BROOKLYN, NY. Perhaps there are still places where silence is self-evident. Not here. It’s not that New York City is painfully loud, at least not most of the time, at least not on an out-of-the-way tree-lined block of two- and three-story houses and small apartment buildings like the one where I live. It’s that wherever you are in the city, the city’s noise comes to feel like a wall, one with varied textures but without apertures or cracks.
As I sit at my desk in late spring, near an open window at the back end of my apartment, I hear the hum and drip of the next-door neighbor’s air conditioner. Although a few minutes might go by before a car passes down my block, the sound of traffic on larger streets nearby never entirely fades away. The rattle of trains on the elevated portion of the subway line a block to the west alternates with the roar of planes crossing low overhead en route to LaGuardia Airport, eleven miles to the northeast. A siren rises to audibility and, before I can tell whether it comes from a police cruiser or an ambulance, sinks back into the stir of sound; there is no distinct moment at which I am sure that I no longer hear it. It’s quiet enough here that I can hear my own deeper breaths, but not quiet enough for my ear to disaggregate the city’s whirs, buzzes, growls, and rumbles.
The city presents in intensified form a problem that stalks us everywhere we go. In or out of the city, we are, these days, inundated by the uncommunicative auditory byproducts of human activity. If we find it difficult to acknowledge one another or to take in the world on its own terms, it may be at least in part because we have come to live in a world of noise, one in which, as Max Picard puts it in his gorgeously enigmatic, frequently perplexing, and ultimately compelling 1948 book The World of Silence, “silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe,” in which silence comes to seem no more than an “interruption of the continuity of noise, like a technical hitch in the noise-machine.”
Silence, as Picard understands it, is not at bottom an absence, “not simply what happens when we stop talking,” but is instead “positive, a complete world in itself . . . contain[ing] everything within itself[,] not waiting for anything [but] always wholly present in itself.” Picard invites us to find in silence a reality beyond human thought and intention, a background against which human activity can convey meaning. “The speech that comes out of silence is as it were justified by the silence that precedes it,” Picard writes, so that meaningful speech is “silence turned around.” It’s not merely that we in the modern world hear a lot of artificial sounds, or even that our words become something other than speech, something more like noise, when they are aggregated into a flood of communications or submerged in a wave of mechanical outputs. Picard means to warn that we in our world of noise are in danger of losing certain capacities for awareness and receptivity.
Alan Jacobs has written recently about our need to recognize obligations to one another and about the possibility of answering this need through a “convivial humanism,” a sense of our common humanity not based on the promulgation of a philosophical doctrine about the human essence but instead following from a better way of being with one another, from our “cultivation . . . of a certain habitus that is rooted always in sitting it out, in waiting for an answer.” He and Picard, it seems to me, are getting at the same need and the same possibility. Yet Picard helps us push Jacobs’s idea farther: not least among the habits required for a convivial humanism, a reader of Picard might conclude, is the practice of appreciating silence, which, in turn, requires noticing silence. “When two people are conversing with one another,” Picard notes, “a third is always present: Silence is listening. . . . At the end of the Platonic dialogues it is always as though silence itself were speaking. The persons who were speaking seem to have become listeners to silence.” If a convivial humanism needs our patient presence with one another, then the practices we need for conviviality are not only those that orient us to one another; we also need to be able to be patient with silence itself.
Thus I have been making a point, lately, of listening for silence in the city where I live. Picard, bless his heart, seems at times to be warning me not to bother. In “the big cities of the modern world,” he warns, “it is as though silence had suddenly exploded and thrown everything into disorder and confusion. The city . . . lies there like what is left behind after an explosion, like the ruins of silence.” It’s not just that the city is loud; it’s that “noise is manufactured in the city, just as goods are manufactured,” so that the city deploys itself against silence: “The houses of the great city are like pillboxes against the silence. It is as though shots were being fired from their windows against the silence.”
To be sure, city noises have changed since the 1940s. Picard’s was the industrial city, the city of assembly lines and pushcarts and cargo ships. In my post-industrial city, there are more coffeeshops than sweatshops, more headphone-wearers than ware-hawkers; the cargo ships now dock alongside parking lots in New Jersey rather than alongside neighborhoods in New York. Moreover, Picard trusted, in a way I cannot, that plenty of places outside the city offer relief from modern noisiness. In the sort of place we today call “the county,” silence can no longer be taken for granted. When I visit friends and relatives in, say, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, I am entering a country where farms have tractors, where Interstate 81 is never far away, where buying almost anything means driving in a car to a mall or a big-box store, where smartphones and big-screen TVs are as ubiquitous as anywhere else. This is not the country as Picard knew it, the sort of place where “the flowers in the peasants’ gardens are . . . signposts on the road to silence,” and where the people “move in the slow rhythm of the silence itself.”
