Silence

I don't really have anything interesting to say about Erling Kagge's little book Silence.  It's a thoughtful if a bit whimsical and scattershot reflection on the importance of silence, and more generally inner peace, from a guy who has spent some time by himself being quiet in extreme conditions.  Kagge's fame seems to revolve around the fact that he's gone to both the North and South Pole on foot; he describes the solitude of solo-skiing across Antarctica in several places in the book.  Does spending 50 days cold and alone make you an expert on silence?  I suppose more of an expert than most of us.  So what, then does Kagge actually have to say about the subject?  

Basically, the book is a long apology for the value of silence and solitude in a world increasingly obsessed with connecting everything together and making it move as fast as possible.  This speed, this noisy profusion, it sometimes seems, has become an end in itself, so that we no longer even ask why we wanted to clink 'refresh' yet again.  Kagge rightly argues that the key to breaking this cycle is to somehow find a moment in the midst of the color-coded traffic jam of our calendars to actively do nothing.  The silence he has in mind isn't a passive lack in our experience but an active engagement with what's before us here and now in itself, rather than as the mere representative of conversations past or future.  Without trying to experience the intrinsic value of a moment, we are never able to ask what all our ever-so-efficient activity is for.  Unfortunately, while I think this is ultimately a sneakily profound idea, I don't think Kagge's exposition of it really contributed all that much to my understanding of this concept.  So unless you haven't thought very much about the problem, you might want to pass over this one in ...