There are winter mornings when you know it has snowed before you even open the curtains. Not because of the light, which filters through only slightly paler, but because of the sound. The street below, which by seven o’clock usually carries the noise of the first cars, of doors slamming, of a bus braking, is strangely muffled. Tyres pass without a hiss, footsteps cannot be heard, even voices seem to arrive from far away. Fresh snow absorbs sound, and for a few hours the whole city seems to lower its voice. Whoever looks out of the window at that moment almost always stays there a little longer than necessary, as though they had found something they did not know they had lost.
Then, as a rule, the phone vibrates on the bedside table. The first notification arrives, then the second, and the morning resumes its pace. The snow remains, but our attention is already elsewhere.
It is a small scene, and almost everyone knows it. Yet it holds a question worth taking seriously: what exactly did we find in those few minutes at the window? Not silence in the strict sense, because a city is never entirely quiet. Something subtler, which everyday noise conceals and which, when it reappears, we recognise at once.
Two Sounds in the Dark
In 1951 the American composer John Cage stepped into an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, a room designed to absorb every sound and every echo. He expected to find absolute silence. Instead he heard two sounds, one high and one low. When he came out and asked for an explanation, the engineer told him that the first was his nervous system at work, the second his blood circulating. As long as we are alive, Cage concluded, perfect silence does not exist: something is always sounding, if only inside us.
That experience changed the way he thought about music, but it can also change the way we think about everyday life. If absolute silence does not exist, then what we call silence is always a quality of listening, not a property of the world. A wood is not silent: the wind moves through the branches, a stream runs not far off, a bird takes flight somewhere beyond sight. The snowy morning is not silent: you can still hear a shovel scraping the pavement, a child’s voice, a church bell. And yet in both cases we say we have found silence.
What we have actually found is the absence of a certain kind of sound: the kind that asks something of us. The stream does not want an answer. The shovel on the pavement does not demand a decision. These are sounds that accompany, whereas most of those around us during the day interrupt. The silence we look for is not the end of noise. It is the end of demands.
Snow, for that matter, does not really take sound away: it changes it. When it is fresh, its crystals leave a great deal of empty space between them, and that light lattice behaves like a sponge, holding on to part of the noise instead of sending it back. Once it settles, freezes or is trodden down, the city sounds as it always does. The calm of that early morning is made of this: not of absence, but of a surface that for a few hours stops returning everything.
Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds
The following year, in August 1952, in a wooden concert hall in the woods near Woodstock, in New York State, the pianist David Tudor sat down at a piano, closed the keyboard lid and played nothing at all. Every so often he opened and closed the lid to mark the beginning and end of the three movements, and he checked a stopwatch. After four minutes and thirty-three seconds he stood up and bowed. Cage’s piece, titled after exactly that duration, was over.
The audience did not take it well. Many thought it a joke, others a provocation. At the end of the evening, so the story goes, someone stood up to propose running those artists out of town. Yet during those minutes the hall had not been mute. There had been the wind in the trees outside, then rain on the roof, then the increasingly restless murmur of the audience. This, for Cage, was the music: everything that happens when we stop filling a space and begin to listen to it.
One can argue at length about whether the piece is music. But the audience’s reaction also says a great deal about us. Four minutes with nothing deliberately to look at or listen to were enough for a room of cultivated people, who had come specifically for a concert, to start fidgeting. It was not the noise that disturbed them. It was the lack of something to occupy their attention.
Staying in a Room
Three centuries earlier, Blaise Pascal had written in his Pensées a sentence that might have been made for that audience: all of humanity’s unhappiness comes from a single thing, not knowing how to stay quietly in a room. Pascal was thinking of the diversions of the court, of hunting, gambling and war, of everything with which the men of his time avoided being alone with themselves. His observation was moral rather than psychological, but it has proved remarkably precise.
In 2014 the American psychologist Timothy Wilson and several colleagues published in the journal Science a series of experiments carried out at the University of Virginia. Participants were asked to sit alone in a bare room, without phones or books, for between six and fifteen minutes, with the sole task of thinking. Most found the experience unpleasant and hard work. In the best-known experiment, participants had a button that delivered a mild electric shock, which all of them had already tried and said they would rather avoid. Many, rather than simply staying with their own thoughts, pressed it anyway: two men in three and one woman in four.
