Review by Choice Review
In her remarkable Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (CH, Feb'11, 48-3243), Brox studied the history of visible indoor illumination and the impact of illumination on individuals and society. Brox now takes up the impact of enforced auditory silence on individual and social development. The primary loci of her historical study are the prison and the monastery--both places that hold, in some measures, to the benefits of imposed silence. In particular she looks at the practice of silence in Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary prison (from its initial founding in 1929) and in the Gesthsemani Trappist monastery (the monastery of Thomas Merton) in Kentucky. Brox studies both the specific ways in which these practices of silence were imposed and the thinking that was meant to justify their use. She concludes by considering both the beneficial and the detrimental aspects of enforced silence in various aspects of contemporary life. Both readable and scholarly, this volume is replete with historical documentation. Summing Up: Essential. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers. --James C. Swindal, Duquesne University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Ours is A noisy country. We've been rebellious, insolent shouters since the beginning. We invent freak shows and circuses and casinos. Talk too loud. Our public spaces honk and whistle at us. We believe ourselves stars just awaiting a stage. We're a people, Walt Whitman crooned, "singing, with open mouths," our "strong melodious songs." We chew with open mouths, too - we're without pretense or much regard for personal space. Our latest, greatest gift to the world is a computer for your pocket that chatters at you all day long. And then there's the past two years: political and technological churn, offense and outrage. Noise incarnate. It would be easy to forget, especially these days, that American DNA contains another trait - though clearly a recessive one: the desire to disappear. There's Thoreau's pond and Kerouac's road and Cheryl Strayed's Pacific Crest Trail, places that couldn't be farther away from Times Square. There's the silent man (it's almost always a man) who must go off alone to discover himself, lose himself, away from the noise, sailing down the Mississippi on a raft. "1 am reduced to my irreducible self," the poet and essayist Wendell Berry wrote in "An Entrance to the Woods," after camping alone along Kentucky's Red River Gorge. "As 1 leave the bare expanse of the rock and go in under the trees again, 1 am aware that 1 move in the landscape as one of its details." Are we still capable of such smallness? The minuscule human figures in a Thomas Cole painting, dwarfed by overwhelming mountains and an engulfing sky, once embodied an American ideal, the purposeful melting away of individuality in order to attain some higher awareness, or to join in a collective or simply to find space to think. With our societal volume dial turned all the way up (and possibly broken), so many of us overexposed and all too present, does quiet any longer have this pull, or does it just make us itch for our phones? And if we can still shut our eyes and cover our ears, become details of the landscape, should we? Is it morally acceptable at this moment? What's waiting for us beyond the noise if we try? Two new books on the value of invisibility and silence seem like a clever bit of counterprogramming. Coming upon them was like finding the Advil bottle in the medicine cabinet after stumbling about with a headache for a long time. They are both, perhaps purposefully, slow reads. They demand patience from addled minds primed to see such subject matter as a result of subtraction, the blank pages between chapters. Akiko Busch, the author of "How to Disappear," a collection of essays, disputes this premise. For her, invisibility is not simply a negative, the inverse of visibility. Going unseen, undetected, overlooked: These are experiences with their own inherent "meaning and power"; what we need is a "field guide" for recognizing them. And this is what Busch offers, roaming from essay to essay in a loose, associative style, following invisibility where it takes her - from childhood and the comfort of imaginary friends to middle age and the feeling of disappearing as a sexual object: a sensation, she argues, that can form the basis of a new, and positive, form of selfhood. She regards some contemporary art, like Cindy Sherman's distorted self-portraits and Alec Soth's "Unselfies," as signals of our deep desire to smudge our identities and keep them at least partly hidden. One essay considers the "improvisational choreography" of rush hour in Grand Central Terminal, the crowd a thing of pleasure to get lost in, she writes, our pace "quickening and slowing in sync with those around us." Inconspicuousness can be powerful - this may be Busch's most radical point, especially at a moment when we're conditioned to think power means yelling louder than everyone else in your Twitter feed, or showing the world on fnstagram how you're living your best life. Consider the arctic fox or the Indonesian crab, animals that deploy camouflage to survive. For them, "becoming invisible is not the equivalent of being nonexistent," Busch writes. "Invisibility is a strategy for attracting a mate, protecting home and habitat, hunting and defense. Camouflage in the natural world is not some exotic and picturesque trait, ft is nuanced, creative, sensitive, discerning." Humans use it in this way, too. In one essay Busch goes scuba diving and makes her best case for giving invisibility more room in our lives. Underwater, she is enchanted by the sensation of being completely ignored: "Forty feet beneath the surface, the striped parrotfish are oblivious to me. The yellowtail damselfish and flurry of silversides couldn't be less interested." This feeling of superfluousness combined with weightlessness and the meditative sound of her own breathing allow her to hold her ego at an arm's length: "We all know that sensation of life slowing down, of being suspended in time, of being outside the rhythm of ordinary life, but underwater, that is the way things really are." As much as anyone else, 1 fantasize about checking out. 1 would love to remove the pinging notifications from my days, for my mind to wander without being