When former Penn President Amy Gutmann said Penn never stops, I did not understand she meant it literally. The cacophony of alarms waking mettlesome athletes blurs with the deafening laughter of our drunk post-party ramblings. At all times, we have, well, noise. I know this is not the Cornell Daily Sun, and I chose the city, not the park, of Philadelphia, but I still wonder what happens to us when we are perennially surrounded by three-digit decibels. Penn does not just not sleep, it does not shut up. Where does one have to go for silence? More importantly, what is the power of reconnecting to it? Let’s see.
Let us return to the silence concept in a moment because the noise is more obtrusive. We love it when science confirms empirically our anecdotal truths: the World Health Organization has long warned that excessive noise can shorten our lives and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Our poor ears may be resilient, but the incessant Pret mutter and deafening Locust Walk rush hour bellows, if coupled with AirPods shielding foreground and industrial traffic background, can be detrimental.
For the record, I am not just an international complaining that America is loud (it is). I am saying many of us are boisterous. You cannot even tell me this noise is purposeful intellectual discourse. I hear people talk about artificial intelligence (using it to write papers), Taylor Swift’s engagement, unavoidable boyfriend drama, and, needless to say, the finance things. I do not deprecate the topics (sampling bias exists); I deprecate the loudness. Even when you shut up, your phone compensates for you via endless distracting notifications. Even spaces that are supposed to be quiet, dorms or libraries, are many good things but certainly not quiet. You would be ridiculous for respecting “quiet hours.”
The classroom is not immune to noise either. Every seminar has that student talking compulsively without really saying much. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls this “bullshiting your way” through the world, but once again, that is nothing we did not know already. I am in Wharton, and this is what we have primacy in. What we may not know is how one centimeter away from this baroque scaffolding of eloquent speaking in the class lies a devastating and raw landscape of utter emptiness.
I am quite pleonastic myself and take more time than needed to get to my point, so let me try better. At Penn, we have what Simon and Garfunkel famously called “people talking without speaking.” Everybody is talking, but what is anybody saying? More urgently, what do we do about that? Well, the name of their song is “The Sounds of Silence,” so there must be something about this silence thing.
We tend to think of silence as absence. I invite you to challenge that assumption. Silence is presence, just for ourselves. It is the sound of our own messy thoughts before being filtered through group sarcasm and intellectual posturing. In the wiser words of Marcel Proust, “silence is purer than speech because we speak for others, but remain silent for ourselves. So silence, unlike speech, does not bear the trace of our faults or affectations. It is pure, it is genuinely an atmosphere.”
I am not asking for an Orfield Chamber (the quietest place on Earth), although if any Penn clinical audiologists would like to build one, I will be first in line. What I would rather ask is that you not only take quiet time, but more importantly, that you make quiet time in your daily life. What I ask is that when I am looking at your noisy self with my scorned mimic muscles in Fisher Fine Arts, you do in fact shut up.
The proliferation of noise and ubiquity of muttering are penetrating our ears. We may soon become deaf without even realizing that we can no longer hear. There is just too much noise, and we have passively resigned ourselves to this high-decibel reality. An antidote made of daily doses of silence is the cheesy but inevitable alternative. I will leave the exercise of figuring out what that looks like into your own life to the only person capable and responsible for such a task. I can only integrate quietude in mine.
SEE MORE FROM FRANCESCO SALAMONE:
I lived as a Zen monk my junior summer. Here's what I learned
Whenever I think of silence, I am reminded of writer Mark Hyatt’s words: “One needs the silence of one’s bed to cover up the life of the day.” He is certainly right, but he was also wrong because we do not need to wait until nightfall. We can start in the daylight. We can choose, together, to both take and to physically make quiet time for ourselves and for each other. I will start now:
FRANCESCO SALAMONE is a Wharton senior studying decision processes from Palermo, Italy. His email address is frasala@wharton.upenn.edu.
