3/11/2020 Why we need an absence of noise to hear anything important | Aeon Essays

Wild geese in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York City, USA, 2017. Photo by Rebecca Norris
Webb from the book Brooklyn, the City Within with Alex Webb/Magnum Photos

A place of silence
Our cities are filled by the hubbub of human-
made noise. Where shall we find the quietness
we need to nurture our spirit?
Liam Heneghan

To walk from south to north on the peripatos, the path encircling the Acropolis of
Athens – as I did one golden morning in December last year – takes you past the
boisterous crowds swarming the stone seats of the eatre of Dionysus. e path then
threads just below the partially restored colonnades of the monumental Propylaea,
which was thronged that morning with visitors pausing to chat and take photographs
before they clambered past that monumental gateway up to the Parthenon. Proceed
further along the curved trail and, like an epiphany, you will find yourself in the wilder
north-facing precincts of that ancient outcrop. In the section known as the Long
Rocks there are a series of alcoves of varying sizes, named ingloriously by the
archaeologists as caves A, B, C and D. In its unanticipated tranquility, this stretch of
rock still seems to host the older gods.

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I sat below these caves that morning appreciating a respite from the tumult and, for a
few minutes, I just listened. e pursuit of quietness, especially in urban areas has
become a preoccupation of mine in recent years. However, the quiet I experienced
below the caves of Zeus Astrapaios, of Apollo and of Pan was not precisely an
encounter with silence, for it was punctuated by many sounds. A family of cats
mewled; the wind gusted playfully across the limestone and the schist, and sent the
leaves scuttering along the pavement. A murmur of voices rose up occasionally from
the cafes of the Plaka neighbourhood; someone, somewhere, played a melancholy air
on the klarino. All of these sounds were pleasant to my ears. is form of quietness,
one that is not precisely silence, is characterised rather by an absence of noise or βοή
(voe) in Greek, a word that might also translate as clamour, or din. I call the sort of
auditory lull that, at the same time, asserts a benevolent presence, ‘avoesis’ (that is, the
absence of voe or noise).

After a short time, I moved farther east along the peripatos and the susurrus of idle
chatter picked up once more; a car horn sounded in the distance, and then I
discerned the pronounced hum of traffic. A sharp whistle blew from the top of the
Acropolis – I assume a visitor had breached a cordon and had placed a profane foot
upon a protected antiquity. I had now left the quiet behind; my time with the gods
was over.

is was my first visit back to Athens in a few decades. e city has always been
appealing to me with its bustling market places; its vendors outside the garrulous
cafes cajoling passersby to stop in; the gloaming sanctuary of its low-domed churches,
the hardware merchants outside their stalls immersed in voluble dialogue (will there
be fisticuffs or embraces? … One can never tell, for the arguments never end); the
curious specificity of its engrossing museums; the indefatigability of its derelict buses
honking their way through the snarling streets; the ubiquity of its adventitious feral
cats; the sense that poetry has always been possible here; the lute players and the
buskers on the street corners and in the squares; its burdensome heat in summer; its
catastrophic and attention-demanding pavements; its promiscuous mix of wealthy
and impoverished streets; the affability of its winter temperatures; its graffiti: political,
amusing and occasionally inane or obscene; the chestnut vendors on the sidewalks
absorbed with their roasting pans; the scattering of its monumental debris; the
alternating mood of despair and vivacity suggestive that both revolution and
equanimity are ever-present possibilities; the dark unkempt verdure of its botanic
garden; the reverence Athens has for its past; the sense that the past should not
determine its future.

And then there is the noise, the glorious polyglottic, polyphonic commotion of Athens
arising from its people, vehicles and its infernal construction machinery. I had
wondered, at first, if enduring the tumult of the city was a young person’s game, and
perhaps it is, but returning to Athens seemed like an assignation with an old lover,
whose whispers remain electrifying and whose harsh words are astringent but still
exciting. Even so, I longed for some relief from the city and its din. I left, after a few
days, for the mountainous Peloponnese.