thrown askew by each incoming tweet. But visions of total unplugging also seem a bit grotesque. Think of Erik Hagerman, a former corporate executive at Nike, who decided shortly after the 2016 election to blockade the outside world, rigorously avoiding all news as if it might kill him. A New York Times profile last year followed him to a cafe where he plugged into white noise and read only the weather report. He watched basketball games on mute. His life seemed sad and lonely, not exhilarating. His decision to disengage was also, particularly now, the height of irresponsibility, an abdication of that most basic duty of citizenship : staying informed. Or consider the unnamed protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh's recent novel, "My Year of Rest and Relaxation," who decides to take enough drugs to, literally, sleep for a year: "If 1 kept going, 1 thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream." But there is nothing hopeful about her hibernation, ft is the act of a vacuous narcissist. How much silence is too much? Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who was among the most influential Catholic thinkers of the 20 th century, pondered this question intently. What drew him to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky was the opportunity for a life of quiet contemplation. His greatest fantasy, he wrote, was "to deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light." When his popularity as an author made it more difficult to achieve solitude, he retreated even further, living for long stretches by himself in a toolshed in the hills of the monastery grounds. But the world intruded, particularly in the 1950s and '60s, as the Cold War ramped up and a nuclear standoff seemed imminent. He began to wonder whether the life he had constructed for himself, so sustaining to his soul, justified the disengagement. Merton's dilemma is central to Jane Brox's "Silence," her meditation on the pain and the joy of being quiet. "When is silence power?" Brox imagines Merton asking himself. "When is it an accomplice to fear?" Merton did not want to contribute to what he repeatedly called the "noise" of American society ("the noise of slogans or the repetition of clichés"; "the amplified noise of beasts"). But he also knew it wasn't right to ignore his own stake in the world's problems. What he sought instead was a "genuine and deep communication," one achieved, he insisted, only through a continuous recharging in silence. The very element that might seem to make us bad citizens or antisocial is at the same time a prerequisite for thoughtfulness and more profound connection with others. Since most of us can't yo-yo in and out of solitude (despite the meditation apps that promise to help us do just that), we have to live with this paradox. If in her book Busch meanders, pulling from her array of examples a generally positive appraisal of invisibility, Brox hunkers down in two institutions dominated by the absence of noise - prison and the monastery - and leaves us with a much more ambiguous sense of silence: oppressive under certain conditions, liberating under others. For her prison, she chooses Eastern State, opened in 1829 just outside Philadelphia as a new, idealistic sort of penitentiary dreamed up by Benjamin Rush, a reformer and friend of Benjamin Franklin, who wanted to deploy solitude as a means to redemption. Brox alternates sections on the prison's history with ones on the medieval order of Cistercian monks, who structured their lives around silence, which they too saw as a means to redemption. These two settings, scrutinized intensely, present silence as many textured. The inmates of Eastern State were condemned to individual cells, with only a small window in the barrel-vaulted ceiling letting in a circle of sky - a design thought to be a vast improvement over the prisons of the day, crowded and disorderly spaces associated with violence. Everything was done to avoid sound. The wheels of the meal carts were covered in leather and guards wore socks over their shoes. This silence, meant to be restorative, became destructive. Although the inmates left little record of their time there, Charles Dickens, who took a tour in 1842, deemed the enforced silence "immeasurably worse than any torture of the body." Brox also quotes an eloquent inmate of the Soviet gulag, Eugenia Ginzburg, on the sensation of an annihilating quiet: "The silence thickened, became tangible and stifling. Depression attacked not only the mind but the whole body. Even my hair seemed to bristle with despair. I would have given anything to have heard just one sound." Contrast this with Merton, for whom total silence is the prerequisite for real thinking, for communion with God. "1 had entered into a solitude that was an impregnable fortress. And the silence that enfolded me, spoke to me, and spoke louder and more eloquently than any voice." Brox writes beautifully about the silence woven through daily tasks and between prayers in the medieval monastery, its varying qualities and duration, sometimes "as brief as a handful of heartbeats." Silence for her is a force of nature, awe provoking, like lightning, capable of electrocuting us and of illuminating the night. But her tone is also elegiac. She speaks of these spaces where silence reigned as now being in ruins, both the monasteries and the prisons. (As for the estimated 80,000 inmates currently in solitary confinement, Brox reports that they are likely to hear not silence but near-constant screaming, banging and shouting.) In our own lives, achieving silence feels so hard that people pay good money to float in sensory deprivation tanks. Even the underwater idyll that Busch enjoys is at risk - the oceans have apparently become so noisy with the sound of tanker traffic and air guns that it's causing chronic stress in whales. There's not much mention in either of these books about Eastern religions like Buddhism or Taoism and their ideas about dissolving the ego. Even our homegrown Transcendentalism doesn't appear. At first these seemed like strange omissions. But Busch and Brox aren't interested in abstractions and philosophizing. Silence and invisibility, they insist, are part of our everyday lives - the place our mind wanders when we're in the shower or out jogging, the feeling we get looking out the window of an airplane, the pleasure