Silence: In the Age of Noise

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Sitting there at the dinner table, I suddenly remembered their curiosity as children. How they would wonder about what might be hiding behind a door. Their amazement as they stared at a light switch and asked me to “open the light”. Erling เล่าถึงศิลปินด้านการแสดงสดอย่าง มารินา อบราโมวิค ที่ทำให้ความเงียบกลายเป็นศิลปะรูปแบบหนึ่ง ครั้งหนึ่งในปี 2010 เธอนั่งเฉยๆ เป็นเวลา 736 ชั่วโมงกับ 30 นาที ใน MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) สบตาผู้เข้าชมกว่า 1,500 คนโดยไม่พูดอะไรสักคำ เมื่อนั่งนานขึ้นๆ เธอก็ได้ยินเสียงต่างๆ ที่อยู่ไกลนอกตัวตึกออกไป ศิลปินอยู่กับความเงียบได้เนิ่นนาน แม้ในครั้งการเดินทางไปทะเลทรายครั้งแรก เธอจะรู้สึกกลัวมันก็ตาม My children hardly pause any more. They are always accessible, and almost always busy. “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself,” wrote the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The three of them tend to sit in front of a screen – whether alone or together with others. I do it too. Become engulfed in my smartphone, enslave myself to my own tablet – as a consumer and at times as a producer. I am constantly interrupted, interruptions engendered by other interruptions. I rummage around in a world that has little to do with me. Attempt to be effective until I realise I won’t get any further regardless of how effective I’ve become. It feels like trying to find your way through fog on a mountain, without a compass at hand, and ending up walking around in circles. The goal is to be busy and effective, nothing else.

Asked at Hay this year how his children feel about his ideas on achieving silence, Kagge replied that his daughter "thinks it's total bullshit". I find myself thinking about how silence can be experienced without the use of techniques. The threshold for finding silence and balance can in fact be lowered. You don’t need a course in silence or relaxation to be able simply to pause. Silence can be anywhere, any time – it’s just in front of your nose. I create it for myself as I walk up the stairs, prepare food or merely focus on my breathing. Sure, we are all part of the same world, but the potential wealth of being an island for yourself is something you carry around with you all the time.What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever?” were three questions they wanted answered.

Humans are social creatures. Being accessible can be a good thing. We are unable to function alone. Yet it’s important to be able to turn off your phone, sit down, not say anything, shut your eyes, breathe deeply a couple of times and attempt to think about something other than what you are normally thinking about. Take a deep breath, and prepare to submerge yourself in Silence. Your own South Pole is out there, somewhere.

Silence, Kagge emphasizes, is not simply the absence of noise, but a "full emptiness, a stillness of the mind." What is silence? Why is it more important than ever?’ … Erling Kagge. Photograph: Simon Skreddernes Erling Kagge is a philosophical adventurer - or perhaps an adventurous philosopher' - New York Times How does one achieve silence in the everyday? While Kagge practices meditation, yoga, and going off into nature whenever possible, he also speaks about achieving "silence" while walking Oslo's busy streets or crawling through Manhattan's sewer system. I suppose this is some zen state that an experienced meditator can simply drop into. Or, to say it in a way that makes it sound slightly more achievable, simply comes from being particularly practiced in "tuning out the noise". Behind a cacophony of traffic noise, iPhone alerts and our ever-spinning thoughts, an elusive notion – silence – lies in wait. But what really is silence? Where can it be found? And why is it more important now than ever? Erling Kagge, the Norwegian adventurer and polymath, once spent fifty days walking solo in Antarctica with a broken radio. In this meditative, charming and surprisingly powerful book, he explores the power of silence and the importance of shutting out the world. Whether you’re in deep wilderness, taking a shower or on the dance floor, you can experience perfect stillness if you know where to look. And from it grows self-knowledge, gratitude, wonder and much more. Take a deep breath, and prepare to submerge yourself in Silence. Your own South Pole is out there, somewhere. Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge – eBook Details

Silence : In the Age of Noise หรือฉบับแปลภาษาไทยในชื่อ ‘เงียบ’ ของสำนักพิมพ์ OMG books ฉันยกมือสมัครใจเป็นลูกค้าทันที knygą pavadinčiau įžvalgų apie tylą koncentratu. Man dažniausiai kur kas labiau patinka skaityti labiau praskiestą turinį ir iš jo pačiai išsirankioti tai, kas yra aktualu ir svarbu man. Šįkart tokios galimybės kaip ir nebuvo, nes viskas daugiau mažiau jau išrankiota ir patiekta. Knyga parašyta populiariu stiliumi, todėl lengvai skaitoma ir suprantama visiems. Ją perskaičius kaip ir nelieka abejonių, kad tyla yra svarbi ir tikrai verta bent jau pabandyti ją prisijaukinti. Tik man norėjosi galbūt šiek tiek kitokios knygos struktūros ir visko daugiau ir giliau!Norveçli kaşif/yazar/yayıncı Erling Kagge bunu anlatıyor. Everest’in tepesinde, Kuzey ve Güney kutuplarındaki uzun ve bir o kadar soğuk yürüyüşlerindeki sessizliği. Kagge is an explorer and entrepreneur whose worldview is close to 180 degrees away from my own. He seems earnest, but entirely humorless and enraptured by rich people problems. He also, in my mind, has never met an anecdote from which he can't draw the wrong conclusion. I’m about to subtract this book from my life: it was a random borrow from the local library. But there’s enough interesting and intriguing ideas about that quest for calm and stillness in it, that I’m almost certain to return to it at some point. That same evening, I went to a pub with a few of them. Inside the draughty entrance, each of us with a pint of beer, it was all more or less exactly the same as my student days. Kind, curious people, a humming atmosphere, interesting conversations.

Silence In The Age of Noise is a collection of thoughts on the matter - some more profound than others, but all make clear the overarching point. There's something powerful to be gained from finding the quiet within ourselves. It is easy to assume that the essence of technology is technology itself, but that is wrong. The essence is you and me. It’s about how we are altered by the technology we employ, what we hope to learn, our relationship with nature, those we love, the time we spend, the energy that is consumed and how much freedome we relinquish to technology.

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And so, this little book is a collection of 33 meditations on the meaning of silence, of quiet and of stillness. And it’s a quest for ways to achieve that. The author has been to great extremes to do it. He’s a polar adventurer, but his expeditions were not purely searching for silence, but discovering it was a blessing that emerged unexpectedly from his trip. And he continues to try to find that in his “normal” life. When you’ve invested a lot of time in being accessible and keeping up with what’s happening, it’s easy to conclude that it all has a certain value, even if what you have done might not be important. This is called rationalization. The New York Review of Books labeled the battle between producers of apps “the new opium wars,” and the paper claims that “marketers have adopted addiction as an explicit commercial strategy.” The only difference is that the pushers aren’t peddling a product that can be smoked in a pipe, but rather is ingested via sugar-coated apps. I’m old enough to remember being deeply bored during my childhood: in a 70s home, once children’s TV had finished and you’d read all your books, it really was possible to be very, very bored. Of course, Heidegger could not have predicted the possibilities offered by current technology. He was thinking about cars of 50 horsepower, film projectors and punch-card machines, which were all the rage. But he had an inkling of what might come.)