The precious treasure that resides in silence

Based on the testimony of contemporaries it seems that the first thing Socrates taught his pupils was silence. It was the necessary condition for listening to oneself, for that permanent inner dialogue, that introspective gaze which can lead man to self-discovery. He gave an example of this when, as his pupil Alcibiades recounts, on the eve of the expedition of Potidaea he remained motionless in the camp, from morning until the following dawn, to meditate. The intuition that a precious treasure resides in silence runs through history and finds multiple expressions in the ancient world, reflected in the words of Pythagoras who said to his disciples “Learn to be silent; let your mind, quiet, listen and learn”, as well as in the incisive recommendation of Sophocles: “Child, shut up: silence is full of beautiful things”. In a context dominated by noise, in which gossip dominates words, media confusion weakens reflective thinking, the functional dimension replaces the contemplative one, superficiality is rampant on television and on social media, so the words of a student become representative of a era: “Prof, I’m afraid of silence”. I had asked the class for more attentive silence than usual, but this admission of disarming candor already laid the foundations for an unexpected dialogue. Later, in a book by the explorer Erling Kagge (Il silence, Einaudi, 2017) I would find the report of a study that highlighted the great discomfort – in some cases unbearable – manifested by people left alone, in a room, for a few minutes : “When you are silent and alone, you become restless”, observes the author, emphasizing what Blaise Pascal summed up four centuries earlier: “All man’s unhappiness derives from his inability to stay in peace his room alone.” The horror vacui that contemporary man struggles to face, door ajar on a seldom frequented interiority, finds an analgesic solution in the culture of noise, in the city overflowing with voices, haste, confusion. It is the disturbance that Franco Loi mentions in one of his writings (Il silence, Mimesis, 2012), when he reports the simple but significant confidence made to him by the manager of a hotel immersed in the countryside: “You know, many people leave as soon as they they notice the silence that surrounds them”.