can sometimes find sustenance in communal religious settings, through artistic performances or the rituals of weddings and funerals. Sometimes we need to test the waters of our own inchoate yearnings for spirituality. One annoying problem with religious services is not just belief and doctrine but language itself and the human speaking voice. I think of more than the worst offenders: the oily televangelists full of passionate intensity and the blow-dried preachers with pressed hair, bad plastic surgery, and permanent tans. Even those with the best intentions are too often full of palaver, platitudes, and piety.
We writers, readers, and wordsmiths of all types can distrust language as much as we venerate it, and often we want no more of it. We move beyond it or lay it aside. Sick of words, we look for their opposite. When I have a hankering for silence-in-company, I go to a Quaker meeting. There is no doctrine; there is no glamour; there is no shouting. A perfect meeting, for me, is one where no one speaks at all, where at hour’s end the day’s leader simply turns to her right or left, and says “Good morning” to her neighbor, thereby initiating a round of “Good mornings” around the room. The congregating Friends have been instructed in thoughtfulness and the art of gentle persuasion. America’s Founding Quaker Father, William Penn, called “true silence … the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.” One speaks when moved to do so by the inner light, and one speaks softly, to the point, and tactfully. The Society of Friends prefers calm reflection to soapbox speechifying. Less is more, and quiet trumps volume.
Think, by contrast, of what passes for conversation on television talk shows, where sound bites and screaming pundits have the upper hand over reasoned discourse and considered phrasing. Human speech, our glory, is also our embarrassment and our shame. We all recognize its inadequacies, its potential for evasion and deception, and also for pure tedium. Language without meaning, like Japanese to me in Kyoto, never annoys you as much as talk heard or even overheard when you know what someone is saying, regardless of the volume. Deafness has its occasional advantages. In his final years, my father lived in what they euphemistically call an “independent senior facility.” He had all of his wits and marbles until the end. What he did not have was his hearing. Headsets helped at movies and for his television, telephone, and radio needs. Conversation was difficult. At some point, he needed to send his hearing aids in for cleaning and repair, and he knew he would have to live without them for a week. He said that at the communal meals he would not be able to hear what his tablemates were saying.
“Dad,” I said helpfully, “you always complain that the people at your table are very boring. You have an easy out. Just wear a little sign announcing that you will not respond to anything they say because you won’t be able to hear them. Just smile and eat.” He was placated, even inspired by the knowledge that he would be spared a little tedium.
Perhaps writers cherish quiet more than other people, if only because they know what language can and cannot do. I think of Bob Kaufman, the man who coined the word “beatnik” in the 1950s. He preferred reciting his poems to writing them down, and he knew the Beat avant-garde on both coasts—Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Kerouac. An itinerant life filled with drugs, run-ins with the police, and psychiatric incarcerations made him an emblem of his times. He also preferred anonymity to publication. In 1963, following the assassination of President Kennedy, Kaufman took a vow of silence and did not speak for another twelve years, until the end of the Vietnam War. Then something changed. The vocalizing switch moved from off to on. In 1975, he walked into a coffee shop and recited his poem “All Those Ships That Never Sailed.” Speech had returned to him. Or, rather, he returned to speech. He lived until 1986.
His case was extreme, but not unique. I think of Ezra Pound, incarcerated for madness (rather than the charge of treason that would have been the alternative) following his pro-Fascist, anti-Semitic, and anti-American rants during World War II; when released from Washington’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in 1958, he returned to Italy for the rest of his life. Having talked so much at earlier stages—out of hatred, vitriol, madness, sheer manic exuberance—Pound then retreated. He spoke seldom. I cherish a picture of him and Marianne Moore, two founders of modernist poetics, meeting on a stairway at the New York Public Library in the last year or so of their lives. “Oh, Ezra,” said Miss Moore. “Oh, Marianne,” said Pound. That sufficed.
