Description

“The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise.”

– Aldous Huxley

Silence feels rarer than it once did. Many of us move through the day accompanied by a constant stream of sounds and signals: notifications, podcasts, music, televisions, traffic, voices. Even moments that appear quiet often contain a kind of anticipation, as if another interruption is about to arrive.

But some forms of noise have little to do with sound. The mind, left alone for even a few moments, often rushes to fill the space with worry, rumination, regret, or the replaying of conversations. Perhaps this is one reason why genuine quiet can feel so unsettling. In silence, we encounter not only the absence of sound, but also something that can be even more unsettling: ourselves.

People have long sought out quiet in monasteries, forests, deserts, and libraries – places where distraction falls away and attention deepens. This need for quiet has also been important to thinkers: French philosopher Blaise Pascal went so far as to say that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”.

And yet complete silence has remained elusive. The experimental composer John Cage discovered this when he entered an anechoic chamber expecting to hear nothing, only to become aware of the sounds of his own body. Beneath the machinery and distraction of modern life, another quieter world persists: breath, footsteps, distant wind, the murmur of thought itself.

Perhaps the problem is not that modern life contains too much sound, but that constant noise leaves little room for sustained attention. Noise fragments our experience. It pulls us outward continuously, making stillness feel unfamiliar and uninterrupted thought increasingly difficult. The challenge might not be learning how to escape noise entirely, but finding a way to filter the signal from the noise.

Zan Boag, Editor-in-Chief