Yet I don’t think Picard’s observations are misplaced. My city’s noises may not be the same as the noises of Picard’s city, but they are noisy enough. Although it clouds the countryside, too, our climate of noise is densest in the city; although its reach is long, the culture of chatter that keeps us from hearing ourselves think has its epicenter in the city: perhaps this feeling of living along different rings of the same bull’s-eye is why the affective gap between city and country in our time is at once so trivial and so consequential.
If the city is the font of our era’s noisiness, then the practice of listening for silence within the city has a special significance. I don’t mean to make this seem hard, like a matter of complaint, or easy, as if to say: If I can make it as a listener-for-silence in the city, I can make it anywhere. I mean, simply, that notes taken by an urban listener-for-silence may prove interesting to listeners-for-silence elsewhere. There may be something generally instructive about the particular puzzles an urbanite like me faces when listening for silence amidst silence’s ruins.
I must admit that I feel the temptation to wait until I’m outside the city to take seriously the search for silence. Betsy McCully, in her wise and observant book City at the Water’s Edge: A Natural History of New York, notes a parallel temptation: “We tend to view nature and city in opposition. The city is always the place to escape from, and nature the place to escape to. Yearning for space, we harried city folk flee to the country.” Yet this presumed opposition between city and nature is destructive of both. “In our desperate search for more space and breathing room, we pile into our cars and clog the highways, doing five miles an hour in our race to get away. . . . And what have we gained? Not a quiet, spacious haven if getting there means commuting through heavy weekend traffic to spend one or two nights ‘in the country.’” (Picard, likewise, fears that when city people “go into the country to reach the ‘quietness of nature’ and silence,” they are apt to “carry the noise of the great towns and the noise of their own souls out into the country with them.”)
McCully refers to “nature,” but we could just as well swap in the word “silence” when she writes: “A more sustainable way to connect to nature is, paradoxically, by coming home to the city,” changing the way that we “perceive the city” and nurturing a love of place that “grows from an intimate knowledge of the place.” If I am to hear silence in the city, it seems, I need to know the city, to become intimately aware of the qualities that make it its own kind of place. I suppose that for people who are trying to be at home in the country, the idea of the city must loom as a threat; the city must seem to offer a seductive answer to the question: “If where I am is imperfect, to where might I escape?” But for people trying to dwell in a city—trying not merely to have an address in an urban ZIP code but to make a home within the city’s small places, within its habitats and neighborhoods and circles of knowables—the idea of the country poses a comparable threat. And in country or city, the antidote to the rage for escape is the knowledge of place—or, better, the willingness to take on the work of learning to know not the idea of the place but the place itself.
Knowing a place doesn’t always mean being at ease in it. There’s a long tradition in urban letters of portraying what it’s like to feel grieved by city life while nevertheless knowing oneself to be at home in the city. One of my favorite New York contributors to that tradition is Claude McKay, perhaps not the best known of the Harlem Renaissance writers but, for my money, the most subtle and intriguing among them. In his 1922 poetry collection Harlem Shadows, published a decade after he had arrived in America from rural Jamaica, McKay writes about walking past a Manhattan grocery store where “Bananas ripe and green, and ginger root,” the fruits of the tropics, are
Set in the window, bringing memories
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.
Reading McKay’s lines, we can hear the silences among those contemplative Jamaican hills, and we can at the same time hear the noise of the city sidewalk on which the poem’s speaker, suddenly homesick, “turn[s] aside . . . and we[eps].”
Listen for the silences, too, in McKay’s “Subway Wind,” which begins:
Far down, down through the city’s great, gaunt gut
The gray train rushing bears the weary wind;
In the packed cars the fans the crowd’s breath cut,
Leaving the sick and heavy air behind.
The voices of the people in the subway car, McKay writes, may be “swallowed in the deafening roar / Of captive wind,” but McKay recognizes here a quality within city life that may not be evident to the senses, recognizes it not against but through the noisiness of air sucked through a concrete-and-tile tube. We might picture that non-evident quality as existing in some other place: McKay listens well enough to hear that the subway wind “moans for fields and seas,” for
Islands of lofty palm trees blooming white
That lend their perfume to the tropic sea,
Where fields lie idle in the dew drenched night,
And the Trades float above them fresh and free.
