If I feel hurried, I want to get what I’m doing done as soon as possible so I can get on with all the other jobs nagging for my attention – both in the garden and in my office. I feel impatient with myself for not getting things ‘right’, and for the objects around for me for being so awkward and time-wasting. I feel like a pretty rubbish gardener with too much garden and too little time.

The first way of working is pottering, and the second is battling. Although it feels like I’m working more slowly when I’m pottering, everything seems to get done.

~ Writing Our Way Home

Photo: Lloyd Kahn

At seventy-five, is it too late to become a pioneer? To clear some land, build my cabin and like Yeats, plant ‘my nine bean rows and a hive for the honey-bee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade’. Will my children and grandchildren come to appreciate my foresight in preparing a bolt-hole for them when the oil runs out? Or will they shake their heads and wonder if Alzheimer’s has finally caught up with me?

~ Terry Oliver

Somewhere To Disappear, a film by Laure Flammarion & Arnaud Uyttenhove with Alec Soth

So, in spite of immediate appearances, your quiet reading is based on a great deal of noise. The same can be said of my quiet writing. I wrote most of this book in an old farmhouse, tucked among the hills of northeastern Vermont. If you could see the place where I was sitting when I wrote this sentence, you would in all likelihood think it enviably quiet, the ideal place for a writer to commune with his thoughts. Yet, this quiet occupation of mine depends upon a great deal of noise: from the vehicles that bring my ink and paper up the interstates, the power plants that generate electriciy for my lamp and laptop, the substations that see my internet signals go through to New York — to say nothing of the travels I made to gather my material and the people I disturbed in the process. In a book of many ironies, none has impressed me more than the noise I made to write it.

~ Garret Keizer, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise

Here, then, is the significance of 4’33” — that it is impossible for humans to experience true silence – that there is, to all intents and purposes, no such thing as silence, except as an abstract notion. That’s why it’s called 4’33” -– a duration of time -– and not “Silence”. In fairness, it’s clear from Cage Against The Machine’s co-ordinator Eddy Temple-Morris’s description of their performance that he has grasped this point. Others have not. On the BBC website and in The Observer recently, as well as in some text books, the mistake has been repeated, as it so often is, that the piece comprises 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. It does not. In the absence of musical performance, it consists of whatever noises occur in its stead -– a cough, the heating system of a concert hall, the distant sound of traffic or aircraft, the creak of the architecture. Ambient in extremis.

~ The Quietus on Cage Against the Machine

I chose to write a book about noise because it is so easily dismissed as a small issue.

And because in that dismissal I believe we can find a key for understanding many of the big issues.

Noise reminds me of a Norse myth in which the god Thor is invited to wrestle with a giant king’s decrepit old foster mother. Though Thor is one of the mightiest of the Norse gods, he is unable to gain any advantage over the crone. He cannot lift her, throw her, best her in any way. Only later is he told that he was wrestling with Old Age itself. Noise is a lot like Thor’s mysterious opponent. It appears lightweight and even frail at first glance, but once you try to pick it up, you discover that you are trying to heft the whole world.

~ Garret Keizer

This segment (starts at 2:30) from Tony Robinson’s show Worst Jobs In History was the beginning of my forthcoming novel The Bee-Loud Glade. I’d been kicking around an idea for a monastic novel after a blog back-and-forth with AKMA a few years ago, but it wasn’t going anywhere; perhaps because I was trying to somehow write a monastic novel that wasn’t religious. Then I saw the show and said, “Aha, a hermit!” and the idea more or less came together. But only the idea; unfortunately, Tony Robinson never came round to help with the writing.

Who says TV is bad for books?

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That’s 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she’s never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she’s never alone.

~ William Deresiewicz @ Hermitary

Keegan Gibbs (via plsj)

“Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life — perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority.”

~ J. Krishnamurti
(via whiskey river)

In contemporary civilization where everything is standardized and where everything is repeated, the whole point is to forget in the space between an object and its duplication. If we didn’t have this power of forgetfulness, if art today didn’t help us to forget, we would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects.

~ John Cage (via Hermitary)