If I turn off the AV system in my living room I can hear the soft buzz of the refrigerator compressor in the kitchen, the fan in the dehumidifier downstairs, and the air from the furnace being forced through the vents. Things change when the power goes out. The house seems preternaturally quiet. That is, until my ears grow accustomed to the constant drip of groundwater entering the sump pump hole, the sound of traffic passing outside, or the occasional train. I am surrounded by noise. Perhaps that’s why Erling Kagge’s book on Silence appealed to me.

Kagge has quite a resume. He has trekked to both the North and South Poles (skiing to the South Pole alone), climbed Mount Everest, and sailed across the world’s oceans. His reflections on noise and silence are borne of these journeys. There is a refreshing weight and honesty to his reflections. Kagge admits that we can never completely escape noise. However, there is a silence that lies beneath it if we but train ourselves to access it.

[T]here, deep beneath a cacophony of traffic noise and thoughts, music and machinery, iPhones and snow ploughs, it lay in wait for me. Silence. (1)

While the message of this little book is important, it was at times overshadowed by the pretension of the author. Described as an “[e]xplorer, lawyer, art collector, publisher, and author,” on the dust jacket, he name-drops tech leaders and casually informs the reader of his various heroic exploits. He also has a tendency to use philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger as a mere launching pad for his own reflections, thoughts that do not always follow from their philosophy.

Those qualms aside, this book is well worth reading, if for nothing more than to remind us of how noisy our world is and what we can do about it.

Kagge, Erling. Silence In the Age of Noise. Translated by Becky L. Crook. Pantheon, 2017.