 come to literary lunch and hope that you'll have an opportunity to read Jane Godd's book Silence. It's marvelous. I could feel, as I read the book, there I go, the world-expanding nudge that comes from a new point of view. It reminded me of art classes you probably had when you walked in and the teacher said, you know, draw this and then said, wait a second, there's a catch. You can only draw the negative space. And you thought, oh, well, you won't be able to see what's going on. But of course, understanding the negative space meant expanding and a deeper understanding of what you were looking at. And Jane has really given that to us in exploring silence. We pay a lot of attention to words, but if we didn't have the space between the words, they would quickly become meaningless. And so she's really looked at the space between and what happens in that space, both in monastic tradition, as it's a chosen by the individual, but also the isolation of prison and solitary. So my novel has some scenes where silence is a conspicuous component of the setting. But I'm really here as a Quaker from Portland Friends Meeting, where we gather in silence every Sunday morning, spoken messages, if there are any, are given when someone feels led by the spirit to share. Every week we have visitors to meeting. Some people find it torture to sit there for an hour and say nothing. And others comment that they feel like they've come home, that the silence welcomed them in in a way that they had not met in other places. So how did you decide to explore both sides of this experience of silence? Thank you, Beth. I first began, my first thought of writing this book came in 2001 when I visited a modest garden in the south of France called Sinon. And I was really just astounded by the silence there and the architecture built for silence. But I didn't know how to handle the material. I couldn't imagine writing a book that would add anything to the long history of books about monastic silence. But over the years it stayed in the back of my mind. And then I happened to visit Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia about six or seven years ago, which was the first use of the silent and solitary confinement for criminal justice. And it was based on the monastic idea of the cell and it was meant as a means of redemption. So, and walking through there and looking at the cells, which were so much like a monk cell, all of a sudden I began to see how I could write a book that oscillates between these two architectures. I will say it also played into my limitations as a writer because I knew I couldn't write a book that was that talked about silence in an abstract way. So that the architecture of silence, the architecture of these places helped me to ground my discussion of silence in the real world. So as you think about the work you did looking at the monastic tradition of silence, do you feel like, are there pieces of that that you thought might be particularly... We find the shape of the book and find the shape of the discussion about silence because there could be a thousand books written about silence and there are. And I was really, I think, on it was very particular to these two places. So I kept reading and reading and my method of writing is to just try to take in everything and then whittle things down. And it's gowns of wash for the pure drop, as the poet Shane Massini said. So I found myself circling back to Thomas Merton, whom I have read in my 20s and had read sporadically ever since for 40 years. And I realized that his experience of silence was so complex and it was a real argument with silence in many ways. And I found that I ended up honing you on that just because of the richness of it and it helped me to situate it in the monastery, but grounded in the experience of one real person who grappled with it over decades. Yeah. And the book really does, I think, a remarkable job of using his rich language because it's so hard to find ways to articulate the challenges of silence and he's such a great writer, too. But you've really woven that in with pieces from very old monastic writing about silence as well. So you really get cover just very much sort of the scope because Merton, well, when was Merton writing? Well, he wrote in the mid-20th century. He entered the monastery on the eve of World War II and that informed his life. But one of the things that really struck me in doing that research was people have been searching for silence for century upon century and that the search in the third century was not, in many ways, different from the search in the 20th of the 21st century. So I did want to give a sense of that. We always think that, oh, we need more silence now. But even in the much quieter world of the Desert Fathers, the much quieter world of the 12th century monasteries in the early Middle Ages, they needed silence as much as we needed now. So it says something, I think, about silence to even ponder that search over the many centuries. I think one of my favorite stories from the Desert Father, which I think about sometimes when someone's visiting meeting and I look and I think, I don't know what their experience of this is. And there was one of the Desert Fathers who, he was sort of off in the desert a little ways and a visitor who was a very important person came and visited the disciples and said, I want to talk to this guy. And so the disciples run off to the Desert Father and say, oh, you've got to come see this guy. It's really important. And he says, well, I'm not going to talk to him today. I'll talk to him tomorrow. And this goes on for several days. And finally, the very important person goes off and off. And the disciples go to him and say, to the Father and say, what was that? Why didn't you see this very important person? You could have influenced the world and made the world a better place. And he says, well, if my silence didn't speak to him, my words would mean nothing. We also want to talk about the other element, which is woven through the book. And as I read, I was reminded of an experience I had last fall when my husband and I were on a trip in the Midwest. And on a whim, we decided we would go see the Hopewell Culture Natural Historic Park, which is off in the middle of nowhere in southern Ohio. And we're turned down this little road. And suddenly, we were confronted with the