The result went round the world, and was debated and criticised too. But its core is hard to deny, because almost all of us recognise it in ourselves. External silence is not the problem. We can get it with a pair of headphones or a closed door. The difficulty is what surfaces when it arrives: thoughts left half-finished, worries that the noise was keeping at bay, a certain nameless unease. To avoid it, we are willing to fill any gap, even with something we do not enjoy.
One detail of the study shows this well. In one of the trials participants had to repeat the exercise at home, alone, with no one checking on them. About a third admitted to cheating: to having put music on, looked at their phone or got up from the chair. Not even in their own kitchen, without witnesses and without consequences, could those few minutes be endured to the end.
The Noise We Carry With Us
Perhaps this is why silence seems so rare today, even when the world around us is no noisier than it used to be. In many places it is actually quieter: cars are less noisy, windows insulate better, residential streets are calm in the evening. But almost every pause in the day has been taken over by something designed precisely to fill it. We walk with a podcast in our ears, wait for the bus scrolling through the news, cook with a video playing, fall asleep with the phone in our hand. The noise around us no longer comes from the street. We carry it with us, and we choose it.
Look at a waiting room, a lift, a supermarket queue. Not many years ago people in those places looked out of the window, read the posters on the walls, sometimes exchanged a few words with the stranger beside them. Today almost everyone lowers their eyes to a screen at the very moment the wait begins. In most cases it is neither rudeness nor addiction. It is a reflex: two minutes of emptiness are perceived as something to be filled before they have even been felt.
There is nothing wrong, in itself, with any of these gestures. A good podcast can teach a great deal, a song can accompany a walk better than any silence. But taken together they produce an effect we rarely notice: we no longer leave room for nothing. Every empty minute is filled before it has even been experienced as empty, and so we lose the chance to discover what would have happened had we left it as it was.
Anyone who has taken a long walk in the mountains without earphones knows what usually happens after the first half hour. At first the mind keeps talking to itself, going over the week’s conversations, drafting replies to emails. Then, little by little, it tires of doing so. Thoughts slow down and thin out, and between one and the next a space opens. It is often in that space that an idea we had been looking for for days arrives, or the simple solution to a problem that seemed complicated. Not because silence provides answers, but because it finally gives our thoughts time to reach their end.
A Precise Luxury
It is no accident that silence is now sold as a luxury. Mountain hotels promise rooms without televisions, restaurants switch off the background music, and Swiss trains have quiet zones for those who want to travel without phone calls or loud conversation. A few decades ago it would have seemed strange to pay for something that was simply there, in the pauses between one thing and the next. Today, like everything that becomes scarce, it has acquired a price.
For centuries, it must be said, silence had its free places. Anyone who has walked into a village church on a summer afternoon, in a valley in Ticino, knows the transition well: the heavy door closes behind you, the heat and the cicadas stay outside, and inside you hear only your own footsteps on the stone floor and, sometimes, the ticking of a clock. One need not be a believer to feel the effect of that threshold. Those places were built partly for this: to offer anyone a space in which the world, for a few minutes, stopped asking.
And yet silence is a luxury in a more precise sense than the market’s. Luxury, in its best meaning, is not a superfluous addition to life, but what allows life to be lived in full. Silence does exactly that: it adds nothing, but removes what stands between us and what is in front of us. It allows a conversation to be heard to the end, a landscape to be looked at, a thought to be thought through.
It is also a luxury that cannot be bought outright. You can pay for a room without a television, but you cannot pay someone to sit in your place with the thoughts that surface once the television is off. That part of the work remains ours. Those who learn to do it, to bear the first minutes of unease without filling them at once, discover that beyond those minutes lies something no hotel can sell: a kind of calm that does not depend on where one happens to be.
The Snowy Morning
Let us go back to the window on that winter morning. The street is still covered, the city still muffled. The phone vibrates on the bedside table, as it does every day. This time, though, the person at the window does not turn round straight away. They stay a few more minutes watching the snow that keeps on falling, listening to the neighbour’s shovel, a child’s voice in the courtyard, the church bell striking half past seven. At first the hand reaches instinctively for the phone, then stops.
Nothing extraordinary happens: there is no revelation, no important decision to be made. There are only a few minutes in which nothing asks for anything, and in which the person watching notices how much there was to hear, just beneath the usual noise. The day will begin all the same, with its demands and its urgencies. But it will begin from a different place.
Perhaps this is what snow teaches, now and then, to anyone who stops to listen to it. We were not short of more information, more sounds, more voices. We were short of enough silence to hear what was already there.