of becoming a stranger on a bustling city street. We take these pauses, these moments of exhalation, for granted, but we should clutch them close. They are our armor against the onslaught. Gal beckerman is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Brox (Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, 2010) approaches the social history of silence from an obvious (in retrospect) and significant place: solitary confinement in America's prison system. Her disturbing history of Eastern State Penitentiary, near Philadelphia, a facility designed and built with the complete silence of its inmates as a central tenet, will stun readers with its Founding Father origins and far-reaching consequences. Gracefully shifting from that dark and desperate locale, Brox moves to the sustaining silence embraced by American Trappist monk, activist, and writer Thomas Merton, then turns to the historical use of enforced silence as punishment against women. With each skillful shift in her narrative, Brox reveals how easily silence has been woven into society, where it is used alternately as weapon and balm. Her ability to juxtapose prisons and monasteries, fear and peace is remarkable, and her graceful prose, which appears effortless, draws upon a wealth of research. This is history at its most effective: elegant, essential, and provocative. Those with an interest in prison reform should be particularly drawn to these thought-provoking pages.--Colleen Mondor Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from Brox (Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light) is a gently meandering meditation that juxtaposes monastic and prison silence and solitude to explore silence's positive and negative aspects, both of which provide "a path to inner life, to beauty and observation and appreciation." Prison silence and solitude were intended to disorient and discourage community, Brox writes, and many prisoners in solitary confinement suffered mental health consequences, while others noted improvements in concentration and recall. Monastic silence, on the other hand, was meant to emphasize the majesty of the Catholic Mass and shrink attachment to ego. Yet hermit monk Thomas Merton explicitly acknowledged silence could be a tool of fear, control, and hatred, and chafed against his religious order's command to refrain from publishing. Where one might expect a neat binarism between restorative and punitive silence, Brox skillfully resists depicting one as all good and the other as all bad, showing instead how silence designed to reform and redeem might instead oppress, and how silence designed to strip away attachments to ego and to temporal goods might also distill and reveal one's character. Brox's elegant, thoughtful survey of social deployments of silence introduces to readers the continuum of its potential harms and benefits. Agent: Cynthia Cannell, the Cynthia Cannell Literary Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this study, Brox (nonfiction writing, Lesley Univ.; Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light) examines the role and effects of silence in penitentiaries and monasteries over many years. While silence was once imposed on prisoners as a punishment, it was freely accepted by those entering monasteries as a means of deepening their spiritual lives. Nineteenth-century prison founders believed that isolation and silence would lead to convicts' redemption but failed to see potential dangers in such practices, including a loss of contact with reality and risk of insanity. In contrast, monastic silence was not absolute but intermingled with chanting, reading aloud, and limited conversation. Thomas Merton is cited as a monk who thrived on silence and solitude, although he continued to speak out in his writings about the secular world's concerns. Silence and isolation are now gone from most American prisons and many monasteries are closed, their silent life vanishing in an increasingly noisy world. Brox's balanced account shows both the positive and negative aspects of silence and points out the need to be attuned to our inner voice in a world of constant distractions. VERDICT Will appeal to readers interested in the effects of this alternative to the noise of modern life.-Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The nuances and complexities of silence.Brox (Creative Writing/Lesley Univ.; Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, 2010, etc.) moves from the openness and space found in her earlier, well-received books on farms to places far more confining. This poignant and somber book is as much about solitude as it is silence. It's also a social history of buildings and people who inhabit them, primarily prisons and monasteries, and the silence, whether imposed or invited, that inhabits those within. The author begins with the history of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in 1829, it was largely inspired by Founding Father Benjamin Rush's belief in a "new kind of justice," the "silent and separate incarceration of criminals." The plan was to make prisons "as forbidding and repellent as possible." Throughout, Brox intimately imagines its first prisoner, Charles Williams, an 18-year-old black farmer, personally experiencing the horrors and sufferings of prison life. The author then transitions to a historical examination of the monastery and the monks who chose a life of voluntary imprisonment as a means to achieve a more spiritual life. Silence, monastic chants, and prayers were an integral part of their daily lives, as was community, something Williams was forbidden. A large part of the book explores the austere life and writings of the famous Trappist pacifist monk Thomas Merton and his life at Kentucky's Abbey of Gethsemani. Brox touches on many diverse topics, including the lives of nuns in monasteries and the horrific World War II bombing of the Monte Cassino monastery, and invokes many voices, including Dickens, Thoreau, Eugenia Ginzburg, a prisoner of Stalin's Great Purge, author Doris Grumbach, and Brox's "own most profound encounter with silence." She concludes that silence can be many things, from an unwelcome punishment or a "lifelong commitment" to a "deliberate inquiry" or a "last resort."A perceptive and subtle meditation about a "true reckoning with the self." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
