Some gulls soared in the air above me.
They seemed almost to be enjoying the warmth and stillness.
A stillness so seldom here.
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star: A Novel. (Penguin Press, September 28, 2021)
Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:57 am, October 19, 2021. 45° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and […] car silent and then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.
— Ada Limón, excerpt from “The Quiet Machine”, in Bright Dead Things: Poems
Notes: Portrait by Lucas Marquardt @ About Ada. Passage via antigonick
Five decades ago,the philosopher Max Picard warned: “Nothing has changed human nature more than the loss of silence.”
• In the 21st century, Ed Schlossberg, creator of ESI Design,a company dedicated to making innovative design spaces,has stated that “attention will be the most scarce and precious asset in the future”.
• Paying attention to a single object, stopping receiving information for an instant, consuming content, images, sounds, alerts, calls is almost impossible today.
We use the new technologies that connect us to the world of messages, tweets, Facebook posts, Google alerts, mobile phone alarms, news from our RSS feeds, Whatsapp invocations, 24 hours a day, wherever we are.
• Only when we get on the plane and the stewardess forces us to turn off our electronic devices, can we afford to feel us, alone. But then we avidly look for what movie they are going to put on.
• Schlossberg says he longs for the times when art offered a space for silence and attention. The static frame and the motionless spectator held together, exchanging radiation in the visible spectrum,without emitting a single noise. Contemplation is a luxury from another era…
✅The human being has owned silence for more than a million years.
Stillness and the absence of noise are part of the natural landscape as are the wind or the sky. We have adapted to silence, and without it we could not survive. So much so that, although it may seem like a lie, we can hear it…
— Steven Melbourne, from “Silence” in Abstract Universe
Notes:
it’s terribly important that I understand this.
Because, you see, sir,
students rush from one class to the other,
because the period is short,
run from mathematics to geography,
from geography to history,
chemistry, biology – you follow? – run, run.
And if I was one of the professors, teachers, I would say,
Look, sit down.
Be quiet for five minutes.
Be quiet.
Look out of the window, if you want to.
See the beauty of light on the water,
or the leaf, and look at this and that, but be quiet’.
— J. Krishnamurti, from Dialogue 16 with Allan W. Anderson in San Diego, 27 February 1974
Notes:
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Notes:
I don’t know who I am becoming. I like who I am becoming, I just haven’t fully met her yet. I don’t think I can go back to a “before.” I don’t think I fit into that life anymore. I’ve just grown and changed, and many priorities and values have shifted. My peak excitement right now is getting ready for baby ducks on the farm in spring. I like the slowness of things right now.
— Mary Fugate, 31, who works in higher education, moved home from Cincinnati to Punxsutawney, Pa., from “Emerging From the Coronavirus” in The New York Times, April 5, 2021
Photo: Paul Rioux
(He) lived a Yeatsian dream life where peace came dropping slow.
— Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Notes:
