Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence. The invention of printing, technics, compulsory education—nothing has so altered man as this lack of relationship to silence, this fact that silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe.
Man who has lost silence has not merely lost one human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby.
Formerly silence covered all things: man had first to break through the covering of silence before he could get close to an object, and the silence protected even the thoughts he wanted to think himself. Man could not throw himself directly at things and ideas: they were shielded by the silence surrounding them, and man was protected from moving towards them all too quickly. The silence was stationed in front of things and ideas. It was there objectively. It was encamped there like a defending army. Man moved slowly and quietly towards ideas and things. The silence was always present between the movement from one idea to another, from one thing to another.
The rhythm of the silence punctuated the movement.
Every movement become a special act: the silence, the primitive rock of silence had to be removed before one could move forward. But then when one had arrived at an idea, one was really there with the idea, and the idea or the thing really existed for the first time. The concrete reality was, as it were, created in the direct personal encounter with man.
Today man no longer moves deliberately to ideas and things. They are absorbed into his own emptiness, they rush at him, they swirl around him. Man no longer thinks, he has his thinking done for him. Cogito, ergo sum has been replaced by cogitor, ergo non sum.
The earth was once no less occupied than it is today, but it was occupied by silence, and man was unable to seize everything in it as it was all held fast by silence. Man did not need to know everything: the silence knew it all for him. And as man was connected with the silence, he knew many things through the silence.
The heaven of silence no longer covers the world of ideas and things today, restraining them with its weight and pressure. Where it used to be there is now an empty space, and things are as it were drawn up by suction into the space where the silence used to dwell. Things are exposed, uncovered and pressing upwards. More and more things are constantly pushing their way upwards, and that is the real ‘‘revolt of the masses””, this rebellion of things and ideas that are no longer held down by the pressure of silence.
Man is not even aware of the loss of silence: so much ıs 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.
There is still perhaps a little silence; a little is still tolerated. Just as the almost completely exterminated Indians are still allowed a little living space in their miserable reservations, so silence is sometimes allowed a chink of space in the sanatoria between two and three in the afternoon: “An hour of silence” and in the “two minutes’ silence’ in which the masses must be silent ‘‘in remembrance of...’ But there is never a special silence in memory of the silence that is no more.
It is true that silence still exists as a true silence in monastic communities. In the Middle Ages the silence of the monks was still connected with the silence of other men outside the monastery. Today the silence in the monasteries is isolated; it lives literally only in monastic seclusion.
from the book The World of Silence by Max Picard
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