Just peace: quiet places
Already as a child I was fascinated by silence. If I felt like it, I ran to the wild meadow with the apple trees behind our house. There was, hidden in the woods, this shady cave. Or there was the beach not far away, a narrow bay of the Baltic Sea. Before and after the bathing season they were often left alone. Silence was just there, like air to breathe. And best of all, I could choose to be alone on the water - or romp with friends, play games, laugh, be hilarious. A few years later, as a teenager, I danced to music in the summer nights, which was turned up all the way. Then, on the way home, we sometimes went to the beach. Sat there, tired, happy, looking into the rising sun. Disco off, silence on.
As long as we can choose what we need, everything is fine. But can we still choose today, in the city, in this never completely disappearing noise ball out loud and quiet? Rattling Vespas, booming vices, cooing doves. Rush hour early and late, screaming stop and go in front of each traffic light. The cozy evenings on the balcony, which I used to love, have grown louder year by year. With the windows open you can hardly sleep without ear plugs. But the knubbel soft things have a disadvantage: they filter away any noise. And so we listen, shielded from the outside, through foam into our body, hear how from afar beat the heart, grumble the stomach. Strange.
Real silence, on the other hand, is different. Acousticians say it starts below 40 decibels - and not, as you might think, at zero decibels. Such an absolute silence we would not be able to endure, would be isolated, as cut off from life. No, pleasant silence consists of soft, soothing and steady sounds. Like then, in the bay of my childhood. Splashing waves. Treetops in the wind, a whirring insect.
Silent places: City people can only dream of that
We city people can only dream of it. Experts estimate that every fifth European inhabitant is exposed to noise levels that doctors consider hazardous to health. Excavators, rollers, jackhammers, on countless construction sites booming and rattling it. There are also noise sources that did not exist in the past. Music sound while shopping, cell phone terror everywhere. Right now you occupy your window seat in the ICE, looking forward to passing landscapes - there placed Mr. Important with mobile phone on the ear directly behind us, and we participate in his last meeting, the course of which he tells loudly Schwäbisch his assistant. Radio advertising is bellowed instead of spoken, alarm systems flash for no reason, airplanes start every minute. Worst of all, there are the endless columns of cars and trucks, the normal road traffic.
Sometimes we wish we had earlobes, they could just close like our eyes. Because noise makes you permanently ill, several studies in recent years prove that. What our early ancestors used - even at night their ears warned them of dangers - has bad consequences for us: even in our sleep, our body perceives every noise and responds to it. with restlessness, stress, tachycardia. Chronic noise, such as on a multi-lane road, is now regarded as a trigger for many diseases: thyroid and metabolic disorders, hearing damage and tinnitus, weakened immune defense and asthma, even heart attack and cancer. Women have been shown to be more sensitive to noise than men, older people more sensitive than boys.
And construction workers? They have to wear headphones from 85 decibels, their jackhammer growls at 100. However, many teachers may need hearing protection: in classrooms a noise level rages by 85 decibels, in physical education up to 112 decibels. Man remembers the sense of smell, wrote Marcel Proust. I am sure: he also remembers the ear. Presumably, every noise is stored in our cells - with what consequences, no one knows.
But is it only about physical health when we long for silence? Is not it about more, something like - mental balance? After all, there must be reasons for the sages to seek silence at all times, in all religions. The philosopher Wilhelm Schmid writes about her motive: "The vastness that opens up in silence relativises all time, even the time of one's own finitude." The inner view opens up beyond the day and one's own life. " Outer silence, so the expectation, will lead to inner silence. To contemplation, a more intense form of perception, reflection and insight.
Inner width. The thoughts come and go, undisturbed, in the river. And maybe, with a bit of practice, at some point the moment when we stop thinking and forget ourselves.Habitare secum - living with themselves, monks say to this meditative state.
Today, many may have become strangers to this spiritual quest for silence. Maybe because the opportunity is missing? A loss, as the filmmaker Philip Groening confirmed. For the documentary "The Great Silence" he spent almost six months with the Carthusian monks in the monastery of La Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps and also kept to their silence commandment, which is broken only once a week on a walk. You can see the movie in the cinema, and in the beginning it will be easy to patience - so unfamiliar is it to fall out of the normal world in this 160 minute silence. But then one succumbs more and more to the meditative pull of the pictures, pricks up the ears for the silence, gets an idea of the power that lies in it (see interview).
But this kind of silence can almost only be found in the monastery. Or on the edges of the world: in the desert, on the shores of a deep fjord, in winter on a snowy forest clearing. Is silence the greatest luxury of our time? It almost seems like that.