What matters, in these poems, is that the thoughts of elsewhere to which they testify are the thoughts of a city-dweller, an element of life in the city. It is not merely that McKay always has Jamaica on his mind: Jamaica becomes, in these poems, an emblem, perhaps a reminder and perhaps a foretaste, of something more than Jamaica. The silences McKay imagines as if they were far away turn out to be waiting for him to find them enfolded within New York City. Writing about his yearning for a place he once knew, McKay shows what it is like to be both here and elsewhere at the same time, to attend to all he can see and hear in Harlem and, by doing so, to attend as well the insubstantial qualities, the “shadows,” of city life. Amidst the city, McKay remembers how to breathe in the stillness he once found in Jamaica’s hills and fields and skies, to sense silence even when silence cannot be heard.
I don’t know how McKay learned all that. I do know, however, that I have gotten a little better at listening for silence in the city as I have gotten to know the city better. By now, I have made my home in New York—first in upper Manhattan, then in south-central Brooklyn—for a little over twenty years, about two-fifths of my life. I doubt that this tenure qualifies me as a “real New Yorker.” But I have had enough time here to begin to distinguish the city’s noises from one another, neither being overwhelmed by their totality, as I was when I first moved here, nor taking for granted each individual sound, as I did once I was newly done with being overwhelmed; I have begun to know this particular city and its particular noises well enough to catch the city’s intimations of silence, to experience the city’s silence, as Picard puts it, as “a living animal, not an extinct species,” one whose “broad back sink[s] ever deeper among the briers and bushes of the world of noise” but which moves and rests close at hand.
Those two decades have been enough, too, for me to have learned to notice times when the city’s noise thins, such that listening for silence can be like looking for something through lifting fog. In the early spring, especially in early morning, when birdsong is louder than the city’s mechanical sounds, or in late summer, when the city slows down and the traffic eases up, or in the middle of a snowstorm, silence seems to wait behind a flimsy curtain of noise.
As well as times when silence is near at hand, the city also contains places where noise thins, places that elicit, even if they cannot ensure, contemplation. In early summer, walking in Green-Wood Cemetery, with traffic sounds coming from slightly farther away than they do in most city places, I notice distinctly the scrunch of my sneakers on the pathway; the thicker noise of airplanes, unobscured by the noises of more proximate machines, stands out more sharply than elsewhere but, in standing out, demarcates long moments of thinned noise. In a truly quiet place, the rustles of leaves or the songs of birds might punctuate the silence around them; in Green-Wood, there is enough distant or intermittent mechanical noise that leaf-rustles and bird-songs can only punctuate noise. Nevertheless, in a place where noise does at least thin out, silences become visible. I can see the stillness of a dogwood trunk or a patch of violets or a weather-worn gravestone and thus can detect, even if I cannot properly hear, their long-winded silences. I have noticed that to see silence in this way requires a certain stillness in me and a trust that silence is there to be found, a stillness and a trust encouraged by the thinness of the place’s noise.
By now, those visible silences seem to me to be generously available throughout the city, but I don’t remember how long I’d lived in New York before I noticed them. I do know that two things had to change for me to begin to see the city’s silence: I had to have my own private map of the city, my own list of the city’s thin-noised places, and I had to begin hungering for silence the way McCully hungers for nature and McKay for the tropics, letting silence become the elsewhere-within-the-here for which I was waiting.
I suspect that this experience of questing after silence is not unknown outside the city. I would guess that in or out of the city, these days, in order to find any place’s silence, to find its peace, you would have to live there for a while, attentively and with an intention to be at home there, before you began to hear what can’t be heard. Is awareness of silence the measure of dwelling? Maybe knowing any place well means knowing when and where to find its silence.
Picard mourns our era’s noise, but he allows for the possibility that we, even we in the cities, can find our way back to silence, and thus to patience and presence and conviviality. Although the world of silence has been “obscured,” he writes, we can hope to “uncover” it: “But these still remain: the quietness of dawn, and the furtive fall of night. . . . The silence of these things is lonely: the power of silence, which once went out from them to the other things of earth and to men, is now confined to itself.” If this is so, then, like any prisoner, silence waits for visitors.
