What the Quiet Does

A morning in Georgia, and nobody knows where I am. Nothing dramatic in that. It's only that no one has a reason to think of me before evening, and I have nothing to be on time for.

The first few days of that are pleasant. After that it gets interesting.

What arrives is not silence. What arrives is that all the noise you had been blaming on other people turns out to be yours, and now you're sitting with it in a room where it has nowhere to go.

Most of us arrange a life so this never quite happens. I was good at it. A profession that let me look into everything and stay nowhere. A camera to hold up between me and the rest.

Jung has a line about this somewhere: that turning away from the outer world is how a man arrives at the inner one. He wrote it in a tower he had built himself, on a lake, without electricity. I don't think that was an accident.

What you find there isn't automatically pleasant. You get shown the parts of yourself you had arranged all the furniture around. Nobody enjoys that. But nothing gets moved until somebody has looked at it.

I won't tell you it changed my life. It changed what I could stand to look at, which turned out to be the same thing, only slower.