In her sublime A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland describes an inner dilemma that she experienced during her experiments with silence and solitude. It’s a dilemma that has become highly personal for me as well: Then I noticed something shocking. I had come to Weardale for four conscious reasons: to study and think about silence,…
Tag: Silence
Nanette Fabray and the quietest two minutes in American television history
Nanette Fabray, the legendary American television actress, singer, comedienne, and advocate for the hearing impaired, has died at the age of 97. Fifty years ago last month, she (and The Carol Burnett Show) provided just over two minutes of the most amazingly quiet and mesmerizing programming in the history of American broadcast television. These two…
Looking for a still point amid our digital cacophony? Consider writing in longhand.
From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, I kept a longhand journal. It was where I learned the sound of my own inner voice and the rhythm of my own thoughts, and where I gained a more conscious awareness and understanding of the ideas, subjects, emotions, and themes that are, through sheer force of gravitational…
Teeming Links – July 9, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net The presiding reflection for today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading and viewing comes from British novelist and essayist Tim Parks, who elicits an important truth about the silence that so many of us seek, or say we think we seek, amid a culture of clamor: Arguably, when…
Sounds of Apocalypse, Part One: Roar of Creation and Destruction
EDITOR’S NOTE: With this post we welcome a new contributing writer to the Teem. Dominik Irtenkauf is a freelance writer of fiction and nonfiction dealing with art, mythology, cultural philosophy, media theory, the occult, and avant-garde music. He also writes about the boundaries between art and science, and recently he has been combining his literary…
Recommended Reading 39
This week: the dystopian potential of the “big data” revolution, and the need for a deliberate preservation of the sphere of the specifically human in the new reality of a true “information society.” The ubiquitous danger of untested chemicals in the products comprising most Americans’ daily lives. S. T. Joshi on H. P. Lovecraft’s enduring…
Silence, solitude, and self-discovery in an age of mass distraction
“[T]he internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. We are immersed because there’s a constant barrage of stimuli coming at us and we seem to be very much seduced by that kind of constantly changing patterns of visual and auditorial stimuli. When we become immersed in our gadgets, we are immersed in a series…
Humility and Silence: Where True Science and True Spirituality Meet
It is said that we live in an age of light, but it would be truer to say that we are living in an age of twilight; here and there a luminous ray pierces through the mists of darkness, but does not light to full clearness either our reason or our hearts. Men are not…