Catherine Blyth on silence

Those of you who read the Evening Standard will have noticed The School of Life's regular Friday column "Life Class", which has been runnning there for several months now. It's written by different members of our fabulous faculty and has covered subjects as various as shyness and shopping. I'm posting last week's column about Silence, written by Catherine Blyth, to give you a flavour.

1.    In the beginning was the word.  So what is there to say about silence?  Plenty, judging by Amazon, where 8,772 book titles feature this term.  Most are murder mysteries or spiritual musings, reflecting mixed feelings about these hazy seven letters.

2.    Silence is nothing if not ambivalent. Since it requires discipline, it has long been associated with power, both good and evil. To Romans, the goddess Isis vanquished 'the lamentable silences of hell'.  Yet for Buddhists, freedom from the word brings higher consciousness.  Today, however, negative sentiments are rising, and while city dwellers should appreciate quiet, they seem the most intimidated by silence.

3.    Our noisy culture is unbalanced by the view that good communication is all talk. At a gap in conversation, few of us pause to consider silence's virtues: we're too busy panicking how to fill it.   The quiet person threatens, because he acts as a verbal laxative on us.  Maybe this is why corporations are stuffed with strong, silent types, whose success seems disproportionate to the few ideas anyone recalls them having.  Then again, they can't be blamed for bad ideas.

4.    Silence should be cherished for more than the ease that it signals with a loved companion.  In fact, this communication tool is as versatile as the queen in chess.  Seventeenth-century conversation gourmet La Rochefoucauld distinguished between the “eloquent”, “mocking” and “respectful” silence.  But its meaning is never fixed: it can express empathy or confusion, encourage intimacy or distance, depending on how it is interpreted.

5.    Used wisely, silence compels others to speak (handy in negotiation). It also helps them to listen, by lending weight to what we say.  Stand-up comics pace jokes carefully: 'Don't,' they advise, 'step on your punchline'. In that extra beat the audience's imagination becomes their collaborator.  This is why masters of silence may be taken for master talkers.  Such as the wily French politician, Talleyrand, who used to sit up late, polishing fine phrases.  At parties he was a clam, before suddenly spitting out a sentence that people claimed 'was the sort they never forgot'.  So have a pause for thought.

Catherine Blyth is the author of The Art of Conversation.  She will be hosting The School of Life's next Conversation Meal at the Front Line Club on April 19th. Find out more here.

Next week's Life Class column by Robert Rowland Smith is about secrets. Look out for it in the Evening Standard on Friday 10 April.

Comments

[Algenon Pratt]

Saying something clever is always an excellent thing to do. I do it all the time, but only in my mind, but then nobody else is there to listen to me. Which is good really because if there were my mind could become rather crowded. But still, at least I could have a good conversation with myself. Still, maybe it’s better just to shut up.

[Drew Byrne]

Conversation: The message is the medium, and the medium is the message.