Our days here at school are crowded, sometimes hectic, always noisy. From the very beginning of homeroom, students are bombarded by announcements, by the wartalk (I write this at the beginning of the second Gulf War) and pictures of Channel One, by the various administrivia that interrupt even those interruptions. There is nothing unusual about any of this; it’s the natural result of bringing large numbers of young people together under one roof and trying to attend to their multiple needs. But what I worry about is that we become so accustomed to the clamor that we might come to believe the insidious message of a billboard I noticed recently. It’s for a cell phone company, and it warns, “Silence is weird.”
I don’t want to sound too grumpy or uncool, but the lack of Quiet and her fair sister Solitude in the lives of many of my students distresses me. I despair of students ever achieving the interior work necessary to becoming self-aware, deliberate human beings. In this time of war and fear and craziness, I fear they will listen to the wrong things. I fear they will themselves become weird.
By “interior work” I mean the self-examination of our own beliefs, thoughts, and actions—and of our failures to act. “Why did I join that stupid dissing of Mrs. Heekin today—I know she’s a fine person, and dedicated to helping us all.” Or, “Why did I fail Mr. Hamm (and myself) the other day by not doing my homework—and this just after he praised me in class?” Or “Do I really think Catholicism is stupid? What parts of it, exactly? And why do otherwise intelligent people I respect, like Mrs. Foley, still believe in it? “ “What do I think about this war, and why, and what must I do about what I think?”
We all encounter thoughts like these, I suppose—but not for long, not for long enough. To really look at ourselves is to live out what the famous oracle at Delphi counseled: “Know thyself.” But such self-knowledge is often difficult. It requires the kind of sustained effort we usually reserve for physical tasks such as getting and staying in shape for a sport or losing ten pounds for a prom. We have to stick at it. Self-knowledge does not arrive by magic nor does it come overnight.
Self-knowledge is important to adolescents, because if the principle is true that you will learn best by connecting what you are studying to what you already know, then if you do not know yourself, you do not have as many hooks upon which to hang new knowledge of the world and how it works. You do not see yourself in relation to those other things. You miss opportunities to grow.
And such growth requires, besides silence, solitude. We cannot do the necessary interior work in a crowd. Among other reasons is that we cannot hear. “Let’s go to the game,” or “How about you come over to my house and we watch some TV,” or “Sorry, I’ve got to work today so I can pay my car insurance.” The business of routine overwhelms us, and easily, because it brings us together with our friends. But these distractions spoil the solitude necessary to growth and development. There is only one of each of us; to sacrifice our uniqueness to habits of mindless activity—malling, video-gaming, television—is to waste all.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
So wrote Wordsworth, a man familiar with solitude. Famous for his long walks, sometimes twenty miles a day, he thereby created the space within himself in which his great poems full of self-knowledge could take their fullest, most developed form. My own father was a great walker too; and though he was no poet, I think that for him, as for Wordsworth, the silence and solitude he built for himself were good for his soul. He did his interior work inside the space of those walks. He was a man of volatile temper, as I sometimes am; I have seen embers of that same quick anger in my sister. Especially when I was very young, and my father freshly back from World War II, his anger, compounded with the trauma of four unfurloughed years in the South Pacific, regularly leaked over into nightmares that he screamed through, waking the whole house. In part, I think his volatility was the lingering effect of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, which hundreds of thousands of World War II veterans suffered, undiagnosed and untreated. At the same time, my father was also deeply pious, attending daily Mass all his life, and doing all he could to build the habit of church-going into his children.
Wasn’t there something contradictory about the magnitude of his temper, the palpable weight of his anger and repressed fear as we cowered in the back seat of the car after one of his rages—ironically enough, they often occurred on Sunday morning, on the way to church—and the calm depths of his religious practice? Wasn’t he exactly the type my students would call a hypocrite, professing the religion of the Lamb while acting out the fury of the Tiger?
No. It was exactly because of his fearful anger that his spirituality arose. I think he probably saw in himself the one and so turned, in repentance, to the the other. He was not a man trained in apology or adept at touching, whether in joy or forgiveness. There was little physical contact in our family; I do not remember ever seeing him kiss his own father.
But he could apologize to God—there was the mantra-like Act of Confession learned by every Catholic school child—and there was, with God, no eye to meet or avoid, no hand to touch. My father could ask God for forgiveness; there was no voice to censure him or to make him feel even worse. Precisely because of his anger, and the magnitude of the guilt he must have felt over it, my father plumbed unusual spiritual depths, and later in his life, during long weeks alone in the woods, accomplished what I have to believe were remarkable, sustained, Trappist-like silences.
That’s why I’m afraid for some of my students. By all appearances, they do not seem to have built within themselves the little booths, like those we read of in the Book of Mark, prepared on the mountaintop for Elijah and Moses to occupy. There appears to be within many of them no safe dwelling for their best thoughts, no monk’s pensive cell nor convent’s narrow room in which to pursue the pure plain work of listening to themselves and then going on, more gracefully, with their lives. There appears to be within many of them no place for The Word—and equally importantly—for the the Silence, in which might dwell kairos—”God’s time”— for longer than the three days given to it currently in my school’s retreat program.
We have forgotten that what the famous Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard observed early in the last century is still true.
The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply: Create silence! The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create Silence.
My father, as he grew older, found kairos in his long weeks alone in the country, eating simply, walking, doing important nothings, and welcoming into his soul what Wordsworth encountered in his “pleasant lea”—the spirit that runs through all things, that informs the water, hills, woods, birds, stars. It is a spirit whose essence is silence. For hours, my father, at last free of the shrieking banzai attacks that racked his memory and psyche for decades, sat wordless and still, the mute world green around him in its calming presence. And he heard its silence, and it was good.
Richard Hague
