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“It’s really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There’s a whole commotion going on inside us.” Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.” Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
When I was in school, I would sometimes wake up and climb out of my bed in the middle of the night or early in the morning and walk around the hostel. There would be no sound but for the gentle swishing of my track pants as I stepped gingerly down the stairs and into the common area. If I felt like a drink of water, I would fish a steel tumbler out of the little tub by the sink, and the sharp clink of steel on steel as the tumbler came loose from the pile of dishes would ring in my ears like a gong. The silence would split and then fall back into place like a soft curtain — parted for a second and then left to drop. The two minutes spent in the common area would feel like twenty, and the rustling of my blanket when I was back in bed would be a deep, distant noise, like waves in the ocean. Silence amplified my sensory world. Everything seemed bigger, louder, more lived.
Solitude and silence are hard to find at college. There are beautiful, rare moments of collective focus: when a teacher pauses to look through her sheaf of notes and the whole class is quiet, rapt in attention, watching her fingers slip between pages of paper, waiting for the sound of her voice to pick up again, for the scattered, animated lecture to resume; or when I’m sitting around with friends, and we’re chatting over coffee and there’s a lull in the conversation, when background noises sound dim and far away, people parade past in their new summer clothes, and nothing seems very important except that cup of coffee between my fingers. Such moments are delightful because they come and go so peacefully, leaving no mark, no lasting sense of joy or sorrow, of time or stillness. They are not easy to come by, and there’s no point in looking for them. They just swoop, hover over our heads and float away.
It’s interesting that other than these unplanned, unselfconscious instances of peace, I don’t really see a role for quiet in my life. I’m almost afraid of it, convinced that if I let down my chattering guard for a moment, I might let something painful slip in — memories of home, anxiety about that friend who hasn’t replied to my messages in two days, frustration with PG life and its many limitations, the desire to run away, turn back the clock, live another life.
And when unpleasant emotions take over, there’s no telling when they’ll pass. So I tend to avoid giving them the chance to get to me, to rise to the surface of my mind like stirred up dregs. I actively dispel quiet. The first thing I do when I wake up is reach for my phone. I switch on WiFi and check my Whatsapp messages, log into Facebook and read the headlines off all the news pages I’m following. I’ve mentally stepped into the outside world already. Before I’ve bodily registered the temperature I’ve read it off my phone’s weather card.
Before I’ve fully opened my eyes I know that Hilary Clinton won the South Carolina Primary. I haven’t brushed my teeth yet, but Little Black Book Delhi has already informed me of the top ten best waffle joints in town. My phone, my music, my friends, my books — I use these things to distract myself from my immediate surroundings and their effect on my mind.
I’ve also found that silence is an unwieldy thing to carry into social situations. It took me a while to make friends at college, to find people who could gauge and understand my changing moods, whose moods and states of mind I, in turn, could engage with. But when I finally decided that I had, I found consistently that on days when I felt like withdrawing, being quiet, listening to conversation rather than participating, my friends saw my silence as an expression of unhappiness, or an attempt to keep the causes of my distress secret. They would try to draw me out, to coax me into talking, confiding, and I would have to explain that it was nothing like that, I was fine, just listening, maybe a little tired. I felt misunderstood.
What is viable quiet? Portable peace? Is there a form of quiet that I can accommodate in my life?
And my irritation would pull me further inward, till I was genuinely no longer tuned into them and what they were saying. Then, over the weeks, I noticed my attitude towards their silences. When someone else had a quiet day I spent time worrying about them and wondering why they weren’t talking. I interpreted their quiet exactly as they interpreted mine — as unhappiness, discomfort. This has changed somewhat now. We try to be more accommodating of silence. But we still see conversation as the only legitimate, expressive form of communication, and somewhere, we assume that words are our only means of connecting ourselves to each other and the world around us.
Additionally, there is the question of physical space. Where, in this mad, mad city, in a college with narrow corridors and packed classrooms, or in a PG of fifty girls high on Maggi and chai am I supposed to find my moment of silence? I’ve tried everything: balconies, staircases, empty rooms, the park outside, the couple of hours before noon on weekend mornings when everyone is still asleep… but nothing quite hits the spot. There is no such thing as a totally quiet space. The noise seeps in and the silence, light and amorphous as it is, resists being given a form, being confined to a place and time. In desperate situations there are always WiFi-free cafes (I sometimes wonder if this is the only way to keep me away from my phone) and libraries and obscure gardens to escape to, but I lack the time and energy to plan and execute such an escape. Besides, I’m all for a cheaper and more hassle-free version of the search for quiet, and for a final product that I can carry with me wherever I go — portable peace, perhaps, to match portable worry, portable stress, the din of the city, and all the rest of it.
What is viable quiet? Portable peace? Is there a form of quiet that I can accommodate in my life? In the Jerry Spinelli quote at the very beginning, the character Stargirl talks about our “churning” bodies and “chattering” minds. She’s arguing that it’s difficult to find internal quiet, to step away from our troubles and anxieties and distracted mental ramblings for long enough to pay attention to the world around us. From this point of view, even external noise is quiet, if we listen closely enough. The silence doesn’t come from our surroundings, but from the state of mind that allows us to really tune in to the things we see and hear, whatever these might be. What’s attractive to me about this definition of quiet is its relevance to daily life.
Silence doesn’t come from our surroundings, but from the state of mind that allows us to really tune in to the things we see and hear.
Stargirl isn’t prescribing meditation or yoga, or telling me to run away to a hill station to find quiet. She isn’t telling me to sit alone in a dark room and lock the doors and confront my ugliest fears. She’s suggesting that I potter about as usual, go to classes, sleep, eat, but that I also turn myself into a tangle of sensory experiences, into a being as captivated by the outside world as I am preoccupied with the “commotion” within me. It’s the kind of quiet that I can take with me to classes, to the market, on my runs in the park, to Hauz Khas Fort — a feeling that I can hold on to as I meet the day.
Quiet can be a pause. Norton Juster in the second quote describes the “expectant pause in a room full of people when someone is just about to speak”. I tend to feel that flow is the key to good conversation, and that I communicate best with people when the exchange is unselfconscious (sometimes incoherent), but essentially involved and honest. I value speaking — the richness and cleverness of the arguments put forth — over the ability to listen and be truly receptive to an idea.
Also, I assume that people have the ability to analyse and appreciate each other’s opinions at a purely intellectual level, and I ignore the potential for conflict and emotionally founded misunderstanding. But technically, in an exchange, the point is really to absorb ideas and respond from a place of some understanding. A pause can afford me the space to come to this understanding. Not necessarily in a literal sense, as an awkward silence before every sentence uttered, but rather as a sustained habit, as a gentle buffer zone into which words can sink before they, in turn, begin to provoke a fully formed verbal response.
Quiet in conversation can be my weapon of choice in heated discussions about politics, social injustices — topics of conversation that are difficult and inflammatory by nature. Pausing, stalling, prioritising receptiveness may keep me from offering my most direct and emotional evaluation.
Quiet, silence, portable peace — they are less a question of space and time than of habit. Literature students like to say that once one gets into the habit of analysing a text, of seeing more than meets the eye, there’s no reading the text as just a novel or just a play or just a poem ever again. It’s not characters and plotlines that drive the reading but ideology, historical context, cultural constructs.
The text is none the worse for it. If anything, it is more stunning, more liberating. Quiet has a similar effect on the experience of daily life: it brings unexpected things to the forefront of our mental maps of the day. New points-of-view, new people, new places, new experiences, each competing with my own emotional states for importance. And the day is none the worse for it.
