One Time, One Meeting

Speech after long silence; it is right.

–W.B. Yeats

Scott Russell Sanders (b. 1945) is a distinguished American essayist and the author of more than twenty books, most recently The Way of Imagination (Counterpoint, 2020). A writer with no declared religious affiliation but deeply spiritual inclinations, he has brought a searching, moral perspective to subjects as diverse as art, marriage, parenthood, community, the natural world, and, of late, environmental peril. And in two of his most personal and affecting essays, he has engaged the dual, contrapuntal themes of silence and speech, stillness and activity, solitude and social interaction. Though written long before the pandemic, these penetrating essays could hardly be more relevant to our present time.

            In “Silence” Sanders recounts his visit to a Quaker service. The setting is the meeting house of the North Meadow Circle of Friends in Indianapolis, a “frowsy, good-natured space,” where he “sank into stillness” and explored the “absence of human noise,” “below the babble of thought.” In prose as unadorned as its subject, he describes an interior silence so deep that he could hear the blood beating in his ears. Contrasting the austerities of Quaker worship with the “scripted performances” of other, larger churches in the area, he confesses his motives for coming to this one: to escape from the “human racket” and “the obsessive human story” and to meet “the nameless mystery at the core of being.” During the hour and a half he spends in quietude, he indeed descends into the depths of silence. He “touches bottom,” or seems to. Yet he also wonders whether what he has reached is the ground of being or “only the floor of [his] private psyche.”

            Whichever it might have been, Sanders’ dive into the depths of self and silence is abruptly curtailed when an elder rises to speak. Soon afterward, this same man extends his hand to the person next to him, a signal that the service has ended. There follows a period of socializing, in which the twelve people present, Sanders included, share personal anecdotes and reflect on their recent experience. Laughter ensues, and the air is “filled with talk.” At this point, the tenor of Sanders’ essay also abruptly shifts, becoming lighter, warmer, and more relational. What began as a solemn meditation on the experience of silence becomes something more complex: a dynamic study of silence and speech, introspection and social interaction.

            Something analogous occurs in “Stillness,” a later essay, although the setting is distinctly different. In this essay Sanders recalls a period of solitude spent in his newly built studio, a twelve-by-fifteen-foot cedar hut situated between a meadow and a woods. In this instance his motive was not so much to escape external human noise but to “cast off worry and grief,” collect himself, and dwell in the present. Watching dust particles floating in the sunlight, he likens their “Brownian motion” to the “mad rush” of his daily life, the unceasing professional activity driven, he concludes, by guilt, fear, and a desire to “stave off death.” Calming himself through conscious breathing, he reflects on the “wild energy” common to nature and himself. “My breath and the clouds,” he acknowledges, “ride the same wind.”

            As in “Silence,” this encounter with contemplative solitude comes to an abrupt end, as Sanders steps outside his hermitage to watch the flight of a pair of red-tailed hawks. Back in the world, as it were, and awaiting the arrival of his wife, he recognizes his urgent need for relationship. “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, and I’m eager for company. . . . I long to hold my children and catch up on their lives. I want to share food with friends. I want to sit with my students and talk over the ancient questions. I want to walk among crowds at the farmers’ market and run my hands over the melons and apples and squash.”

            Sanders’ realization of these natural human desires, occasioned and amplified by his experience of solitude, may strike a chord with those of us who have endured more than a year of curtailments, restrictions, and social isolation in the service of the common good. We, too, have longed to share food with friends, hold our distant loved ones, and walk, unmasked, in the farmers’ market. Concluding his essay, Sanders speaks of carrying “back into [his] ordinary days a sense of the stillness that gathers into the shape of a life, scatters into fragments, and then gathers again.”  Perhaps we, too, who have suffered the absence of normal human relationships and activities, can carry back into our ordinary days whatever insights, wisdom, and renewed appreciation we may have acquired during our many months apart. Speech after long silence; it is right.

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Scott Russell Sanders, “Silence,” The Force of Spirit (Beacon, 2000), 151-164.

Scott Russell Sanders, “Stillness,” A Conversationist Manifesto (Indiana, 2009), 195-20.

Photo: Scott Russell Sanders