Susan Hill:

We have betrayed several generations of children in many ways — by giving the teaching of skills priority over that of knowledge, by making exams easier out of a false egalitarianism, by letting them choose their own morality from a soup of political correctness, by over-emphasising the importance of the computer as if it were anything more than a useful tool, and of the internet as if it were more content-rich than books. But we have also betrayed them by confiscating their silence and failing to reveal the richness that may be found within the context of "a great quiet".

So difficult has it become to find such oases of silence, that many children never experience it. In adapting to constant noise, we seem to have become afraid of silence. Why? Are we afraid of what we will discover when we come face to face with ourselves there? Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let's drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.

Have you seen Into Great Silence?

Douglas Coupland:

People would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed.

William Deresiewicz:

There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.

At a recent screening of "Up!", during a beautiful, wordless-but-not-silent extended montage sequence in which the almost-entire life of the protagonist and his wife unfolds on the screen, children in the audience can be heard squirming antsily, intermittently compelled to quietly express their discomfort at the verbal vacuum of the soundtrack. Even as these kids disrupt the proceedings with their untimely comments, one feels a certain sadness for them, not unlike the feelings evoked by major events in the protagonist's life story. These kids are so unfamiliar with the pleasures of silence that even a few minutes of wordlessness feels like punishment.

Silence, Please