Notes on Voluntary Silence

We keep silence before noon^[1]. Six people, one kitchen, no talking. It sounds austere and is mostly comic: an elaborate pantomime about the kettle, conducted daily by adults.

The value is not mystical. In ordinary conversation a great deal of what we say is maintenance — reassurance that the relationship persists. Remove the maintenance for four hours and you discover how much of your speech was load-bearing and how much was upholstery.

Some people find the first morning frightening. That is worth saying plainly, because our literature has a tendency to describe difficulty as depth. It is not depth. It is difficulty, and it passes for most people by the fourth day, and for some it does not pass and they should stop.

We do not believe silence purifies anyone. We believe it postpones the sentence you were going to say, long enough for you to notice why you were going to say it.

A visitor asked me last spring whether the silence was ever used as a punishment^[2]. I said no. I have thought about the question every week since, which I suspect was its purpose.