Although language fatigues as well as stimulates, you can often move gracefully beyond it, in the way two people can finish each other’s sentences or know by a glance what their partner is thinking. Pound and Moore had had enough of words. After a while in any intimate relationship, one can sit in unembarrassed silence with a mate, lover, relative, or close friend, in public as well as in private. It takes time, experience, and patience to reach this stage. It always gave me—and most other adolescents, I imagine—a frisson of sad contempt when I saw a middle-aged couple in a restaurant, mute. They must lack, I thought condescendingly, even stupidly, what John Berryman satirically called “inner resources.” They must have no ideas, no new thoughts or perceptions. They seem to prove Thoreau’s dismissive remark about “lives of quiet desperation.” At the same time, as a vigorously garrulous college student, I watched my grandparents and their friends, well into their seventies, living out the sunset years in a large apartment complex. Parking themselves on a summer evening after dinner in the garden courtyard, they sat, basking quietly in their own company as twilight came on. These were the same people who, a decade or so earlier, had impressed me with their loquacity. With everyone talking all at once, they had made a symphony of speech, in many tones, registers, and volumes. Now I gathered only modest, slow, often half-articu
lated resignations and recognitions. Bristling with a callow youngster’s manic energy and a logomaniac’s natural volubility, I pitied them. For the most part, they weren’t talking, just sitting, sighing, and acknowledging. I did not realize that they had made their compromise, or better still their peace, with one another and with life, and they had little new to say. I did not know at the time what a different, equally valuable lesson they were teaching me.
In Another Life, the story of his family, Michael Korda recounts the relationship of his father, the art director Vincent Korda, with Graham Greene:
My father was famous on three continents for his taciturnity, but Graham, normally the most talkative of men, seemed to enjoy endless dinners with him, in Antibes, or London, during which the two men sat facing each other for hours across a table laden with food and drink, never saying a word, apparently quite content with each other’s company. Once, after a dinner during which neither one of them had spoken more than a few words, and those about the weather and the food, Graham whispered to me as I took him to his waiting taxi, “Your father is the cleverest man I know!”
Beckett and Pinter did not invent the pregnant pauses that fill their plays; they discovered them in ordinary human beings. In a speech, Pinter once distinguished between a silence in which no word is spoken and another “when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed.” Everyone can find favorite literary moments in which silence speaks: Jesus before Caiaphas; Ajax snubbing Odysseus in Homer’s underworld, and Dido doing the same to Aeneas in the Aeneid; Cordelia articulating the minimal “Nothing” to Lear’s command to match her sisters’ fulsome proclamations of filial love; the list goes on.
Now I know why my taciturn elders, like clever Mr. Korda, had slowed down and opted for silence. Not because they had limited intellectual or perceptual resources, but because they did not have to talk. They had said everything. “Being there together”—as Wallace Stevens memorably put it in his great poem of old age “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”—“is enough.” Mere presence can take the place of conversation, supplanting noise with well-earned, all-knowing silence. This senior commitment to quiet is a positive rejoinder to Wittgenstein’s famous admonition “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent) if only because silence, when elected and not exacted, betokens fulfillment rather than frustration or uncertainty. Instead of being undone by words, you have decided to go without and beyond them.
Does Silence=Death, according to the chilling formula of AIDS activists thirty years ago? In terms of political protest, social repression, and the stifling of dangerous voices, yes. But silence, for Stevens and my grandparents, can embody wisdom. Does a longing for it bring to mind fatigue (“Enough already,” I can hear someone say), even a desire for our final end? In A Time to Keep Silence, his deeply moving memoir of visits to European monasteries, the late Patrick Leigh Fermor realizes that the silent, obedient Benedictine monks with whom he lived for a month were ready for death at any moment: “The final step would be only a matter of detail.”
The final step for almost everyone involves a gradual shutting down of the body and a lessening of all responsiveness. It has long been acknowledged that of all the senses hearing is the last to go. Doctors and other medical personnel know that they should not discuss the situation of a patient—moribund, failing, and perhaps comatose—as though that person cannot hear or understand what they are saying. Often the person can. In his last hospital stay, an uncle of mine gradually lost language, but he revived upon hearing the Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs he had known, loved, and sung as a young man. He mouthed the words as if by rote. They awakened him, and they also awakened something in him that gave pleasure. Next, even when all words had abandoned him, merely hearing the same songs encouraged him to open his eyes. He smiled.
I attended a dying friend last year. He, too, was sinking gradually into the final silence. At first, we conducted conversations. Then, as his mind began to wander and as medications reduced consciousness along with pain, the conversations became more illogical and less linear. A question might stimulate not an answer to it but a metaphorical reply only tangentially related. Things became circular. We spoke in riddles, conundrums, half-truths, and half sentences. It was up to me and others at the bedside to make sense of him, not for him to make sense of or to us. A sentence would start and drift away. Whole articulations gave way to random words. Then whispers. I would press his hand—his eyes being shut—and talk to him as though I were talking with him. Sometimes, his eyes opened and signaled some responsiveness. Sometimes, he squeezed my hand in reciprocity. Finally, I alone spoke. I imagine he heard. I hope that he heard. His silence might have implied his impending death, but it did not mean that he could not understand.