two biggest prisons I've ever seen in my life. And they're really deliberately invisible. I mean, I was just so struck that here were these huge prisons with thousands and thousands of people locked inside. But no, it wasn't like they were on a highway where people would drive by and talk about it. And it's connected. What's going on right now with prisons is really connected to the origins. Can you talk more about how did we get started on this? Well, the idea for the Penitentiary for Eastern State Penitentiary was the concept of Benjamin Rush, one of our founding fathers in the late 18th century. And at that time, the new United States was looking for a means of, a new means of criminal justice to replace the hangings and brandings of the past and to distinguish themselves from the European system of criminal justice. And they wanted something that was not only, they were looking for something more humane, but also something that wasn't quite so public. The jails at the time were located in the middle of cities, and they were very chaotic, and people could go up to the window and just talk to the people who were incarcerated. The hangings and brandings and lipids were very public. So Eastern State Penitentiary was eventually built on the outskirts of Philadelphia on where there had been an old farm. So it was three miles outside of the city of Philadelphia. So it was the first instance of separating prisoners and within the Penitentiary each prisoner was in their cell, was escorted to their cell in a wood so as to disorient them within the prison so they would never know where they were. And each prisoner was, they were granted access to spiritual advisors, but they couldn't contact their family, they were not to speak unless instructed to, they were not to make any noise, and they didn't, they were fed in their cells, they didn't have any communication with any of the other prisoners. So there is a direct line from that world of the Penitentiary to solitary today, although it's very different in scale and different in intent. The prisoners in Eastern State Penitentiary were, those were sentences needed out by the criminal justice system, and that is no longer the case now. Solidary confinement is kind of within the punishment of the system. Yeah, this is good. I think you said in your book no one is sentenced to solitary confinement. Yeah, no one, yeah, because it's it's the idea of sentencing to people, sentencing people to solitary confinement was done away with in the early 20th century, but it's interesting, I use the experience of prisoner number one, Charles Williams, to almost be the, it's the opposite of Thomas Merton's experience, it's the imposed experience rather than the chosen. But the challenge was Thomas Merton left hundreds of thousands of words for me to read through, and Charles Williams was mute, and the only records we have of his experiences are through observers who visited the prison or the prison records themselves. Which included Charles Dickens. I was interested, you do have found a person who wrote extensively about her experience of silence in prison with Ginsberg? Right, Eugenia Ginsberg who was swept up in the great first, Thomas' great courage, and I came across her because of, again, the writing presented its own challenges, and I was stumped as to where to go with Charles Williams' experience, but then it occurred to me it's the same experience all over the world for almost two centuries, these people who have been committed to solitary. Eugenia Ginsberg's self is remarkably similar to Charles Williams' self over 100 years prior, but she wrote a memoir of her experience after getting 20 years after, she was in solitary for 10 years, and then spent 10 years in Siberia, and then wrote this memoir of her time there. She was a very different personality and brought something very different to the self, which was also interesting. I mean, it's not the same experience for everybody. It's a challenge to endure, but different people endure it differently. One of the topics which you actually give a whole chapter to and has rolled them in through some other parts of the book, looking at women in silence, and I was reminded of a friend of mine was telling me about her father, who was a very prominent person, and at home he was abusive to his wife and his kids, and one time when his wife was in the hospital, she actually said she hadn't fallen down the stairs, and they, so they recommended marriage counseling. The psychiatrist recommended that her mother take up knitting so that she would stop provoking her husband. So this is really, in addition to being horrifying, is actually part of a very long tradition, right? It struck me both in the penitentiary and in the monastery that the experience of silence for women is emphatically different from the experience of silence for men, in part because there's a whole another layer of meaning for silence that women experience, and that goes way back to the punishments for gossiping or speaking too much in public for women. Gossips in 16th century England, for instance, could be bridled for not for speaking in public or for seeming to nag too much. This was the same in colonial America. In colonial America they were dumped into the walk, into a pond repeatedly. In England they were often put a metal shield was put over their head and a bit was put into their mouth and they were paraded through the streets. It was a severe humiliating punishment in both instances. And that also shaming came in through even into the penitentiary because there was no place for women in the original design of the penitentiary, in part because women were not women who transgressed when thought not capable of redemption. And the penitentiary was supposed to be a means for redemption. So women were treated differently even in society for that transgression. And in the monastery, women, this wasn't always the case, but often the case, the convents were much poorer than the monasteries and they were often, they, women in the convents had much less freedom than nuns had. So the order within the penitentiary, the monastic tradition was also very different. But it's intriguing to me in the middle ages. I look at a group of nuns in southern France who, we can't know what they thought, but it may have been that confinement, even in their property, even it being