Better in their words…

How about you? Got silence?
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Silence, by Erling Kagge
Reviewed by Sara Wheeler, WSJ 12/22/2017

Twenty-five years ago, the Norwegian adventurer Erling Kagge trekked solo across Antarctica without a radio (actually, the aviation company that flew him to the coast insisted that he take one, and he did—but he dumped the batteries in the plane’s trash bin). The experience of being alone for 50 days inspired this book: a meditation on the need for, and meaning of, silence.

As the subtitle (“In the Age of Noise”) indicates, the notion of cultivating silence is mightily unfashionable as well as hard to achieve. Mr. Kagge began by asking himself the questions: “What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever?” He reckons that he came up with 33 “attempts at answering them.”

Mr. Kagge has skied to the North Pole as well as its southern counterpart, summited Everest, and sailed across the Atlantic and back. He once did some urban exploring in New York City, sneaking to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge in the dark. He is a lawyer, a serious art collector and a distinguished publisher (his own house brought the book out in Norway). His previous six books include tomes on exploration and art collecting.

He admits that he is as ready as the rest of us to busy himself “with this or that, avoiding the silence.” He also acknowledges the “fear of getting to know ourselves better.” But he argues that it is important to train the mind to hear silence. In the Antarctic, he writes, “the quieter I became, the more I heard.” He recognizes, too, that the next hardest challenge, after walking to the South Pole, is “to be at peace with yourself.” He is optimistic, despite the chaos that reigns. “I believe,” he writes, “it’s possible for everyone to discover this silence within themselves.” He quotes contemplative wisdom from a variety of sources, from the rock band Depeche Mode to the 19thcentury French novelist Stendhal (these two just a few lines apart). Mr. Kagge also cites scientific studies in which subjects were left alone with no external stimuli. In one such, a joint venture between the University of Virginia and Harvard, “nearly half of the subjects eventually pushed on the button to administer an electrical shock in order to reduce their silent time.”

“Silence” (fluently translated by Becky L. Crook) is a slim volume at 144 pages, with a biggish font and lots of white space, and it is as much object as book, something to be handled and savored. It is illustrated with photographs and paintings, many of the polar regions and all conjuring silence, if an image can (which it can); the production qualities are superb. Mr. Kagge is especially interested in visual representations of his subject. “The most powerful scream that I have ever experienced,” he writes, “is one that is void of sound: The Scream, by Edvard Munch.”  Other practitioners referenced include the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, who famously sat for 736 hours at New York’s Museum of Modern Art peering at visitors in silence.

Erling Kagge’s solo trek to the South Pole in 1993—without a working radio—taught him of the need to block out the noise sometimes.

The author has a sense of humor. “Having tried my hand at internet dating,” he says, “I am inclined to agree with Heidegger,” the philosopher having said that in order to achieve nearness, we must relate to the truth, not to technology. Mr. Kagge is also not afraid to dive into contemporary culture: There is a section on “the drop,” the pause near the beginning of a pop song when, after an introductory buildup, silence occurs before the main event.

There are truisms (“silence is an experience that can be had for free”), and many of the sentiments are not original. That doesn’t matter, but it might have been acknowledged. For example, Mr. Kagge ends his book with “You have to find your own South Pole.” A lot of people have said that. Shackleton, for example, the polar explorer, said, “We all have our own White South,” and Thomas Pynchon, who didn’t go anywhere near the South Pole, wrote in his novel “V.”: “You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.” Sara Maitland’s 2008 “A Book of Silence” also champions the countercultural notion that silence is more than an absence of noise, though, unlike Mr. Kagge, she emphasizes the role of prayer. Curiously, both authors cite Rothko as a master of the pictorial representation of silence.

A little of the sanctimony in these pages rings hollow. After retailing an interview with Elon Musk, Mr. Kagge says: “I am not so stupid as to compare myself to Elon Musk. However, when I look back on my time as a publisher, the only unusual thing I have done, on a completely different scale to Musk, was to stand uninterrupted at the kitchen sink and raise a few questions about sanctioned truths.”

As a publisher, Mr. Kagge has learned that it is possible to sell hundreds of thousands of books “about knitting, brewing beer and stacking wood” and links this fact, plausibly enough, to “a desire to return to something basic, authentic, and to find peace, to experience a small, quiet alternative to the din.” He discusses the craze, among the wealthy, for relaxation retreats where silence is on the menu (he did a yoga version himself, in Sri Lanka). He also taught himself hypnosis, “in order to disconnect. . . . I lie there hovering a couple of centimetres above my bed each afternoon.”

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.

Ms. Wheeler is the author, most recently, of “O My America! Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World.”