By the end of the book, the reader is left wanting more of these tangible evocations of silence and less commentary on the concept. Even the philosophers, poets, and entrepreneurs Kagge draws on to inform his subject, from Seneca to Kierkegaard to Elon Musk, begin to feel like just one more voice in a crowd—in other words, noise. Tam da ihtiyacımız olan bir şey var aslında: Sessizlik. Bu sessizlik sesten arınma değil, hiç sesin olmaması da değil. Sesle birlikte sessiz kalabilmek demek.

Outside of the book’s more poignant moments, Kagge’s language at times falls into the trite phrases of the self-help genre—clichés that banish rather than evoke silence. The author runs the risk of writing about a subject so expansive and elusive that it becomes several things at once. When silence is both joy and boredom, self-knowledge and wonder as well as eternity—in other words, when it becomes too many things, or really anything other than itself—then silence, by definition, no longer exists.Not long after, I was invited to give a lecture at St Andrews University in Scotland. I was to choose the subject myself. I tended to talk about extreme journeys to the ends of the Earth, but this time my thoughts turned homewards, to that Sunday supper with my family. So I settled on the topic of silence. I’m old enough to remember being deeply bored during my childhood: in a 70s home, once children’s TV had finished and you’d read all your books, it really was possible to be very, very bored. That same evening, I went to a pub with a few of them. Inside the draughty entrance, each of us with a pint of beer, it was all more or less exactly the same as my student days. Kind, curious people, a humming atmosphere, interesting conversations. Pastaruoju metu tylos motyvas mane vis dažniau pats susiranda knygose ir gyvenime, o tylos žygis, kuriame neseniai dalyvavau, sukėlė dar didesnį poreikį įsileisti kuo daugiau prasmingos tylos į savo gyvenimą. Todėl visai nekeista, kad netyčia užtikus tokią knygą bibliotekoje ją iškart pasigriebiau ir perskaičiau papildomai nesidomėjus (o kaip retai goodreads laikais taip būna). Silence : In the Age of Noise หรือฉบับแปลภาษาไทยในชื่อ ‘เงียบ’ ของสำนักพิมพ์ OMG books ฉันยกมือสมัครใจเป็นลูกค้าทันที

I thought this was excellent advice, and finding a woodland trail or something similar is now much more preferable to me than walking on pavement or flat earth. Not just because it's more difficult but because it's harder to think about other things because it's more difficult. Reading this you too might find the author's advocating for "full emptiness" and marches off into the wild as "total bullshit". During a walk in the countryside outside of the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, Kagge spoke of the importance of walking "without thinking". That all sounds more easily said than done, I replied. Is it even possible to clear your mind of thoughts? Humans are social creatures. Being accessible can be a good thing. We are unable to function alone. Yet it’s important to be able to turn off your phone, sit down, not say anything, shut your eyes, breathe deeply a couple of times and attempt to think about something other than what you are normally thinking about. When you’ve invested a lot of time in being accessible and keeping up with what’s happening, it’s easy to conclude that it all has a certain value, even if what you have done might not be important. This is called rationalization. The New York Review of Books labeled the battle between producers of apps “the new opium wars,” and the paper claims that “marketers have adopted addiction as an explicit commercial strategy.” The only difference is that the pushers aren’t peddling a product that can be smoked in a pipe, but rather is ingested via sugar-coated apps.

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Silence, Kagge emphasizes, is not simply the absence of noise, but a "full emptiness, a stillness of the mind."

My children hardly pause any more. They are always accessible, and almost always busy. “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself,” wrote the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The three of them tend to sit in front of a screen – whether alone or together with others. I do it too. Become engulfed in my smartphone, enslave myself to my own tablet – as a consumer and at times as a producer. I am constantly interrupted, interruptions engendered by other interruptions. I rummage around in a world that has little to do with me. Attempt to be effective until I realise I won’t get any further regardless of how effective I’ve become. It feels like trying to find your way through fog on a mountain, without a compass at hand, and ending up walking around in circles. The goal is to be busy and effective, nothing else. They are still curious, but their faces are not as childish, more adult, and their heads are now filled with more ambitions than questions. None of them had any interest in discussing the subject of silence, so, to invoke it, I told them about two friends of mine who had decided to climb Mount Everest. Of course, Heidegger could not have predicted the possibilities offered by current technology. He was thinking about cars of 50 horsepower, film projectors and punch-card machines, which were all the rage. But he had an inkling of what might come.)

Silence can take many shapes. To the insomniac, silence can be an enemy. While the noise of technology and the devices we surround ourselves with can keep us from sleep, quiet can also weigh heavily on an active mind. When he was young, Kagge describes a sleep disrupted by silence. “I lay there in my cot, tormented by silence,” he writes. “It was like having a nightmare and being awake at the same time.” In the 2007 film "Noise", Tim Robbins plays David Owen, a Manhattan man so fed up with the noise of the city that he takes it upon himself to "rectify" the situation. He soon gains a popular following and a moniker, "The Rectifier", to go with it. At the risk of giving too much away, Owen eventually comes to the realization that vandalizing every car in the city is a slow way to go about achieving any lasting peace and quiet and instead decides to make some, ahem, noise, by campaigning for an anti-noise ballot initiative. Kagge’s book is most powerful when he is writing about what might seem, paradoxically, like the noisier parts of life: his adventures as an explorer. Kagge was the first person to reach all three of the earth’s “poles” (the third being the summit of Mt. Everest), and his book describes his adventures in each of these extreme destinations as well as some of his urban explorations in New York City. The author’s experiences allow him to compare the silence at the top of the highest mountain on Earth with that experienced in the depths of New York City’s sewage system.