On the Conservation of Quiet

and the sanctity of (semi-) silence

Not all quiet places feel the same. Hushed, moonlit laneways are filled with weathered whispers. Empty parklands are littered with the sighs of daydreams soon to decay in silence. Overcrowded elevators move slowly beneath the weight of unspoken, awkward tension. Depending on the environmental conditions of the place from where it grows, quiet always blossoms in a different sort of shape, evoking feelings that vary in their level of intensity. But there is one place that fosters (and fortifies) a rare species of quiet that is particularly distinct, a kind so powerful it’s been known to birth wild reverie, inspire ingenious imagination, and catalyse deep love.

There is a favourite memory I have of this sort of soundlessness. We sit in the Redmond Barry Reading Room, he on one side of the table, I on another. An armchair cradles me gently as I nestle into its depths, nursing my notepad. He sits up straighter in my peripheral vision, occupying himself with a task I don’t remember. The air smells like dust and long-forgotten residues of autumn. His eyes turn, reassuringly, in my direction, reminding me softly that he’s still there. When he’s not looking, I let my gaze wander towards his silhouette, listening as my heart beats in shapes that are strange and unfamiliar. We spend hours submerged in quiet, alone together amongst the shadows cast by others, saying nothing at all. When it is silent, you can hear our love. Words are very unnecessary.

‘What harbour can receive you more securely than a great library?’ Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. In the modern Western world, the truth is that no such physical harbour exists. Defined as a building or a room containing collections of books, periodicals—and sometimes films and music—for use or borrowing by the public, or by the members of an institution, the library is, at surface level, a certain place where certain people go when they want to find out certain things. But to anyone intimately familiar with the sensation of getting lost within the modest confines of a few dusty shelves, and a few hundred books, the library represents far more than just a pile of bricks and mortar filled with tactile and intangible academic references.

Providing the kind of regulated climatic conditions that cater to the growth of the intellect, and of the imagination, the library—positioned amid the loudness of the contemporary landscape—serves as a necessary haven for the arguably dying art of quiet contemplation, a greenhouse where ideas can be lovingly nurtured, away from the potentially distracting elements of a mostly high-volume, fast-paced, neon-lit terrain. But within a culture far more committed to interconnectedness than concerned with inner thought, the role that the library plays in the present day has been increasingly called into question, namely by those concerned with the gradual degradation of its interior landscape, amid reported levels of escalating and vexatious noise pollution.

Where Calvino once questioned if the library’s inherent sense of security could be rivalled, writers and academics now find themselves wondering if, and to what degree, the library’s sense of security is under threat, and if it can survive a future that appears to be headed further towards collaboration and online interaction, and farther away from solitary study and offline, old-school musing. But it’s impossible to examine, and measure, the endangerment of the library’s air of solace without first exploring what this distinct sense of solace is made from, at its very core. What is it about the library that makes you feel as though you’re walking into a place that you have never intimately known but always deeply loved?

When reminiscing on her first visits to her local branch as a child, American writer Susan Orlean says she always felt that there was something special about the library, something she realised very young without needing to be told.

‘The very aura of the library seemed special to me. It’s the feel of it, the smell of it, but definitely the sound of it. It had a very particular sound that was hushed. Not silent, but definitely hushed. I certainly knew that you didn’t run around yelling. But it wasn’t severe. It was just a kind of contemplative quiet that was very distinctive. It even appealed to me as a noisy little kid; I think it added to the sense of it being someplace special.’

For Orlean, the library has always embodied a unique kind of quality, what she refers to as a sort of elevated nature. Given this measure of unspoken majesty, it’s no surprise that libraries are often referred to as temples of knowledge, as emblems of wisdom and learning. For followers of certain religions, churches accommodate close encounters between gods, goddesses, and fellow disciples. For seekers of truth and bespoke erudition, ever-curious individuals who desire a different variety of divine, the library—perhaps the only secular equivalent to a religious shrine—becomes a place of encounter between the physical body and the enigmatic higher self. A portal to the potential, if not to the promise, of self-actualisation. There are few non-imagined places that put my timid mind and heart at ease. But the library, what with its sexy ‘Be Quiet’ signage and old-fashioned furnishings, has always been the one place I feel left alone, so as to be alone, completely. Drifting out of touch with time and tension, I trace my footsteps in aimless patterns between the shelves, always led towards something, but never led astray. I sit at tables that are built for building dreams on. I consider, closely, the curiosity of the particles of dust that fall, gently, in the beams of sun that spill in from the windows, staining my notebook in vivid light. I enjoy the silence. To explore one’s realms of consciousness is a tremendously delicate endeavour, an act that yields the most desired results when done within environs designed to navigate one’s attention away from the physical world, toward the inner self—a place such as the library. As Director of the National Library of Argentina, Alberto Manguel, states in his book The Library at Night:

‘Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible pur- pose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble what- ever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we’d like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure.’

Though his sentiment ends on a somewhat sour note, Manguel’s words remind us of the role the library plays in providing a place of refuge from a universe that can, at least at times, feel full of noise and void of meaning. And so—sans a conveniently located tall mountain to escape to for peace and quiet, Thus Spoke Zarathustra-style—the modern seeker retreats to the library to hunt for some semblance of their own version of truth. Whether their quest leads to despair, delight, or doom is beside the point; it’s that the journey was taken that matters most, and that there was someplace safe to take it. But just as a ghost orchid only grows in a humid forest, the enlightened mind can only mature in an environment that caters to the very deepest depths of thought. In an age when the interior of the library has begun to increase in (albeit modest) boisterousness, some have begun to wonder if the refuge-like quality of the institution is at risk. Others began to wonder quite some time ago.