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t might have been unrealistic to expect Athens to offer silence. It is, after all, a
sprawling and kinetic metropolis with a population of more than 3 million souls. I

I began to wonder if those quiet moments on the north face of the Acropolis were a
figurative residue of a more ancient silence. It is tempting to regard the relicts of
the ancient Athenian polis – cordoned off as these are from the modern city – as
geological eruptions intruding into very modern urban strata. Yet there are important
continuities between the old and the new. Certainly it is hard to imagine from reading
accounts of the Athenian Golden Age that it was ever an age of silence. Despite its
small size in the classical era – in e Greeks (1951), the scholar H D F Kitto gives the
entire population of the Attic peninsula, which the city dominated, as a mere 350,000
– Athens, it seems, has always been a garrulous town.

e polis of ancient Athens was not just noisy in a quotidian way but rather it was
grounded in a type of philosophical volubility. As the classical historian Jean-Pierre
Vernant wrote in Les origines de la pensée grecque (1962), or e Origins of Greek
ought (1982): ‘the system of the polis implied, first of all, the extraordinary
preeminence of speech over all other instruments of power … Speech was no longer
the ritual word, the precise formula, but open debate, discussion, argument.’ In the
philosophical and political writings of the Ancient Greeks, there are, unsurprisingly,
slim pickings for the student of avoesis or attentive silence.

Admittedly, a small smattering of silence punctuates the Socratic dialogues.

Commenting on these silences, my colleague Sean Kirkland (an Aristotelian, for the
most part) observes: ‘Plato marks them with real emphasis.’ In Phaedo, for example,
which takes place on the day of Socrates’ death, there is a notable instance of silence.
Plato reports that when ‘Socrates had done speaking, for a considerable time, there
was silence; he himself appeared to be meditating.’ But even as he endures the
countdown to his execution, Socrates – that most disputative of the Greeks – cannot
long remain silent. After his contemplative pause, the debate simply resumes. ese
important instances of silence notwithstanding, Kirkland concedes my point,
observing that ‘the Greeks were pretty gabby (logophilic).’

If the Greek philosophical tradition is gabby and noisy, stillness flourishes in Greek
spiritual practice. In her book
<https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691146584/silence-in-the-
land-of-logos> Silence in the Land of Logos (2000), the classicist Silvia Montiglio
excavates the complicated history of silence in Ancient Greek religious practice.
Montiglio concedes: ‘Experiences that are normally silent for us were normally vocal
for a Greek, at least in the archaic and classical period.’ Although the dead are
notoriously silent, nonetheless Montiglio cajoles a range of texts relevant to
understanding religious practice ‘to talk to one another about silence’. By doing so,
she reveals that Ancient Greek silence often has the character of an interdiction:
speech must be kept under control before the gods. One never knows what
incautious words might offend them.

‘If you cannot attain stillness where you now live, consider
living in exile, and try and make up your mind to go’
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Whereas the silence of the Ancient Greek religious practice needs some careful
academic sleuthing to declare itself, silence in the Christian tradition is loquacious.
e Greek tradition of hesychasm (from the Greek hēsychia meaning ‘tranquility’,
‘silence’ and ‘stillness’) put silence on its most positive footing. e supplicant should
be silent before an ineffable God because silence is a desirable form of prayer. e
hesychasm of 14th-century Athonite monasticism builds upon the literature of the
Desert Fathers – the 3rd- and 4th-century ascetics of Egypt and Palestine. ese
writings were collated by Saint Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain of Athos (1749-
1809) and Saint Markarios of Corinth (1731-1805), and can be found in e
Philokalia – the Complete Text (publication of English translations started in five
volumes in 1979). Even those of us who don’t insist upon cultivating an intimate,
contemplative relationship with God will find these readings immersive and
instructive. ey provide the most complete encyclopaedia we have in the Western
tradition on the merits of stillness, silence and solitude. e writings bristle with
striking aphorisms. For example, Saint Diadochos of Photiki (400-486) tells us that
‘where there is richness of spirit no speech is possible. At such times the soul is drunk
with the love of God and with silent voice, delights in glory.’ e 7th-century Saint
eodoros the Great Ascetic states: ‘A silent man is a throne of perceptiveness.’
eodoros then continues in a cautionary spirit: ‘ e Lord has said that we shall have
to give an account of every idle word.’ is might be awkward, at least for some of us.

Down through the centuries, hesychastic practice continues and indeed finds a home
in contemporary spirituality. e central message endures: silence is a virtue; noise a
distraction. Although the translation of hēsychia as tranquility and silence is
appropriate, its translation as ‘stillness’ emphasises an important aspect of spiritual
practice. at is, the word ‘stillness’ captures a sense of rootedness (or in the Greek
etymology, of being seated). e anchoritic cell is rooted, as often as not, in the desert:
tranquility being possible only far from the secular fray and the confines of the city.
Evagrios the Solitary (345-399) – my favourite of these writers, if one can claim
favourites among such stern fellows – wrote: ‘If you cannot attain stillness where you
now live, consider living in exile, and try and make up your mind to go.’ Admonitions
against the fleshly ways of the cities abound in the Philokalia. For example, Saint
Neilos, the 5th-century Ascetic, warns us that ‘in order to escape vice, the saints fled
from towns and avoided meeting large numbers of people for they know that the
company of men is more destructive than the plague.’