crowded, they found more freedom than they could in society. And it's a really interesting question to bring up. I mean, I think in the book, I didn't want to answer questions, I wanted to present these situations and let the reader think about them because some of these things are unanswerable. We can't know what they were thinking in that convent in the 13th century. I've recently been reading Grading Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Both of these books, which are also nonfiction, include details on plants from her knowledge as a botanist. But that's almost background to her own stories as a mother and an indigenous person. In silence, your own experience is almost a whisper by contrast. How did you decide how much of you to include in the book? Well, that's an interesting question. I think it goes back to really my first books about my family farm and were a personal narrative. It's backed up like history. And then when I came to write Brilliant, one of the challenges of Brilliant, I gave myself as a writer. I said, I want to take the first person out of the narrative, but I want to create a voice that seems intimate. And so that was not kind of a challenge I gave myself as a writer. And I thought, all right, I did that. I don't have to do that again. But I wanted to, I just felt as I worked on the material over the six or seven years, that I wanted, even though I had a very personal connection to the search for silence in a way, I wanted to keep myself in the background. So I'm more of a questioner and a wanderer who pops up at times than anything else. It wasn't about my personal story. It was about this phenomenon that was out in the world. So I thought it seems right to keep myself in the background. I want to give you a chance to hear from Jane Reed from her book. I'll just read a few paragraphs and read at the same time. But this is actually, I do come in with a very personal story at the end of my first experience sort of dealing with a large silence when I was in my early 20s and living on my own on the Antiquad Island way on the edge of the island one winter. And this is, but that winter was also my first serious attempt at the writing life. And I think those days allowed me to lean an understanding of what was possible in silence. I believe now that the time in Squawn gave me the freedom to begin. And once I began to work intently, it also gave me room to acquire into the life that I hoped for and allowed me to make large decisions. I think I was bordering with my choices than I otherwise might have been. The silence may have been unsought to begin with, but it became a complex part of my life after a while. I grew to love the days when I could so intently focus on my work, grew to love the long walks in that austere landscape and the continuity of thought that silence allowed. I also feared that at times it could seem like a test and I wondered the same things the world always wonders about silence. Was it an avoidance and escape? And then I'll just skip to the end of that chapter. Silence can seem like a luxury or the fraught world is labeled it that way. But from what I know of it, I would argue that silence is as necessary as the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech that we so carefully guard and endlessly ponder. For it affirms the meaning of speech even as it provides a path to inner life, to beauty and observation and appreciation. It presents the opportunity for a true reckoning with the self, with external obligation and with power. As much as we need silence, it needs us. It needs more than a few hundred monasteries where a few thousand souls are most of what's left of it. Like all else threatened by our onslaught, it must be attended to and valued, given space and time in which to gain strength again. And the stronger the silence, the more it will be able to withstand the noise and distractions of our world. So we've got some time for questions, if we've got a few questions. Well, the prisoners, you know, some prisoners managed to, the prisoners who came out it was difficult, it's difficult for all prisoners to enforce silence and solitude against their will. Those who survived it best find a means of discipline, whether Eugene Ginsburg, for instance, used the time to recall all the things she had read and she found that in the silence and solitude, her memory of the book she had read came back to her almost completely and that she used the time to write poetry in her head. And even when she was put in a dark cell, which was a punishment within the punishment, she knew she had to keep track of time. So every time they brought her bread and water, she would rent her shirt so that she could count the rips in her shirt and know how many days she had been in the cell. But for a lot of prisoners, for instance, there's evidence in the Eastern Statement of Tentury that some of them may have entered already having cognitive disabilities, quite a few of them left with cognitive disabilities or went mad in their cells or went crazy. They were given work and most of the prisoners loved the work for the structure they provided and depended on the work for kind of sanity. So it was a feat of endurance for all of them. Some of them survived it, some did not. Charles Williams was let out of prison two years to the day after he was put in. He was given four dollars and his street clothes and I couldn't find any trace of him after that. He was a young black man with a very common name, so he was lost to the world. For monastics, nuns and priests who are in monasteries, you know, it's often a challenge. A lot of postulates who entered do not end up leaving, but those who do stay and have chosen that life often find it very deep and rich. You know, he had a special place in the monastery because he was also a famous writer, so that presented its own complexities. But he deeply valued the time he did have for the silence in regard to his origins. I think part of what you talk about in the book too is that for the monastic that silence is a choice that's happening in community with the support of your community and certainly that's part of you know, Quaker worship is it's silence in community and then if people want to do some reading, you've also got some modern psychiatrists looking at the damaging effects of modern solitude. So let's have another