🪟 31 - Being and Quietude
Frame & Axiom #31 (Part 4): An inquiry into silence, self-knowledge, and the inner worlds.
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE » on the relation between man and nature: man as feeble and the consequence of forces.
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE: » on the relation between man and justness: reality as court and canvas.
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS » on the relation between man and others: the necessity of love and compassion toward the ill, that is, us all.
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
Being and Quietude
🪟 31 - Being and Quietude
Dear Inquirer,
There is a common saying out in the wild: “You do not truly know yourself until you are or can be alone”. This has probably been said in many variations and one too many times. For example, Paulo Coelho, writer of The Alchemist, writes a comparable cliché: “If you are never alone you cannot know yourself.” Uninspiring as it is, like all clichés, there are deeper realms of truth in it. Here I want to relay what I see.
The saying is posed as a problem. There is an effect of not knowing oneself, produced by the cause of not being (or being able to be) alone. However, I think such a diagnosis is all too easily misinterpreted. One would be mistaken to believe that the doorway to self-knowledge is by being more alone. It is not that a man should sink into his chair, disassociate himself from the world, and opt rather arbitrarily into examining himself. Often such an orientation is not so much wise as it is narcissistic! I can picture a fashionable young man in his 20s who seeks to spend time alone away from the ‘noisy murmurs of society’, in order that he might collapse into a symbol of deep introspection and intelligence. It is that sort of orientation you can be sure will produce an Instagram post or two, as he feels a great urge to declare his own solitude, to actualise his own self-image of heterodoxy. What sort of reverse-irony is this? It is as if he mocks those embroiled in the trivial by engaging loudly in a counter-triviality, as a provocateur does with the provoked, laughing from a high horse made out of cotton.
The theologian Pascal produced his own spin on the saying in his book Pensées [Thoughts]. He proclaims in a comparatively hyperbolic fashion, and quite memorably: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone". Now, this aphorism is more extended, and to me relays a better diagnosis: it is not that man has the inability to sit in a room alone, for as I have shown, he may choose to sit alone for more reasons than one. Rather it is that man cannot sit quietly. In every moment he jerks about as if down with a chronic case of involuntary spasms, pursuing amusement after amusement and exhausting them from one to another. You see, his head is led by his heart, and his heart is soft and naïve, behaving something like a cultured and poise version of Pinocchio. Dangle any glittering object before him, and he will be silently seduced. His heart is always yearning, always leaping, like a flighty mammal that pounces from one thing to another, whose only reason for quiet is out of weariness or boredom. In his world, quietude has no place, for it has no meaning.
What gives then, for one who comes to know oneself truly? The archetypal wise man enters into the inner worlds from love. Its meaning is that of a retreat, as the Stoics would call it — a revitalising and pleasuring retreat from the noise and troubles of the world1. But I think the Stoics did not see that quietude itself has a coming-of-age, and it represents a retreat only at the later stages of its development. Its beginning rears a much more unwelcoming head. It is, at first, a doorway into the discomforting — the realm of ghosts, everything horrifying and anxiety-inducing, the dwelling of the eerily infinite night, the origin of dreams and nightmares, the subtle consciousness of existence’s own failures. For us, my fellow inquirer, one enters into the inner worlds rather from desperation, as if when thrown2 into an infinite ocean, affording only to flail about wildly in search for balance amidst savage crashing of waves, whence at a certain point conceding by a whim to venture underwater, in hopes of finding something to latch on from within. As such I would not call it a retreat myself, since I have not found that very tranquil.
To the unacquainted, the inner worlds present a multiplicity without harmony. There is no poignance, no higher or lower, better or worse. It has only an agitating cacophony of sounds, produced by bells and whistles of instruments that appear both incomprehensible and unjustified in their incomprehensibility. What then is a break between amusements to a man of no music, but a direct confrontation with the abyss? Thus, he keeps himself eternally distracted and distractible, in order to ensure some form of sound is always persistent in his house. Whatever swing of the mood he contracts, he amplifies and identifies himself closely with. This is how he keeps silence at bay, he tries poorly to banish it from his consciousness. But through his eternal convulsions, he disallows himself from hearing what the silence has to say. And silence surely expresses much — it is none other than the spirit of our beloved Mystery, the ever-present spirit, the psychical companion to which we have been newly acquainted.
