Silence: In the Age of Noise

by Erling Kagge, Becky L. Crook (Translator)

Overview

"A joyful celebration" (NPR) that shows us why silence is essential to our sanity and happiness—and how it can open doors to wonder and gratitude—from a renowned explorer and acclaimed author.

In this astonishing and transformative meditation, Erling Kagge, famed Norwegian explorer and the first person to reach the South Pole alone, explores the silence around us, the silence within us, and the silence we must create. By recounting his own experiences and discussing the observations of poets, artists, and explorers, Kagge shows us what silence is, where it can be found, and why it is now more important than ever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525563648
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/04/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	154,556
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

ERLING KAGGE is an explorer, art collector, publisher, author, and the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge on foot—the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. He has written six previous books on exploration, philosophy, and art collecting, and runs Kagge Forlag, a publishing company based in Oslo, where he lives.

Read an Excerpt

Whenever I am unable to walk, climb or sail away from the world, I have learned to shut it out.
 
Learning this took time. Only when I understood that I had a primal need for silence was I able to begin my search for it—and there, deep beneath a cacophony of traffic noise and thoughts, music and machinery, iPhones and snow ploughs, it lay in wait for me. Silence.
 
Not long ago, I tried convincing my three daughters that the world’s secrets are hidden inside silence. We were sitting around the kitchen table eating Sunday dinner. Nowadays it is a rare occurrence for us to eat a meal together; so much is going on all the other days of the week. Sunday dinners have become the one time when we all remain seated and talk, face-to-face.
 
The girls looked at me sceptically. Surely silence is . . . nothing? Even before I was able to explain the way in which silence can be a friend, and a luxury more valuable than any of the Louis Vuitton bags they so covet, their minds had been made up: silence is fine to have on hand when you’re feeling sad. Beyond that, it’s useless.
 
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.”
 
Questions and answers, questions and answers. Wonder is the very engine of life. But my children are thirteen, sixteen and nineteen years old and wonder less and less; if they still wonder at anything, they quickly pull out their smartphones to find the answer. They are still curious, but their faces are not as childish, more adult, and their heads are now filled with more ambitions than questions. None of them had any interest in discussing the subject of silence, so, in order to invoke it, I told them about two friends of mine who had decided to climb Mount Everest.
 
Early one morning they left base camp to climb the southwest wall of the mountain. It was going well. Both reached the summit, but then came the storm. They soon realized they would not make it down alive. The first got hold of his pregnant wife via satellite phone. Together they decided on the name of the child that she was carrying. Then he quietly passed away just below the summit. My other friend was not able to contact anyone before he died. No one knows exactly what happened on the mountain in those hours. Thanks to the dry, cool climate 8,000 metres above sea level, they have both been freeze-dried. They lie there in silence, looking no different, more or less, from the way they were last time I saw them, twenty-two years ago.
 
For once there was silence around the table. One of our mobile phones pinged with an incoming message, but none of us thought to check our phones just then. Instead, we filled the silence with ourselves.
 
Not long afterwards, I was invited to give a lecture at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland. I was to choose the subject myself. I tended to talk about extreme journeys to the ends of the earth, but this time my thoughts turned homewards, to that Sunday supper with my family. So I settled on the topic of silence. I prepared myself well but was, as I often am, nervous beforehand. What if scattered thoughts about silence belonged only in the realm of Sunday dinners, and not in student forums? It was not that I expected to be booed for the eighteen minutes of my lecture, but I wanted the students to be interested in the subject I held so close to my heart.
 
I began the lecture with a minute of silence. You could have heard a pin drop. It was stock-still. For the next seventeen minutes I spoke about the silence around us, but I also talked about something that is even more important to me, the silence within us. The students remained quiet. Listening. It seemed as though they had been missing silence.
 
That same evening, I went out 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 at Cambridge. Kind, curious people, a humming atmosphere, interesting conversations. What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever? were three questions they wanted answered.
 
That evening meant a lot to me, and not only for the good company. Thanks to the students I realized how little I understood. Back home I couldn’t stop thinking about those three questions. They became an obsession.
 
What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever?
 
Every evening I’d sit, puzzling over them. I began writing, thinking and reading, more for myself than anyone else. By the end of my search I’d come up with thirty-three attempts at answering them.