It could be even worse, as in the story of Heinrich Böll entitled "Air in cans or on the budget of the earth": There is silence only in containers that you buy in the supermarket and holds to your ear. Amazing: The story comes from the sixties, which seem heavenly calm from today's perspective. And yet Böll lamented the loss of silence. As in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant, who was annoyed by the crowing cock in front of the philosopher's house. In the end, according to the anecdote, he bought the troublemaker, sizzled him and ate it up.
Silence costs money
Excavators, cars, cell phones can not be eaten. Who wants silence today, has to pay for it, one way or another, with money - seven days retreat for 2000 euros - or with resignation. But who does that already: cell phone, TV, turn off the radio or even abolish it? Who takes the time to go to a "room of silence", at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin or at Hamburg Central Station? Of course, here too it is never quite quiet, for example at the station you can hear the rolling of the trains. But the wonderful thing is that nobody says anything. Silence also means silence. No chatter, no cell phone, no music. Only a haiku on the wall: "Nothing but silence. Deep in the rocks digs cry of cicadas."
And in our everyday life, where do we still find silence? Probably it is with her as with happiness: You meet her in moments and rather unexpectedly. Last winter, for example, it often snowed night after night, and those who got up early saw a carpet of snow-white silence, untouched, swallowing even the city's familiar roar.
But it was the quietest on this tiny Greek island, discovered by chance on a sailing trip. In the village high up on the hill no one was out in the street at lunchtime, not even a cat, the dazzling white houses lay sluggish, as if deserted. Through a wall opening, the view fell into the blue, on the horizon, the sea and sky flowed into each other as a light line. One almost guessed the rounding of the globe there. Later we stood for a long time in the cool of a chapel, the canopy above us glowing aquamarine. Perhaps one not only learns to hear more intensively in the silence, but also to see more deeply? Sea view outside. Sea view inside.
The whole walk, back down the mountain to the small harbor, we have remained silent. It was a dumb agreement not to break him, the magic of silence.
Interview: "Silence dispels fear"
What do we long for when we long for silence? The director of the movie "The Great Silence", Philip Groening, 47, has lived in the Silent Abbey for half a year and found his answer.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Mr. Groening, how did the "great silence" feel? Do you get used to it, days, weeks - or have you missed your "normal" life?
Philip Groening: It was a gradual growth, in stages. In the beginning, I often felt sad when questions came up: how do I deal with my life, what have I failed or possibly done wrong? Otherwise we bypass these questions by dealing with mobile phones, computers, film and television, music and so on. Without all the distractions, you literally sink. And then something great happened one day: all thought stopped, it just fell away.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: And what came instead? Honestly, I can not really imagine that. ..
Groening: Thinking, forging plans, asking questions, all of this is for us humans in concepts, words, and language; If it completely falls away in our environment, the thoughts eventually disappear. A kind of empty space arises in us, and what appears on it gets a deeper meaning: the call of a bird, the frog's choir in the morning, the view from the window in the change of the seasons, a cup of steaming tea, the smile of another.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Silence awakens and sharpens all senses?
Groening: Yes, exactly. And things themselves get a glowing aura, almost becoming a kind of counterpart.The light that falls on the table begins to develop a presence that otherwise escapes. For me as a filmmaker were the moments of happiness: because I now saw pictures that I had never seen before. And I sensed: Everything I see here, be it the light or a drinking glass, exists with me, with us, now at the beginning of the 21st century. In such moments I felt lifted in the world, felt an almost childlike sense of security.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Does one not have to be very strict believers for such a feeling, like the Carthusian monks?
Groening: No, I too have a different concept of God than the monks. But I understand the idea behind the life in the Schweigkloster. After all, the contemplative orders are not justified by social services or work, but they seek to find and find closeness to God in inner and outer silence. This basic idea belongs to the roots of our Christian culture, of all cultures, often for millennia. Only we today, who are constantly communicating, almost forgot that.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: But it still works?
Groening: At least that was my experience. In the same process of the days, time lost its weight, I no longer asked: And tomorrow? I believe that when you empty yourself from everything, you create a space in which you can not fail to see what lies behind the world. A kind of divine energy. It is easier to accept that there are questions that we can not answer. At the same time comes the beautiful feeling of a comprehensive correctness of what happens. This dispels all fears that burden us otherwise.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Also the fear of illness or unemployment?
Groening: That too. And even the deeper, hidden in the subconscious fears, which are widespread in our Western world. We live here with many supposed freedoms, plan our lives from start to finish, and at the same time have to be happy. These are often overwhelming freedoms that generate these fears. The monks live in silence, in the natural process of time, they do not question it. This results in another form of freedom, one without fear - and you can feel it in the film as well.