What then is the meaning of quietude? It is certainly not about going convulsively from one thing to another, nor superficially bearing the quality of aloneness in action like our broody young intellectual. To me, it is about being within for acquaintance’s sake. This means, firstly, that quietude is an inward act. It is an act, for it occurs in time, in the immediate, when one poses the question, and flirts with tension — the unresolved. For a man engaged with quietude, there is a certain movement generated between the inner and outer worlds. It is one not unlike the nature of a refrain in a musical composition. How so? Now, and this is utterly fascinating for me to think: that a stroke of silence may be asserted in a musical composition to delightful effect reveals a certain truth to me. What we call music is not merely in the unceasing endurance of sounds from one to another, be it impulsively or meticulously, for it is also present and deepened in the lack thereof, at the break of sound. Yes! — the poignance of silence in music is akin to life attending profoundly to its own negation — it is a momentary confrontation with the infinite silence.
Through silence, music is weighted and emphasised. Is this not the same matter with other dualities of nature? Through darkness, light is weighted and emphasised, which is why there is not only beauty in light but in shadows3. Similarly, by plummeting into the inner worlds, in direct confrontation with life’s own negations and nothingness, life itself is weighted and emphasised. It is to plunge into all that is invisible, unknown, and negating, and to have it enter the frame without compromise. Perhaps it is because we were born in and of nothingness, by the unseen ‘dust of the ground’, from the womb of silence, that there exists nothing quite as deeply “human” as the confrontation with life’s own nothingness, and what is most subjectively ”human” is what is most profound. This is the miracle — a divine paradox — perhaps no less than a figment of divine mercy!
In this inner confrontation, one comes to make a distinction between the finite and the infinite — from the hasty preoccupations of the day, into the dreaming silence of the night. As I have said, angst is a doorway. Wherein, you will be able to mediate both the inner and outer worlds into a deeper, more piercing form of music4. Now, my dear inquirer, if you feel yet unacquainted with the dark, what are you to do? The poet Rumi wrote: “The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear”, and Christ said, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.5” I think it is within reason for me to add on, ‘The more you are able to hear, the more you have to say’. The quiet spirit is neither loud (like our broody young intellectual), nor secretive. The quiet spirit is expressed in a certain resonance, by its own incorruptibility6 and by the discernible weight of its choices. These are the fruits of quietude — and they are among the richest fruits of the soul.
To conclude, I return to the saying aforementioned, and offer my own personal spin: ‘To be acquainted with silence is to be acquainted with oneself’.
Till next time,
Euwyn
Aurelius: “People seek retreats for themselves in the countryside by the seashore, in the hills, and you too have made it your habit to long for that above all else. But this is altogether unphilosophical, when it is possible for you to retreat into yourself whenever you please; for nowhere can one retreat into greater peace or freedom from care than within one’s own soul”, and, “Nowhere can man find a quieter and more untroubled retreat than that in his own soul.”
In reference to Heidegger’s concept of “Thrownness”, which explains the human state as confronted by the world without the choice of existing in the first place. The essence of 'thrownness' is that confrontation, the condition we all experience in some fashion.
For a thrilling, aesthetic read on the beauty of shadows, read Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows.
Indeed, it is only when strokes of silence serve the music, that we call it a ‘refrain’ and not silence. Correspondingly, it is only when aloneness serves life, that we can bestow the classical christening upon what is normally aloneness, as ‘solitude’ or ‘quietude’. A composition comprised only of silence for the sake of itself would be hardly a song, unless its element of “music” was exhausted in its own eccentric description. (For instance, if there was a 3-minute track titled “Song with Ample Silence”.) Thus, both the inner and outer worlds are to be mediated into music, and not to be treated with one-sidedness.
Matthew 11:15 (KJV)
1 Peter 3:4 (LSB): “but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible quality of a lowly and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God.”