Multiple Silences in a Cacophonous Age

Abstract

Max Picard once observed that ‘Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence... Man who has lost silence has not merely lost one human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby’. With Picard’s profound reflections in mind, is silence lost? Au contraire, I would like to argue that there are multiple silences, many of which are capable of being retrieved in spite of the cacophonous world we live in. Picard begins his book by observing that ‘Silence is nothing merely negative; it is not the mere absence of speech. It is a positive, a complete world in itself’. Furthermore, ‘there is no beginning to silence and no end: it seems to have its origins in the time when everything was still pure Being. It is like uncreated everlasting Being’. This raises many questions, among them what is silence itself as a part of pure Being? Furthermore, what do such terms mean within the context of our time? What George Prochnik has called ‘Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise’ I wish to address through a series of themes that might enunciate the subject of silence itself. Is there silence through the act of speech itself, and if so what might that be? Can silence be a part of the world of sound, but only through its emphatic presences as experienced, for example, in John Cage’s 4’33”? Furthermore, how does silence appear visually yet at the same time still reinforce itself in the profound explorations of architects such as Louis Kahn? Does Nature have silences and if so, what are they? Finally, what are we ourselves all about in confronting our own interior silences? This paper wishes to address these conditions and proposes a merging and potential resolution regarding these multiple questions about Silence in a cacophonous age.