ese then are the poles, as I see them, of the Greek imagination: the talky
anthropocentric babble of the polis on the one hand, and the stillness of exile, the
mountains, the desert, on the other. e one pole gave us a politics, and a set of
institutions; the other furnished a spiritual practice. ese are not immiscible
principles, of course. Athenian democracy takes root in peoples both cosmopolitan
and pastoral, and one can find hesychasts even in the fleshpots of Athens. Although
there are those moments such as the one I experienced at the north-facing rocks of
the Acropolis when a stillness fell upon the Athenian hubbub, this city is rarely
without noise. Nor, for that matter, is there much quiet in the city from which I hail,
Dublin, nor in the one where I now reside, Chicago. Even those of us not listening in
the stillness for the voice of God might need an absence of noise to hear anything
important at all, even if it is just our own thoughts.
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W hen I first visited Athens, I was a young graduate student living in Dublin.
Back then, I possessed what I thought of as a kaleidoscopic mind. I recognise
now that a truer description is that my mind was turbulent, restless and obsessive. A
friend at the time suggested that we attend zazen meditation together as a mental
salve during that last stressful year of dissertation-writing. e Catholic priest leading
the session explained that we would just sit in silence in a bid to quiet our minds.
Why, I asked, would I ever want that? So, I left. For the mind in need of constant
stimulation, Athens with its ceaseless street theatre and all the charm of its noisy
discord is a city of dreams. My frenzied mind seemed amplified and enlarged in that
place. is is what I needed to thrive, I thought; rather that than quietly staring at a
blank wall.

My mental processes seem slower these days. I like to think that they also run deeper.
I require longer periods of quiet for the sake of equanimity. Living in Chicago, it has
been hard to find those periods of uninterrupted silence where the human din is
minimised and the sounds of other Earthly things – the birds, the insects, the wind,
the lake waves on the shoreline, the creaking of trees – reach the ear and soothe the
mind. Taking my cue from the spiritual wisdom of the hesychastic tradition – where
stillness demands a cessation of anthropogenic noise so that other voices might be
heard – I have become a student of this form of silence. In its secular context, I name
it avoetic silence. Where the hesychast requires stillness in order to develop an
experiential relationship with God, the needs of the avoetic listener are more
mundane; that is, the absence of noise is a requirement for health.

My observation that metropolitan areas are rarely quiet is not especially novel; noise
is often a point of civic pride – ‘the city that never sleeps’ must surely be a noisy one.
Policymakers have often concerned themselves, laudably, with curbing excessive
noise – eliminating damaging noise in the workplace, mandating quiet times in
neighbourhoods and so on. However, I have discovered that quantifying urban quiet
– and identifying opportunities for avoetic silence – is rarely done.

The longest period without the intrusion of disruptive

anthrophonic sound was 3 minutes and 15 seconds

With a view of ascertaining the quality of silence in the Chicago region, I have worked
<https://resources.depaul.edu/newsline/sections/student-
spotlight/Pages/Soundscapes-in-Chicago.aspx> with a group of intrepid
environmental undergraduate students – Bailey Didier, Matthew Rosson and Ashlyn
Royce, joined later by Angela Stenberg – to make recordings in places where avoetic
silence might prevail. ese students work with me on a variety of projects
characterising the ecology of green spaces in the city. Braving inclement winter
mornings from February to the onset of spring last year, we recorded twice weekly in
two nature preserves in the city and a large cemetery north of the city. One of the
preserves is a bird sanctuary close to Lake Michigan; the other surrounds a restored
pond and is in a busy neighbourhood. An account in my field notes from a typical 10-
minute period goes as follows:

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airplane grumbles overhead, continues for some time; elevated train clanks
by; low roar of traffic; slight wind arises; traffic continues; airplane gets
louder; *silence* very briefly; traffic persistent; a distant airplane; geese
some distance away; hiss of car tires; car honks; airplane; train clangs;
*silence* very briefly; traffic sounds resume; screech of train; emergency
vehicle siren blares; train loudly banging on tracks; commuter train clicks
by.

We use the classification of sounds proposed by the writer and sound-recorder Bernie
Krause in his book <https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/bernie-krause/the-great-
animal-orchestra/9780316192392/> e Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins
of Music in the World’s Wild Places (2012). Krause distinguishes anthrophony (sounds
generated by humans), biophony (sounds generated by nonhuman organisms) and
geophony (sounds generated by nonbiological natural elements). Our tallying of this
data is almost complete. Without needing very complex analysis, this much is clear:
over the 10 weeks of recordings during the winter, the longest period without the
intrusion of disruptive anthrophonic sound was a mere 3 minutes and 15 seconds.

