Dear Writer,
It’s impossible to find perfect silence. Google ‘the world’s quietest place’ and you’ll know. Situated at Microsoft’s Headquarters in Redmond, Washington, a room is designed with an onion-like structure that isolates it from the rest of the building and the outside world. It’s called an ‘anechoic’ chamber, because it creates no echo at all — which makes the sound of clapping hands downright eerie. This is the world’s quietest place.
If you stand in it for long enough, you start to hear your heartbeat. A ringing in your ears becomes deafening. When you move, your bones make a grinding noise. Eventually, you lose your balance, because the absolute lack of reverberation sabotages your spatial awareness. The background noise in the room is so low that it approaches the lowest threshold theorized by mathematicians, the absolute zero of sound — the next step down is a vacuum, or the absence of sound.
Why am I talking of absolute silence? No, I’m not in Redmond right now. I am in a metropolitan city scrambling to find a place where there exists that perfect silence to sit and finish this letter in one go. When I started writing in 2007, I always kept searching for the perfect place to write, and for me, the perfect place was the one where there was no noise. A silent place. The search took me around India and the world. The place that I finally found to be quite peaceful was, as one could guess, the Himalayas. The serenity and the quiet of mountains near my cave, only interrupted by the meditative hum of the river Beas, was quite calming, but then, as I moved to the cities, the roar of the traffic and the banter of people didn’t let me concentrate, didn’t let me slip into the subconscious while writing. I had to find a way out. Initially, I waited for the day to end, for the traffic to subside, for the world to sleep and me to begin my writing. But the daily wait for the world to sleep was too much for the urgent desire that I possessed to write. I had to find a sustainable way to write through the day, clocking a lot more words than my nightly owl avatar. And that’s when I discovered how effective music could be.
What often disturbs you while trying to concentrate isn’t sound but noise. Noise that’s irregular, unpredictable and unrhythmic. Whereas every jarring burst of sound takes your mind off the chain of thoughts that you are chasing, music and songs walk into your ears and find a cozy seat somewhere at the back of your mind, watching it work. Music is like that good friend we can comfortably share your silence with. Its hum is as pleasant as that of the gushing rivers, it makes your body sway and your lips move in sync, but never let you lose the track of your thought. Thoughts flow with the music, rather more effectively, more naturally. Music is the walking stick with which your thoughts walk.
You don’t need the world’s quietest place to be a good writer, to be disciplined with the craft. You need a song that flows at the speed of your thought that carries your imagination like a baby’s pram. Right now, I’m listening to the serene piano instrumental by Ludovico Einaudi and my words are flowing at the speed of my thoughts. I like the fact that our typing speed is slightly slower than the speed of our thoughts, and it allows us to edit and re-edit our sentences while they are being conjured. If my words came on paper faster than they come in my mind, I might never have been able to write.
What music, if any, do you listen to while writing? Today, write about what plays in the background of your words. Use #MusicForWriting in the caption of your quote. Now my song has just changed to Songs of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel, I think the perfect background song for this letter. Do listen. I will go and sing along, and will think about what should I be writing to you in tomorrow’s letter. Before I part today, here’s a quote for you: “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” — Plato
Singing silently, through words,
YourQuote Baba
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