Silence, and How to Hear It
The other day, I was sitting in the King James Library, thinking about silence. This is what I wrote:
I hear hands brush paper, pencils clatter, the round thunk of a water bottle set down as softly as possible; I hear wooden chairs whine, the obnoxious sschwip of a hastily turned page, the sniff of someone who is mildly sick. A cough cracks like a shell detonation, then shamefully fades away. I never realised how the writing tools all have different accents — the pencil raspy and tentative, the pen slick and whippy, the marker so screechy. I hear the deletion of words, can almost hear exasperation in the tic-tic-tic-tic from the invisible person across from me. Outside, the sparrows chitter and trill, the crows roar, and the people down on the grass ripple in laughter. The bells bleat meekly from within their sanctuaries, and I am the most silent thing here.
Apart from the stiff, exposing quiet of King James Library, there is a real lack of silence in my life. I travel everywhere in a flurry, wired headphones half-falling off, chronically five minutes late for class. Noise consumes most of my awareness. In his 1851 book For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard wrote: “If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence.” Silence is closely intertwined with self-perception — as attractive distractions fade, our attention curls inward. A 2020 study on the relationship between silence and consciousness distinguished the shift from the narrative self to the minimal self. The narrative self is autobiographical; it’s the conscious knowledge of the self, a narrative of memories, beliefs, and experiences. The minimal self concerns the experience of being. It exists in the timeless now; it’s what the slightly wacky yogis call “awareness.” Silence invites the minimal self, as the lack of noise shifts your consciousness from what is happening to me to the awareness of the happening itself.
A 2023 study published in PNAS wrote that silence is heard. Researchers found that auditory processing treats silence the same way it treats sound, suggesting that silence is perceived, not inferred. The absence of sound, then, is like negative space in a drawing — a portrait is not made just of charcoal, but of charcoal against the bareness of paper. The negative and the positive are married to create form. Or silence is like the space between words that gives place, order, and rhythm, and maybe, eventually, poetry.
Since I have invited more silence into my days, they’ve seemed to grow louder — not louder in the sense of sound, but in the awareness of music. I have found a word for that: discordia concors.
From the Latin, discordia (dis [apart] - cor [heart]) means ‘discord.’ Concors, (con [together, with] - cor [heart]) means ‘harmonious.’ Altogether, discordia concors is harmonious discord, the idea that conflicting elements in nature paradoxically create harmony. The way I understand it, all the jumbled, jarring, and random sounds in our world aren’t solitary, but part of an ever-singing choir.
To hear it, you (and I) must take out those white wired headphones that I know are knotted, shoddy, and undoubtedly blistering your auditory nerves. Only yesterday, I heard the music on the grim walk back from the gym: the whisking of a passing bike, the low rumble and whirr of a far-off industrial plant, the birds shifting in the trees, a car chafing slowly over gravel, the hoots of drunken students in the streets. My own feet, skimming the wet pavement, and my heartbeat, like a small animal in my ears. All these discordant sounds, with hearts apart, were stitched together to form one rhythmic organ in the un-silent silence of the night. Open your ears to silence, and you will hear the music, too.
Image from Artvee
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