What we have found in Chicago is that opportunities for avoesis are rare indeed. It is
an observation that will, I suspect hold true for most other cities, as there is not much
opportunity for silence anywhere. at this is the case is illustrated by the acoustic
ecologist Gordon Hempton’s compelling search for ‘One Square Inch of Silence’.
Hempton travelled extensively recording and preserving the rapidly disappearing
wild soundscapes across the United States. e project led to the designation
<https://onesquareinch.org/> of one square inch of silence in the Hoh Rain Forest of
Olympic National Park in north Washington state – one of the quietest places in the
US. Hempton’s work has done much to raise global awareness of the perils of sound
pollution.

It is often the case that innovations in our environmental sensibilities (and in the
environmental sciences) emerge from taking seriously the intuitions inherited from
traditional knowledge. Indeed, some of these insights can be drawn from folk stories
and mythology, as I tried to show in my recent book
<https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo25153600.html> Beasts
at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature (2018). at

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humans benefit psychologically and physiologically from contact with nature, that
being among trees <https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-an-embodied-history-of-trees-
teach-us-about-life> might calm us, that unstructured play
<https://aeon.co/essays/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play>
outdoors is salutary for children, that a brisk walk is good
<https://aeon.co/essays/step-by-step-americans-are-sacrificing-the-right-to-walk> for
you, that healing <https://aeon.co/ideas/how-pottering-about-in-the-garden-creates-
a-time-warp> can be found in a garden <https://aeon.co/essays/gardens-cannot-
make-us-good-but-they-invite-us-to-be-better> : none of these assertions is especially
audacious. Yet the sort of data needed to substantiate these claims and to drive public
policy have emerged only from the work of a recent generation of environmental and
social psychologists. Influential summaries of such research by Rachel and Stephen
Kaplan are technical, accurate, accessible and inspiring: eg, e Experience of Nature:
A Psychological Perspective (1989).

ough the mechanisms by which such benefits from nature accrue are imperfectly
understood, the patterns are clear enough to compel policy and educational
programmes. Municipal regions the world over concern themselves with providing
access to green space for recreation, and this is now a component of public health
programmes. Children’s programmes that enjoin us to ‘leave no child inside’, as well
as programmes which prescribe ‘nature cures’ or invite us to ‘forest bathe’ and so on,
all draw from the research insights of environmental psychologists.

at a relationship might pertain between natural sounds and human wellbeing

seems intuitive too. After all, few sleep apps feature jackhammers, yet many provide
myriad birdsongs or ocean waves. Research that quantifies this relationship is now
under way, though it remains a novel field of investigation. However, one influential
article <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872309/> , published in
2010 by the Swedish researchers Jesper Alvarsson, Stefan Wiens and Mats E Nilsson,
illustrated that just as images of nature can facilitate recovery after psychological
stress, nature sounds can have similar effects. Papers such as this one, alongside the
growing appreciation of the degradation of urban soundscapes, could inspire policy
innovations in the near future.

ough one surely cannot command the birds to sing, nor the wind to play music in
the trees, nonetheless it should be possible to manage urban space in a way that opens
up these fields of possibility. Managed in this way, the quality of urban green spaces
will be assessed as much by their soundscapes as by their visual allure.

For all of that, avoetic silence is a subjective quality. How much silence is needed in
order for humans to contemplate their lot? What determines the quality of an avoetic
space? When I stopped along my walk on the peripatos trail and the noise fell away, I
stood, not in complete silence, but rather in a space cradled by the rocks and the
path, and the murmurs of voices, and the gusting of the wind. And if I had regrets
about being thrown back into the clamour of Athens, these feelings were not long
lived for a city should host both the gabby voices of the marketplace, as well as
avoetic silence. is is how it might always be with experiences of avoesis: they are
rare (though perhaps we seldom seek them out), they could be a vital ingredient for a

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sense of wellness (though we have not evaluated them), and they might prove to be
enduring – a moment with the gods creating impressions that could last a lifetime.

anks to my wife, Vassia Pavlogianis, for discussions on Greek vocabulary associated with
noise and silence.

Liam Heneghan is professor of environmental science and studies at DePaul University in

Chicago. His latest book is Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom of
Children’s Literature
<https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo25153600.html>
(2018). 

aeon.co24 February, 2020

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