From Antarctica to the bathtub, finding perfect silence

How many millions of words have been spoken or written in praise of silence? In this slim volume, Norwegian adventurer and philosopher Erling Kagge adds his voice to the chorus. On the opening page he tells of trying to convince his three teenage daughters that “the world’s secrets are hidden inside silence.”

The daughters greeted this fatherly advice with skepticism, counting on their smartphones to reveal any secrets worth knowing.

Soon after that exchange, Kagge found a more receptive audience among a group of students in a Scottish pub.

“What is s ilence?” they wanted to know, and “Why is it m ore i mportant now than ever?” Brooding on the questions, he came up with 33 responses, which are laid out in these pages in as many numbered sec- tions.

The final section is a blank page, a gesture reminiscent of the Zen master who, when asked how to achieve enlightenment, gazed at the questioner with lips firmly sealed.

The filled pages that pre- cede the empty one offer a miscellany of memories, reflections, aphorisms and quotations bearing on Kagge’s theme.

We hear about a soccer star who blocks out the roar of the crowd when he takes a shot on goal, about a performance artist who stares at visitors for hours without speaking, about people in psychological experiments who choose to suffer an electric shock rather than sit alone in a room with no entertainment except their thoughts.

Although Kagge has spent much of his career indoors - writing, practicing law, run- ning a publishing company, collecting modern art - he is best known for his outdoor adventures.

He was the first person to reach the “three poles” on foot: the North Pole, the South Pole and the peak of Mount Everest.

In this new book, “Silence,” he sketches his “extreme journeys to the ends of the earth” to illustrate the restorative impact of withdrawing from the human cacophony into the wilds.

Recognizing that few of us can indulge in serenity tourism, and fewer still can spend months walking or sailing to the ends of the Earth, Kagge reassures us that “the silence I have in mind may be found wherever you are, if you pay attention, inside your mind, and is without cost. You don’t have to go to Sri Lanka: you can experience it in your bathtub.”

There is little to object to in such passages, and yet, even allowing for what may be lost in translation, there is also little fresh insight to be gained from them. Literature extolling the

virt uesofs ilence has been accumulating for millen

nia, in Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, in sayings of Christian hermits and mystics, in teachings by modern yoga ade ptsand meditators.

Kagge refers to this body of wisdom only in passing, perhaps because he does not share the view, common to this tradition, that

cultivation of inward stillness is a way of escaping

the small self of the ego and experiencing a transpersonal reality.

The yearning for relief from human chatter may be as old as our capacity for speech. There will always be more to say about the benefits of saying - and hearing - less.