Why we never experience true silence

Exploring quietness through sound

Nothing penetrates the stone-walled solidity of this mountainside AirBnB. It's a cuboid cavern of calm on the slopes of Taygetos, where I sleep on the ground floor in a comforting nook. The room has a low wooden ceiling and only two windows, and my wide wooden bed is pushed against the darkest wall opposite. I have closed the hardwood shutters and the fire has died to its embers. There is not a single tiny sound to scratch its existence out of the void, not a hum or a click or a flicker, no WiFi and no 4G. No cars have a reason to come to this high-altitude dead-end, not during the day and certainly not at night, so I know this quietness will endure with the darkness.

The sun now has crept above the mountain opposite and its light is shafting through the two small windows, casting narrow beams across the long wooden table. The hot water tank squirms in preparation for my shower, and a bird chirrups noisily outside, answered by a similar call further away. A smaller cheeping emerges near a window. Other voices emerge and recede. I scrape a wooden chair over the stone floor and sit down for breakfast.

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Silence is quantifiable, like absolute zero or the colour black, but the experience of silence is not. We experience it and describe it only by a process of triangulation, determining its nature in relation to that which it is not. To do otherwise – to somehow directly apprehend or communicate the unfiltered, objective nothingness of silence – would require contextlessness, and therefore an omniscient separation from time and space. Instead, being material assemblages of presence, fragments of a universe experiencing itself, trapped at the midpoint of an unstoppable transformation of future infinities into the actualities of the past, we can only perceive an imagined nothingness by filling and eroding it with the noise of our experience. A pseudo-quantum phenomenon, perhaps; like Schrödinger's dead/alive cat, an objectively "real" nothingness would be confounded by our observation of it.

Thunk. There I go, yanking at the limits of my little brain chain again. Time to get back in my box.

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(...)

O Sabbath rest by Galilee,

O calm of hills above,

Where Jesus knelt to share with thee

The silence of eternity,

Interpreted by Love!

(...)

Breathe through the heats of our desire

Thy coolness and thy balm;

Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,

O still, small voice of calm!"

– From a hymn by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892).

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Dusk in the hills of Oinountas, and the distant hounds are taking up their customary howl – first one (recognisably the same call each night) then a gaggle, then a strung-out chorus of contented whoops and wailing. Half a minute later the communication is complete, the evening sinks back into the thickness of the surrounding branches, and a new silence rises into the night.

Daylight will return with a gradually emerging forest cacophony of birdsong, static yet minutely turbulent, distinct voices arising only fleetingly above the multicoloured din.

Somehow there's silence in the din, too. Birdsong, insects, rainfall... the synapse-stilling white noises of nature.

"The night, the mountain and the rain were woven tightly in a dark pre-human communion of absolute oneness."

– Venture to the Interior, Laurens van der Post (1952)