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Oct 19, 2019

"How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself." --Virginia Woolf

In Pursuit of Silence

In this thought-provoking piece, George Prochnick, author of "In Pursuit of Silence", calls on us to examine our relationship with the sounds, or their absence, around us. Drawing on the wisdom of Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and others, Prochnick proposes that by shutting ourselves off to the noise of our surroundings, we shut ourselves off to the world, effectively losing our place within it. "At some point the inability to 'hear oneself think,'" he argues, "becomes the inability to think at all." Read on to learn more about how we can achieve a greater balance between the variety of naturally-sourced and man-made sounds we encounter and the interludes of stillness and silence that beckon our attention.