In her article ‘Silence, please,’ published in March of 1997 by Harper’s Magazine, American writer Sallie Tisdale shares her disappointment in the growing sparseness of silence to be found in the modern library landscape, commenting on its transformation from hushed haven to trendy haunt in a bid to stay en vogue.

‘The silence I remember from my childhood library, and still find on occasion in a few big-city reading rooms, is the thick, busy silence one sometimes finds in an operating room. It is profoundly pleasing, profoundly full. There used to be such silences in many places ... broken only by the unhurried sounds of unhurried people. There is no such silence in the world now; in every corner we live smothered by the shrill, growling, strident, piercing racket of crowded, hurried lives. The street is noisy, stores and banks and malls are noisy, classrooms are noisy, virtually every workplace is noisy ... And now the library is noisy, which is supposed to be a good thing. It is less “intimidating.”’

According to Tisdale, the boundaries that have kept the library a refuge from the street are being deliberately destroyed in the name of access and popularity. While some find this to be a blessing, others consider it a curse. Indeed, the debate surrounding what the ideal library ought to look like has been waging since well before Google was a thing, between those who find the increase in noise to be a nuisance and those who don’t see noise as a nuisance at all.

The latter attitude could, in part, be attributed to our attitude towards silence in the West, a society that has an undeniable social bias towards, and seemingly undying love for, extroversion. I don’t just love the library because it’s full of books. I love it because it’s one of the few, if not only, places where my quiet nature is not questioned, objected to, or scrutinised. It’s odd to sit at a bar staring shyly at your straw because you lack the appropriate predisposition to thrive in high volume, crowded places. But it’s okay to sit at a table in a reading room staring shyly at your book, because you’re (usually) surrounded by others who are doing just the same. When you’re at a library, you don’t have to feel ashamed of your introversion, because you feel as though you’re standing in a building that was built specifically for all the things you love: inquisitiveness, staring out of windows (longingly) in silence, and of course, quiet contemplation. The rest of the Western contemporary landscape is, unfortunately, not quite so accommodating. As Susan Cain puts it in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking:

‘Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.’

You can’t always run from the culture you’re born into, but it’s sometimes nice to have a place to hide. And although Tisdale feels that the library’s safe net of silence has been sacrificed in the name of making the environment feel less intimidating, others believe that the reality is not quite so black and white. As a writer who recently spent much time in many libraries while promoting her latest work, The Library Book, Orlean feels that, though the ambience has definitely shifted, it’s not to quiet’s utter demise. Thankfully, it seems our preference for social assertiveness appears to be tempered amid the presence of strangers poring over piles of papers and open books, brows furrowed in varying degrees of concentration. Extroverts may navigate the manic nature of the modern world with far greater ease, but in the library, introverts reign (modestly) supreme. When asked whether she felt that the increasingly communal spaces offered by the library, in tandem with the ever-growing presence of livelier conversation, were a reflection of a culture that had lost touch with the importance of quiet contemplation, Orlean seemed confident that not all hope was lost.

‘It seems to me that there is a kind of spaciousness to libraries, both in actual physical space, but also in mission, to offer both. It doesn’t feel to me, that if you wanted to be in a quiet place and really absorbed in your own thinking, that you couldn’t do it at the library. I really don’t sense that.’

Gone may be the days of domineering silence setting the soundless tone of the library’s austere ambience, but they do still play a crucial role in the conservation of quiet. As the volume of our contemporary landscape continues to rise, so too does the responsibility of the library to maintain its position—both in body and in spirit—as a modern-day refuge from the nonstop sounds of a culture that can’t keep silent or still. Just as gardeners regulate and respect the conditions of the greenhouse for the growing of exotic things, so too must we work together to conserve the conditions of our libraries, for the growth of the imagination.

As librarian Alice Crawford notes in The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History, the library is and always has been a changing and organic entity, an ecosystem that is constantly adapting and becoming something else. ‘[W]e see it like a kaleidoscopic image,’ Crawford writes, ‘forever nudged into new versions with each turn of the cylinder; a concept endlessly and energetically reinventing itself.’ But while the chameleon-like nature of the library is no doubt a strength, it’s important to remain mindful of what Orlean refers to as one of the library’s primary missions: the catering of quiet contemplation.

‘I think it’s a feature that is important, and always has been; one of the un- changing qualities of a library. When you think about the world at large, and the chance for contemplation and quiet, that’s an endangered quality. I’m in support of libraries evolving as they need to evolve, and serving people in an engaged way. But to me it seems like one of the primary missions needs to always remain that there is, within them, a chance for quiet.’

Not all libraries feel the same, nor are they destined to remain unchanged while entangled in the rhizomatic roots of the cities they inhabit. As cultures continue to evolve, so too will the landscapes of the places that we gather—to be together, and to be alone amongst the shadows cast by others.

Thankfully, the library’s very presence is one that continues to, at least to some merciful degree, fortify the sanctity of (semi-) silence. For those who seek that nuanced kind of noiselessness that is particularly distinct, the kind that promises to hold you close as you venture into the depths of your imagination, the library remains a place of encounters that expand the mind and enrich the soul, in quiet. ‘Raise your words, not voice,’ the Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi once said. ‘It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.’

fin

This article was first publish in JANE issue five. Heartfelt thanks to American writer Susan Orlean for her contribution.