Editorial Reviews

As much an object as book, something to be handled and savored…. I too remember crunching over ice at the South Pole—though I had not walked there like the author—and thinking about the ethereal quality of silence that the owned world cannot give (no country owns the Antarctic). Erling Kagge captures that wonder on the page.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“A series of lyrical vignettes. . . . Kagge is clearly qualified to write about the soul-reviving benefits of quiet.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Kagge . . . writes in a chatty, accessible style and with a healthy dose of humor. . . . Silence . . . offers thoughtful meditations.” —The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“An extraordinarily calming book . . . just the tonic when things get hectic.” —The Irish Times

“A simply extraordinary book anyone with a smart-phone or a social media account would do well to read—and heed.” —Trail Magazine

“A joyful celebration of what feels like a precious resource that is . . . in too short supply.” —On Air, NPR

“The book both contemplates the various forms of silence around and within us, and offers solutions for finding such silence amidst endless interruptions and opportunities for distraction….With a sense of awe, Kagge wanders rather than narrates, moving intuitively between philosophy, science, and personal experience….It’s always good to be reminded of ancient truths. And with Silence, Kagge provides a much-needed reminder.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“An eloquent and persuasive argument for the significance of silence, in all of its forms, from an author who has explored the limits of the human experience.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Searing and soaring….For Kagge, silence is more than the absence of sound: it is the incubator for thought, the conscious eradication of external distraction, and the ability to live in one’s own mind as fully as one lives in the physical world. Infused with powerfully evocative art and photographs that enhance his salient concepts, Kagge’s treatise on this endangered commodity provides an intriguing meditation for mindful readers.” —Booklist

“The book expands the concepts of silence and noise beyond their aural definitions and engages with modern culture’s information overload, need for constant connection, and cult of busyness….Great pleasure lies in Kagge’s creative investigations. The reader leaves more mindful of the swirl of distraction present in everyday life.”  —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

06/12/2017
Kagge (Under Manhattan), an explorer and publisher, provides 33 answers to three linked questions he poses to himself—“What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever?”—in short, meditative essays. The book expands the concepts of silence and noise beyond their aural definitions and engages with modern culture’s information overload, need for constant connection, and cult of busyness. Kagge draws on his experiences as an explorer, including a solo sojourn to the South Pole and a climb up the Williamsburg Bridge, and on more mundane experiences such as his daily commute. He also takes inspiration from famous people as various as Seneca, Kierkegaard, Elon Musk, and Rihanna. An intentionally scattershot bibliography (“an attempt at listing those sources I can easily recall”) may frustrate those wishing to read further. Kagge writes accessibly and economically, supplementing the text with the occasional inclusion of art and photographs. He raises some intriguing ideas—regarding, for example, inequities in access to silence and the concept of silence as a luxury—that could benefit from more examination, but the format requires that he provide only minimal analysis. Great pleasure lies in Kagge’s creative investigations. The reader leaves more mindful of the swirl of distraction present in everyday life. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Listeners hear sirens, traffic, and phones at the start of Erling Kagge's meditation on silence. The noises demonstrate Kagge's need for silence, and various sounds pop up here and there throughout to illustrate or punctuate his points. Narrator Atli Gunnarsson's voice conveys Kagge's feelings well, whether it's the joy of listening to nature at the South Pole or the irritation of noisy everyday life as a publisher in Oslo, Norway. Kagge touches on every aspect of his theme, even the way birds' songs adapt to compete with human noise. The essays are brief, but the adept voice work and ambient sound effects work together well to help Kagge make the case for finding inner silence. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2018 - AudioFile

Listeners hear sirens, traffic, and phones at the start of Erling Kagge's meditation on silence. The noises demonstrate Kagge's need for silence, and various sounds pop up here and there throughout to illustrate or punctuate his points. Narrator Atli Gunnarsson's voice conveys Kagge's feelings well, whether it's the joy of listening to nature at the South Pole or the irritation of noisy everyday life as a publisher in Oslo, Norway. Kagge touches on every aspect of his theme, even the way birds' songs adapt to compete with human noise. The essays are brief, but the adept voice work and ambient sound effects work together well to help Kagge make the case for finding inner silence. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2018 - AudioFile

2017-09-25
A slender investigation into the idea of silence and its importance to those who dwell in the ceaseless noise of the modern world.Norwegian explorer and publisher Kagge (A Poor Collector's Guide to Buying Great Art, 2015, etc.), the first person to reach all of the Earth's "three poles"—the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest—should be an expert on silence; he once spent more than 50 days trekking alone, without radio contact, to the South Pole in Antarctica, "the quietest place I've ever been." A dinner conversation with his family and a lecture on the topic provided the author with the impulse to write this book, which consists of 33 attempts to answer a series of questions: "What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever?" Drawing from his personal experiences, as well as conversations with artists, poets, athletes, philosophers, and musicians, Kagge challenges readers to grapple with the concept, inside of which, he contends, "the world's secrets are hidden." Interspersed with the short chapters are images, including photographs taken by the author during his expeditions and works by artists including Ed Ruscha and Catherine Opie. Despite its philosophical nature, the book is aimed at a general readership, and, befitting the subject matter, the narrative has a meditative quality. Kagge explores his subject from many different angles—not simply as the absence of sound but as a matter of human perception, a force both external and internal. Though they contain no startling revelations, his reflections provide a thoughtful approach to a topic of import to many who live in "the age of noise."An eloquent and persuasive argument for the significance of silence, in all of its forms, from an author who has explored the limits of the human experience.

Kirkus Reviews