Creativity Needs Silence

I’m sorry I’ve lost the attribution for this quote — if anyone can help me here, I’d be grateful.  Meanwhile, I thank the nameless writer for some important thoughts about what we need to start paying attention to.

Hello chatter, my old friend.

The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.

As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.

As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.

There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.”

“In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of silence because people are so filled up now with streaming video,” said Ed Schlossberg, the artist, author and designer who runs ESI Design. “Paying attention to anything will be the missing commodity in future life. You think you’ll miss nothing, but you’ll probably miss everything.”

Photo by Coral Jewell

 

 

About SSH

Philadelphia native and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell, Shaw Homer has lived in Costa Rica for over 30 years, where she has taught languages and worked for environmental NGOs. In addition to writing for the local press, her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in both print and on-line literary and travel journals, as well as on her blog, writingfromtheheart.net. Her travel memoir, Letters from the Pacific, received excellent Kirkus and Publishers Weekly reviews. Her most recent book is Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica. She and all her books can be found at www.sandrahomer.com.

3 thoughts on “Creativity Needs Silence

  1. SSH says:

    Thanks to my friend, author Erin Van Rheenen, for the instant discovery of the author of the above citation: Maureen Dowd, one of my favorite New York Times commentators, in December, 2011.

    • Allyson Latta says:

      Wonderful quote, Sandy. Thank you! It fits well with the theme of workshops I’ll be leading soon on the art of creative attention for writers.

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