In a secular life, the choice of silence may augur a yearning for ordinary peace and quiet, for death’s gentler second self, which we may label rest. Eighty years ago, the literary critic William Empson defined and explored what he labeled “versions of pastoral.” Consider Andrew Marvell’s paradigmatic poem “The Garden.” The poet finds respite, an escape from the external world, via a flight to a locus amoenus, the traditional pastoral “pleasing place” of inwardness and silence. The pastoral mode balances equal parts of innocence and experience, simplicity and sophistication. It is what Marvell seeks, and discovers, in the imagined garden:
Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men:
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow;
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.
The scene implies contrasts: before-and-after in time, and there-and-here in space. Marvell pictures solitude after society; silence after bustle; innocence after worldliness; sweetness rather than rudeness; a replacement of male company (the plural “companies” suggests military troops rather than mere companionship) with a pair of allegorical ladies, Innocence and Quiet. Ordinary secular people can achieve this longed-for condition in moments of vacation or a Sunday rest after six days of work. For Marvell, the Garden is the spot for relaxed, solitary inwardness, for the almost impossible condition of aloneness. Even Adam and Eve didn’t have it so good: “Two Paradises ’twere in one / To live in Paradise alone.” One is company; two’s a crowd.
Students of pastoral all acknowledge, if only tacitly, that the final pastoral condition, the one that meets all the demands for quiet, even total silence, requires the inevitable loss of all consciousness. In his magisterial The Oaten Flute, Renato Poggioli labeled this “the pastoral of death.” In 1815, Wordsworth, experiencing an exciting, though unspecified, gust of passion (“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind”), turns, or so he thinks, to his daughter Catherine, whose death he has momentarily forgotten. She is no longer available: “I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom / But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, / That spot which no vicissitude can find?” Those of us who seek silence, or at least quiet, will have to stay on the qui vive, seeking it out when and where we can, balancing our civic, social, and personal obligations to others with our selfish need to withdraw into our own happiness (to paraphrase Marvell) slowly. The final silence will come all too soon, and only in the tomb. Until then, we’ll remain satisfied with its gentler, more modest, enabling, and ennobling surrogates.
Sometimes we give in to silence, but often we come back for one last exchange. Some people leave without saying goodbye. Others say goodbye without actually leaving. I shall allow Walt Whitman, master of sociable tenderness as well as braggadocio, to have the final word. He knew about farewells and endings as well as anyone; he offers the most poignant literary defense of talkativeness before the final silence:
After the supper and talk—after the day is done,
As a friend from friends his final
withdrawal prolonging,
Good-bye and Good-bye with emotional lips repeating,
(So hard for his hand to release those hands—no more will they meet,
No more for communion of sorrow and joy, of old and young,
A far-stretching journey awaits him, to return no more,)
Shunning, postponing severance—seeking to ward off the last word ever so little,
E’en at the exit-door turning—charges superfluous calling back—e’en as he descends the steps,
Something to eke out a minute additional—shadows of nightfall deepening,
Farewells, messages lessening—dimmer the forthgoer’s visage and form,
Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness—loth, O so loth to depart!
Garrulous to the very last.
This is the Whitman not of the “barbaric yawp” but of the resigned whisper. His poem’s present participles and gerunds pile up on top of one another, their sounds doubling and redoubling (“final withdrawal prolonging,” “emotional lips repeating,” “far-stretching,” “shunning, postponing,” “seeking,” “turning,” “calling,” “deepening,” “lessening”). The amassing of vocal and physical gestures comes to a halt before we even realize that this is a nonsentence, or rather a sentence with no simple verb. Everything is deferred or withheld, a conversation constantly in medias res, stretching through time as the departing comrade, “loth to depart,” is equally loath to enter into silence, which for him would indeed be death. Talk is our essence. Whitman brings sight and sound together: soon to be lost in the darkness means soon to be lost in silence, too. As at the end of Revelation, sound accompanies the parting shot: here, not the trumpet’s last call, but the poet’s ongoing, gently garrulous babble.
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