Turning Off to Tune In

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The mesmeric Manchester band New Order captured the spirit of a quiet epiphany at the end of a day when they sang:

Tonight I think I'll walk alone; I'll find my soul as I go home.

Robert Frost’s finest poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, also portrays such a moment of stillness when it’s possible to see reality with a fresh sharpness:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

An essential element of such experiences is silence, when the wallpaper of noise which surrounds us is ripped away.

In the Welsh capital there seems to be a conspiracy to stamp out the possibility of silence.

The organisers of the London 2012 Olympics have erected a giant television screen which from 7am to 11pm splurges out noise and images.

This Blade Runner-style monstrosity could be a propaganda exercise to make Wales forget it is set to lose – according to Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones – £100m in Lottery funding and spin-offs due to the gushing of spending on the Games.

But this is not the only sensory assault. Many of the capital’s buses now have intermittent connections to the BBC News channel. The sound and pictures cut in and out and a strange audio soup of snippets fills the bus: “Kosovo... high street spending... Britney Spears... Robert Peston.”

A city in the moments before it wakes up or in the hours after the shops have closed used to be a place to think with clarity – somewhere the mind could breath.

Yet today we are trapped in a mesh of noise which frazzles our thoughts and stultifies the imagination.

The poet Christina Rossetti noted: “Silence is more musical than any song.”

And one of the most marvellous moments in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is when Uma Thurman tells the enigmatic hitman over dinner: “That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just [shut up] for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.”

Quaker schools and colleges continue to celebrate “moments of silence” as a way to still the heart and prepare the mind. Britain pauses to commemorate disasters, but we should take opportunities to press “mute” more often in our schools and workplaces.

Thomas Merton, a fabulous monk, said: “Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.”

The jibber and jabber of City jargon disguised the fact our banking system has the internal consistency of thrice-boiled spaghetti. The stripping away of vacuous noise may help form a society capable of recognising truth when it sees it – and that would be something to talk about.