The Multitude of Words and the Limits Thereof: Or, A Semi-Scrooge-ish Christmas Meditation

Jan 2

… sometimes the noise of the world today seems like the mere buzzing of insects on the broad back of silence.

—Max Picard, The World of Silence

Far be it from me or anyone else during these twelve days of Christmas to put the kibosh on conviviality. (Farther be it from any Carrie Nation wannabe to go around censoriously counting cocktails.) Let wit and banter flow like oil down the beard of Aaron; let jocularity erupt like geysers. In fine: let there be feasting and merry-making. Christmas wasn’t over on the morning of the 26th. It was just beginning.

But even as there’s a certain polarity that governs human thought as much as it governs human affairs—consider, à propos of the above, the rhythms of fasting and feasting, of Advent and Nativity, of things as quotidian as sleep and wakefulness—so too on the flipside of conversation, which, make no mistake, is the sine qua non of friendship, there is an opposing and altogether necessary silence, the proper limit to talk and to the world’s ubiquitous noise.

You needn’t look high and low to find the enemies of silence, and you need do little more than hit the mute button during, say, the pre-game hype, or post-game interviews, or especially the “news.” That is but one way to expose the idiotic earnestness and irrelevance that are the hallmarks of TV’s talking heads. (Another way is simply to listen to their inanities, but that’s less pleasant and not nearly as funny.)

We have, indeed, a whole class of chatterers who have convinced themselves and many of us that they actually have securely in their possession the very thing they manifestly lack: something to say. And, to make matters worse, they are at great lengths to articulate these stupendous nothings.

When in any given news cycle you compare what happened to what was said in advance of its happening—take, for example, a general election—you will be obliged to conclude that most of what was said didn’t need saying and that it left no dent whatsoever. The chatter was all bluster filling the yawning emptiness of life, an emptiness that quietude, if allowed, could easily fill to bursting. Worse: the chatter was all a thinly disguised delivery system for advertisers, whose job is never to take a breath. As Max Picard said (in 1948!), “there is something hard and obstinate in language today, as though it were making a great effort to remain alive in spite of its emptiness.”

It was in fact the post-election chatter that got me wondering whether you could quantify the needless noise. What percentage of all talk is entirely unnecessary? The answer will vary with man and mode. If you’re an AM Talk Radio host you’re probably obliged to put the number at zero. Everything you say is necessary; everything you say will change history and alter planetary motion—even though none of it could make a leaf fall in hurricane. I have a brother who’s a monk (I sometimes call him Fra Taciturn), and I’m guessing his answer would be about 95%, maybe more. I’d put it at at least seventy-five—and I say that as someone who lectures for a living.

And that pernicious device ironically called the “smart phone,” which in the final accounting—if we ever undertake it—will prove to have been a clear and present evil, has turned every thought into noise aborning. You can see the rapid recognition play out on the facial theaters of all those phone addicts: “I have a thought (or ‘thought’); someone must hear of it now.” Out comes the rectangular tyrant to drive silence into hiding. And pretty much none of the talk matters. At all. Exactly what kind of desperate creature finds the slogan “unlimited talk” appealing and then shucks out actually money for it?

Samson had nothing on us. Every day, day after day, the jawbone of an ass commits a thousand atrocities.

Against this we have always had available the Wisdom of Solomon. You may doubt, as I do, the advisability of having 700 wives. (Think of all those mothers-in-law when, clearly, one and only one is sufficient to the day’s sorrows.) But that troubled and almost certainly henpecked king could occasionally deliver a zinger. Consider this: “In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise.” That’s how the AV (1611) renders the proverb. The Geneva Bible (1560) is close: “In many words there cannot want iniquity: but he that refraineth his lips, is wise.”

(“Sin” is the operative. If you’re prone to gossip or slander or prevarication, then not talking is a strategy you might consider.)

It is maybe a marker of entropy to see the proverb rendered in an ever-declining and debased language. The New International Version, one of the most artless translations ever to assault the ear of man, puts half of the quip in the passive voice: “Sin is not ended by multiplying words.” In the ironically named Good News and Living Bibles we get, respectively, “The more you talk, the more likely you are to sin. If you are wise, you will keep quiet” and “Don’t talk so much. You keep putting your foot in your mouth. Be sensible and turn off the flow!”

But even in these Chicken-Soup renditions something of the original point remains. And even if you missed it, do not despair. Nineteen chapters later we read, “A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards.”

Why, unless you are a fool, would you utter all your mind? At least count to ten. If Solomon is to be trusted, the more you yammer the more damage you’ll do. The more bullets in the magazine the more likely the AR will kill. And what, after all, are the members of the chattering classes but flesh-and-blood assault rifles spraying willing targets? What but WMDs in make-up?

Not that the make-up helps. Even the leggy ones are noisy, ugly, and, in at least two senses of the word, offensive. Who can attend to televised news and not long for the silence of the ocean floor or a death like Major Tom’s?

How salutary would it be if whole populations learned how to operate on-off switches, whether external or internal? We need not be afraid of silence simply because it is eager, like nature herself, to fill the vacuums it abhors. Silence is not nothing; it is a very full something.

The snark will point out the irony of my spending several hundred words in defense of using fewer of them. It should be pretty clear by now that I’m not one to take issue with irony. But some people won’t shut up unless you tell them to. I say that as someone whose mother raised him not to say the words “shut up.” I also say that as someone who with hard work and determination has overcome the less agreeable aspects of his pious upbringing.

* * *

Think back to the spring of 2021. It was certainly a dark time. Petty tyrants were trying to get a feel for how compliant we all might prove to be. But even as we found ourselves stripped of basic liberties, nevertheless for a time, albeit brief, things were much quieter. For example, no cars raced up and down my country road for several days; there were no jets roaring across the sky above. My little farm, my whole world, as it were, was quieter then, and for its stillness it was much better. It’s a damn shame we needed the one-two punch of mass hysteria and governmental overreach to show us what less noise and more stillness sound like.

But soon we were back to the noise and yammering and the vibrations in our pockets and purses. What was so intolerable about the silence? Why were we so disquieted within? What, if left alone with himself, is a man afraid he will find?

At a conference once I stepped outside and found a woman, another conferee, sitting on a bench. She’d left the chatterers behind. The sky was clear, the sun warm. She wore a scarf. It covered her hairless head. It was clear to anyone who might notice that she was a cancer patient, which is to say her death sentence was more immediate to her than, say, mine was to me. For we all live with a death sentence.

She sat as wise as a house plant, which is to say with her face turned toward the sun. Her eyes were shut, and there was a faint smile on her lips. Her countenance was nearly beatific. She had turned off the noise to bask in what she knew she had limited time and too few remaining opportunities to enjoy. Her little silent world was a place worth inhabiting and defending. It was the kind of world a god might even come down and die for.

The story of a dying God: that’s the sort of thing that the days between Christmas and Theophany—the twelve days, like in that annoying song—set in motion. Again, I’d be the first to forbid the glum and dour from imposing their tenebrous wills on our merry-making. But lordy. Once we get Jesus into the Jordan, how about we give limited instead of unlimited talk a try?

Jason Peters joined Hillsdale’s faculty in the fall of 2021 after spending 25 years at Augustana College, where he was Dorothy J. Parkander Professor in Literature.