question. What was the story, two quick questions, what was the story of Charles Williams? I don't know. And also just in terms of what happens in solitude, I guess we're just pretty met up and I assume the cynicism rate would be really high, whereas in places like Norway, where they treat, they treat prisoners really well, they have a practically normal life except they're like maybe on an island cannot leave. Well, Charles Williams was an 18-year-old black farmer who was sentenced to two years in solitary confinement for breaking into a house and stealing a gold key, a gold seal, and a gold watch. And he was brought to the jail, they had a whole ritual to bring him into the jail of bathing him just as if you were entering a monastery, bathing him, cutting his hair, noting his scars, leading him to the cell and then leaving him to that world. I think the rate was very high. I mean the prisoners who were in eastern state kind of country in 1829 were largely drawn as you can imagine from minorities and immigrants. What were known then as the dangerous classes. So even then I think some of the aspects of prison are very similar to the aspects of prisons today in that sense. So it didn't really cure anybody. Obviously, we went on a roses retreat with main works of publicist alliance, I've been more than in a kind of late stream and I have this part of poetry workshop best enough and one of the exercises we did was to go for a walk in the woods as a group and we were told nobody must say anything during this walk. So it was not a long period of silence but it was incredible, all of us I think in the group found it a very powerful and deep experience sharing the silence in community and that kind of takes me to Thomas and then his choice to be in a community that was largely silence and also to the choice of being in Quaker meeting where my experience of silence in Quaker meeting is that the silence in community is a very powerful thing and quite different from something likely the silence of silence you can find where you're not with people who haven't chosen it or and I wonder if that's worth commenting on. Yeah and even Thomas Merton says at some point that the silence in the community was very distinct from the silence in the individual cell that silence in fact isn't one you know that's one of the things I think I learned over the years of writing the book that silence isn't this monolithic thing that it has the silence he experienced in his individual cell or later in his hermitage was very different say than the silence of working with the other monastics together or worshiping with the other monastics together and you know the silence within the the the surgical services was a way in a way served to enhance everything that was spoken everything that was vocalized the beauty of the music would have been nothing about the silence so it's a very I mean it's such a complex and layered thing that to say there's one thing I should say it's the absence of noise is really being very productive I mean I did a lot of research on John Cage and he never made it into the book except for an epigraph which he said silence is not acoustic it's a change of mind and turning around was a large part of it it was to sort of lose yourself in the world and to and to you know be a vessel to allow the god to come in you know they would have said for instance they weren't looking out into the world the life of beautiful men as the life that comes in through the monastery was god looking at them not them looking out into the world does that make sense yes I was wondering whether you have been able to go home after the United Nations in New York City where there is a room of silence no oh well it was doing way back down from the show such that they had and he I don't know if he'd mind it or if he'd just suggested that you should he says we all need silence in your lives so there is a room in your right to mistake for the first floor when you go in and there is a little sign that does tell you that this is the room for sirens in other words you don't just go in and sit and whisper and so I was just wondering whether you have in your room to be searched for silence at one point other things building flavors out there that might be for a room of silence well I mean that's a wonderful idea and certainly every every city could use one on every block or something you could just duck into a room and sit in silence I mean I did that when I travel I find these little churches and I go and I just want to be away they just want to be quiet and I'll go next time so yeah yeah they're like preserves like the dark sky preserves that they have now and there are no like any of mine you can have silent preserves everywhere I was wondering if you looked into all Christian monasteries and convents or if you looked at other belief systems that Easter yeah and if you saw any differences between the silence within those you know I thought about that and then I thought the folks would become you know I to give do you know I didn't want to just you know talk about Eastern monasticism in a couple of paragraphs I don't think that would have done injustice so I have to make the decision um to sort of at the end I do have Thomas Thomas Merton does go to Asia and he meets with the Dalai Lama and so I have I have part of that his journey to Asia but I couldn't take it's I thought that's for someone else and for another one or the next book yeah it would be interesting though yeah it would be and I do think there is a profound difference and I realized that that would have you know required another hundred pages of the book and sort of take it out of alignment and there's a woman over there talking but the brain injury at all their conferences all that means we have something I'm sorry I didn't hear you oh I'm sorry she said that in greater injury conferences they always have silent room oh it's it's kind of amazing but I mean the acknowledgement all these things the UN the brain injury conferences are an acknowledgement of the power of silence to just set a place aside for it and um I guess I'm not even in the area yeah yeah yeah as brain injury you need to be by yourself in the time right to waste it yeah no that's true even of um my artistic nephew who means you know who wears airfoils sometimes because he can't the stimulation of the world around him