Hours passed with scarcely a sound. Three fin whales were breaching by the prow of our small ship; a black-browed albatross circled overhead. On a brilliant midsummer morning, my wife and I stepped into a black Zodiac raft and drifted noiselessly among icebergs five stories high, their emerald and aquamarine walls gleaming above sapphire waters. Later we wandered onshore among thousands of penguins that busily waddled along their way as leopard seals eyed them from the rocks.
Yet what stays with me most from my 10-day cruise on the Silversea Silver Cloud around the Antarctic Peninsula six years ago is an encompassing noiselessness that seemed to stretch for miles. No sirens, no drills, not even the possibility of a car alarm. In response, we passengers grew hushed ourselves, united in a silence that was less an absence than a presence: the presence of subtler notes like birds and water and wind that so often get lost in the cacophony of the world.
I travel to get as far as I can from the life I know. And as the world grows ever more clamorous—a phone ringing, my iPad beeping, screens everywhere blaring out the latest news—I long more than ever to cut through the noise and access what feels like my deepest self, the silent being that sits beneath the social one.
I’ll never forget arriving at Camp Denali in Alaska, deep within the 6-million-acre Denali National Park & Preserve, and feeling as if I’d landed on some distant planet where sound doesn’t carry. There was no electricity and no running water, just a heart-stopping closeness to the snowcaps all around and the alpenglow that shone above a 36-mile-long glacier. As a guide led me across the spongy scarlet-and-yellow tundra, she pointed out a troupe of caribou on a ridge, taught me how to read bear scat, and opened me up to a universe encompassing an area wider than New Hampshire. In the vast quiet I came to an attention so sharp that every detail sang out.
Even in places alive with energy and movement, there are sanctuaries. The first time I came to New York City, I slipped, by instinct, off busy Fifth Avenue and into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, sensing it would steady me after a series of harrying job interviews, Instantly I felt silenced—by the thick hush, the flickering candles, the proximity of prayer. Once I began working full-time on 50th Street, I learned to catch my breath in the stillness of Bryant Park. And when finally I realized that, too often, I just couldn’t hear myself think (or not think) in the city, I decided to give up my dream job and move to the quietest urban society I have ever known: Japan. Even in a jam-packed suburban train, there’s very little noise.
Something that trip to the cathedral showed me was that escaping from the chatter of the world can help me escape from the chatter of my own mind; doing that can help connect me with intuitions that lie deeper than my surface thoughts. Last summer I bumped over a barely paved road for 13 miles until I reached the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine abbey near Abiquiu, New Mexico. Ever since a visit 30 years earlier, I had hungered to experience desert silence again. I’m not a religious person, but I knew that when I arrived at the Benedictine sanctuary, I’d find what the German mystic Meister Eckhart called “the place in the soul where one has not been wounded.” I arrived to a realm of birdsong and rushing water and the tolling of bells. Not silence at all, actually, but everything I miss in my daily life as I run from one appointment to the next and wonder, as T.S. Eliot once mused, “Where is the Life we have lost in living?”
