In search of silence

Our modern distractions: 3

Noise is everywhere today ? ?Satan?s invisible world?. The assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph has some suggestions about how to deal with it

THOMAS Carlyle did not take long to start complaining about the noise after he and his wife Jane moved into the tall terrace house in Chelsea in 1834. He tried room after room as his study, only to be driven out by noise ? from the girl next door practising the piano, from the street, from a cock distantly crowing. In 1852 a sound-proofed study in the attic was completed, with cupboards insulating the inner from the outer walls. During the 12 years that Carlyle stuck it out before returning to the ground floor he became convinced that the arrangements actually magnified noise from the river. It was, he wrote, ??my first view of Satan?s invisible world?.

We can take it that Carlyle?s difficulty was fundamentally psychological. Jane felt neuralgia in her arms; he suffered from sensitivity to the slightest sound. No doubt Chelsea was livelier than Craigenputtock, but even in the Scottish countryside cocks crow. In any case, what was Carlyle being distracted from? From sleeping, to be sure, and any insomniac can sympathise with the mosquito-whine of intrusion that a slight noise can make on the wakeful senses. The fall of a leaf is enough to startle.

Carlyle also felt sorely that he was being distracted from his work. This is of relevance to prayer, as I shall show. For in fact noise did not stop Carlyle working, turning out his books to make money and astonish the world. He had the inner resources to swim against the most exhausting counter-currents. To retrace one?s steps is frustrating, and that is what Carlyle had to do when a housemaid burnt his manuscript of The French Revolution when he lent it to John Stuart Mill to read. He began again.

So if Carlyle thought that noise was a distraction from achievement he was wrong. He was neurotic. But one does not have to be neurotic to be driven to distraction by a noisy baby at church, for example. And yet it seems to me that one whole nation ? the Spanish ? is stonewall oblivious to this kind of distraction.

During Mass in the summer in southern Spain, the benches will flutter with women?s fans, which sound like a startled flock of pigeons, a susurration punctuated by clacks. If it is a city church, there is a good chance that a loud busker will be performing outside or a Saturday-night rock concert rehearsing in the square. If it is in a country town, the door will be open for air and the local children in direct earshot will be riding their bikes, kicking footballs and shouting. No one at their devotions inside, from gnarled labourer to young mother, will take any notice whatsoever.

I cannot account for this piece of ethnic psychology. Some say Spaniards are solipsistic, and there is some truth in that. They are sure of their own existence while possibly taking life as a dream. And yet they enjoy the hard impact of the world; they relish noise. In a bar, the television and one-armed bandit compete with loud talk. Even the dominoes are slapped down with a crack. Nothing at night is so much fun as a street band playing the discordant fife, with the drum echoing like cannon-fire, except perhaps really loud fireworks thunderflashing through the small hours ? the madrugada which only those with nothing else to do give over to sleep.

I sketch this national attitude to noise partly as a contrast to the feebleness of the English in resenting the slightest interruption by noise, and partly as a context for a remark of St Teresa of Avila?s about a noise that she did notice at prayer. It was the sound of someone behind her, grinding or scraping at her teeth with a thumbnail.

That is distracting indeed. And yet I think Teresa felt it more as an occasion for impatience than as a direct distraction. After all, she arranged during her tough journeys for the nuns travelling with her to be enclosed in a covered wagon, with a crucifix hung up in view and the divine office to read as they lurched through stony Castile. To be recollected in such circumstances is good training for the scrape of a thumbnail.

Anyway, Teresa was quite aware that the imagination provides plenty of distractions without any help from the hearing. And just as the intellect and will, in Teresa?s interior castle, can let the imagination run on its way disregarded, so we beginners in prayer may well find that a little insignificant sound (traffic, the wind, birds, children playing) is less distracting than a breath-held silence.

I do not deny the need to find silence in order to pray. But, just as peace is not the absence of war, so silence is not the absence of noise. For prayer there has to be a gap in other occupations, and it is certainly true that noise can be used to extend the sector of life that is occupied until there is no gap for prayer. The average time spent watching television is more than 20 hours a week. Escaping the telly for a few minutes is a necessary condition for prayer, and in small houses with a family that is not always easy.

Trains, for me, are good places to read, to work and to pray. Or they were before the invasion of the mobile phone. The ring tone is still an attention-seeking performance even though we know the call is not for us. The ensuing speech is louder than any normal conversation. Overhearing one side of a conversation is more distracting than hearing both sides; the pauses and cues provoke attention. And the fatuity of other people?s mobile conversations! Altogether it makes me feel as Diana Cooper did towards Evelyn Waugh?s ear-trumpet ? I want to rap the mobile phone with a heavy spoon.

Perhaps the soothing white noise of the train inspired the theoretician who came up with the open-plan office. When enough people are buzzing about at their task, the individual worker is left free to focus his attention. But if you are early or late when only a few are around in the open-plan office, then you will be the sole target of a stand-up colloquy, or your right ear will be directly in the line of fire of a loud monologue delivered by someone talking excitedly not into his telephone but over it.

In an open-plan office, it is the devil?s own business to find a few minutes before, say, leaving for an appointment, to say your prayers. You could try lying hidden under the desk wearing earplugs. Barring that, there is a website, www.sacredspace.ie, that The Tablet has given attention to. It lets someone at her or his desk click on the computer screen at their own pace through a gospel text, facilitating prayerful meditation.

Such talk must sound a luxury to a mother, travelling from supermarket to school gates and thence home to cooking and family involvements. But prayer is not like playing the piano, an activity perfected by mastering procedure. It cannot be the case that people who look after children, or are caught up in an army at war, or are lying in a noisy hospital ward, will be denied by God the means to lift up their hearts and minds to him. They may think they have failed in their attempt to pray, but the Holy Spirit is not so easily thwarted.

Having reached this sunny conclusion, I found myself last night trying to go to sleep while two drunks sat on the steps over the road opposite my bedroom window. Their sub-Beckettian conversation, just below the threshold of audible comprehensibility, bid for attention by sudden lurches in volume and emotional force. Then one of them fell down the sharp steps. It was three in the morning, and Satan?s invisible world was in my ears.

The articles in this Lent series can be read on our website, www.thetablet.co.uk