Friday 27 April 2018

On the death of silence


“…the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.”
~ Josef Pieper
"Man is not even aware of the loss of silence: so much is the space formerly occupied by the silence so full of things that nothing seems to be missing. But where formerly the silence lay on a thing, now one thing lies on another. Where formerly an idea was covered by the silence, now a thousand associations speed along to it and bury it. In this world of today in which everything is reckoned in terms of immediate profit, there is no place for silence. Silence was expelled because it was unproductive, because it merely existed and seemed to have no purpose. Almost the only kind of silence that there is today is due to the loss of the faculty of speech. It is purely negative: the absence of speech. It is merely like a technical hitch in the continuous flow of noise."
~ Max Picard
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1 comment:

Dinwar said...

I have an eye disorder and underwent therapy for it when I was a kid. The most effective therapy was to play videogames for an hour every night, using my bad eye. I ended up playing a LOT of Tetris and similar games--ones that require hand-eye coordination but not a lot of thought. This gave me an hour a day where I was obliged to be alone with my thoughts. I believe that's what really set me on the path I'm on: I got into the habit of thinking about things, alone. I could dig into the meat of things going on around me, of artwork I'd seen, of music I'd listened to. Far from being unproductive, those hours spent quietly alone were the most essential to making me who I am today.