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There is something very exquisite about silence. I alluded once before to this quote by Aldous Huxley:
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
I have just spent the day in the house, in fact almost constantly in the same room, with a very active 11-year-old. He is a dear. He also had a P.A. day today, and beyond finishing up the last bits of a couple of projects he has due this week, the day was spent in pure entertainment. He managed to keep himself entertained with various “quiet” activities for parts of it, but there were also parts where movies were watched and computer games were played, and the music and sound effects from both filled the room.
Our current house has one room that has the kitchen, eating area and TV/living room all within the same four walls. It is actually a lovely design. It is nice being able to have all of these areas interact.
However –
This next ties in with a post I attempted to write several nights ago. Unfortunately, when I was writing it, it was into the wee hours of the morning and was not nearly as coherent as I had hoped. –
there is something about silence, after a day that is full of noise, that is simply beyond compare.
The day is coming to a close. We haven’t begun supper yet (we had a late lunch), but I requested that the 11-year-old continue whatever activities he was planning on pursuing in his room. Then I spent an hour and a half cleaning the kitchen, doing the dishes and tidying the random bits of things that scattered themselves about the room while the 11-year-old was hard at work at projects and play. And now I am reclining in one of the armchairs in this room, listening to the dishwasher run and just marveling at the peace that has come from a silencing of the movies and video game sound effects.
It is rejuvenating.
It can be uncomfortable. In the course of writing this, I have been tempted several times to minimize it and pull up my various other online accounts instead, substituting visual noise for aural. But sometimes it is nice being able to turn off the distractions and to give yourself room to think.
What I wrote about several nights ago was the importance of solitude in our lives. We need other people a great deal, but I think we also need time to steal away, to sort through our thoughts, to centre ourselves, to pray.
In the Bible, Jesus was constantly surrounded by crowds, but he often sought times and places to be by himself, to meditate and reconnect with his Father. I think it is a good model.
Writing as a fresh graduate, I recall how easy it is to spend all of your waking hours with other people. Meals in the cafeteria or off-campus with friends, studying in groups, movie nights, dances, etc. It was often difficult to find time alone.
Something I wrote about in the doomed post from a few nights ago was the discomfort that comes with solitude. I had found a coffee shop in my University town that I quite liked, and in my third year, I regularly patronized it by myself with a book or notebook. While I appreciated my time there, I often found it uncomfortable. It was a place I was used to going to with others, and there were not many who went simply to seek solitude. Some were there on their own to study, but most of the patrons were in pairs or small groups.
It is important, though, to have time to examine your thoughts and your actions. It is valuable to carve out time to pray. It is wise to spend time focusing your thoughts and your heart on God. For me, anyway, I struggle most when I haven’t made time for solitude and silence in my life. Purposeful solitude, though it is often difficult, is a discipline that is worth developing.
One of the most inspiring courses I ever took was Victorian Poetry with Professor John North. I transcribed more sound bytes in the margins of my notes for that class than I did for any other. This is a man who loves God and who loves poetry, two of the loves of my own life, and so to listen to him speak several times a week was an incredible gift.
I remember attempting to describe this course to my friends. Professor North is an older gentleman who has had many experiences and who has seen much in his life. His students are privileged to hear of his experiences in his classes, and we are even more privileged to be able to listen to the wisdom that he has gleaned from his years on earth. Attending his class was like entering his living room. He invited us in and began speaking, and though he spoke of poetry, he could not help but give us knowledge greater than simply what the poet was trying to say.
Poetry, he says, is a way for us to “read experiences that are like our own, that we can identify with, that affirm ourselves.”
We discussed some of my favourite poets in this class – Tennyson, Hopkins, Arnold, Browning – and through each step of the course, we could see the above-quoted theme carrying through. While discussing Tennyson’s In Memorium and explaining to us why this poem was so popular when first published, North said,
Tennyson explores grief and put into words for people for the first time their internal worlds and emotions.
In Memorium was a poem that Tennyson wrote over the course of twenty years as he mourned the loss of his best friend. We all have these experiences and these “internal worlds and emotions”, but most of us cannot put words to them. With this poem, Tennyson took something that was incredibly well-experienced, but very rarely expressed (that is, grief), and finally put it to words. Poetry touches the ineffable.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~Aldous Huxley
I would class poetry with music.
I found Professor North’s class to be an incredibly healing one. Through his class, he carried us into the very depths of the poem, often to the core of our souls, inviting us to examine what we found there, and to actually feel the emotions that we carried within us. It wasn’t that he was not content with a surface-level analysis of a poem; it was that remaining on the surface never even occurred to him. He is a man deeply in love with his wife, passionate about his God, and incredibly moved by the pieces he reads, and all of this came through in his lectures.
Poetry gives shape and a voice to our internal world; it affirms us, we are less alone.
The excitement in Hopkins is that his world makes sense. The problem is that oftentimes our world just doesn’t make sense. When the dark sonnets come, we can see that he has made sense in the non-sense. Despite the darkness, there is joy.
Poetry gives us an insight into other people’s hearts and minds, and into our own. It gives all of that shape, brings form out of chaos. We can understand what we never understood before, and through another’s writing, we realize it is true. It is satisfying both to have words for it, and to realize that someone else feels the way that we do. It takes the loneliness out of life.
It’s hard to fight with evil, but consider the consequence of not fighting with evil.
Evil cannot exist on its own; by definition, it is a perversion of good.
Even evil is under God’s authority.
[Poetry helps us to] accept the potential of the future, without rejecting the beauty of the past.
Poetry says far more than the poet knows he or she is saying.
Poetry is so powerful that it affects us to the core, even if we don’t know why.
We often only need to see something or hear something and we are transformed.
Be aware that you can’t study literature without being changed inside, in spite of yourself.
(the above all taken during Professor North’s Fall ‘07 Victorian Poetry class)
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