is too much right I think that also the like the art department and publication studio all they need to get away from the world right I agree I mean let's start a movement of having little faces for silence and I could walk as I listened to you I noticed that one of you talks about two different situations where people are silent and alone which is isolation and one of you talks about quicker reading which I've never been to and I don't really I'd like to explain to me the nature of coming together as a large group of people to not speak what you can do that at home yeah um I actually I actually brought with me a quote from Thomas Kelly who's a quicker writer about the experience of silence in quicker meeting and we we call a meeting where the silence is particularly deep a gathered meeting your practice of group worship on the basis of silence comes special times when the electric hush and salinity and depth of power steals over the worshipers a blanket of divine covering comes over the room and a quickening presence pervades us breaking down some part of the special privacy and isolation of our individual lives and bonding our spirit within a super individual life and power an objective dynamic presence which enfolds us all nourishes our souls speaks glad unutterable comfort within us and quickens in us depths that before had been slumbering the burning bush has been kindled in our midst and we stand together on holy ground and uh there there is something there is something different that happens when we when we invite silence as a community and and just sort of on our own yeah how's the stories of silence and deaf people especially like a child respond it's not hearing that's also one of the silences I didn't take that people ask about that no you're not the person and I it's another that's another book for you know you can write a whole book on that experience as well yeah I mean there are so many layers of experience with silence well I I was just going to add to uh comments about the quaker meeting one of the reasons that silence works there is that people come ready to listen so the silence is not just few I can escape which it is in some ways but it's also what might come to out of silence what might I hear in my head or in my body or from someone that's there so doing it in a group then with that intent is I think the different gives a different quality than sitting at home alone or you can also do it but did you look at the vaccination between silence and loneliness loneliness seems to be really an important aspect of modern life these days and yeah it's the moment well yeah I mean I think that comes through when I talk about the prison experience because I think in extricable from Charles Williams and the other prisoners experience was a profound loneliness of that and how that um it wore on them in that sense of isolation and not having another to close to the layer yeah so that that weaves through I think the the uh the penitentiary segments of the book I mean I you know the interesting thing to me is that the silence is extremely powerful and I think at all times it holds both as positive and negatives together and that you know the you know because it's very mysterious and that you know can feel very enriching my day and feel like torture than that at that time did you have to tell them what questions about um maybe a couple more questions no you said you didn't go deep into the eastern philosophies at this time you know but did you look at other cultures and actually know something that I think would be all soon that every culture could recognize some of what you're talking about here is there some culture where they say I don't know what you're talking about where there's going to be such similarities between some in forced silence when you're removed from society some in forced silence when you're in society and silent sight is something that's contemplative and restorative I didn't go beyond the western tradition you know I I stuck to the experience you learned in the united states because that also is the penitentiary tradition and the western monastic tradition so that it's it it sort of circulates around the end but that's a good I mean that's a really interesting angle to find out if that was the same you know whether it would be the same in all cultures I I couldn't say yes you're no confidently there is a website that lists 100 books on silence I think it's called encountering silence and it's really interesting I mean I think there's some aspect of it that's just the human experience and you know different cultures we ourselves I mean a contemporary culture I think is a culture of isolation more than others you know I remember I had a friend who joined the peace corps and went to Ecuador and you know he came to the he was in the village and they sent him off to his quarters and they said would you like somebody to be with you to stay with you for company I mean you know they didn't want to leave him alone because that seems like such a abnormality to be living whereas we you know in our culture now most of us a majority of Americans live alone there's a lot of you know just being able to live alone yeah what's your next topic or project well I you know I haven't had much time in the last few months to but I am what's rolling around in your head what I think I'm going to write about is and this will be historical and have research but it will be more personal about how single women inhabit their homes and how single way you know the history of it how someone in the 19th century a single woman in the 19th century was in a very different social world than is and have much more limited freedoms and how that experience has changed over time and over cultural I think it'll be really interesting to see I think it'll be a challenge to find I think there's a lot of um letters and diaries from middle class and upper middle class women more of a challenge to find say working class women yeah so that would be interesting it might be hard for them to afford yeah or of course to live alone you know and my house in Brunswick there was a widow there in 1900 so it's kind of an interesting um you know I don't think that is young women look too long yeah yeah well thank you thank you so much for being here and I just want to remind everyone that there are copies of books for sale over here