I ran into my good friend Michael in the garden yesterday.  He turned seventy (and a spry seventy at that) a few days after I turned forty, and we've had plans to celebrate, but we've both been busy — this is the social season, after all — and now he's off to New York, then after that it's a month of silence.

Yeah. Get this: he spends one month of the year in silence! Which intrigues me. I've tried to get the inside poop, but he's understandably a little secretive.

"Is it a monastery?" I asked him again yesterday. "Is it a mime school?"

"It's silence," he answered curtly.

"Are there cabana boys?"

Occasionally he drops a little clue — yesterday he cracked a joke about Franciscans.  So I figured that'd be a good place to start my investigations.  But even if I discovered his secret, it would probably be awkward to show up wherever he was doing his thing to do mine.  I mean, talk about the silent treatment.  He'd be glaring at me.  I'd be shrugging and shooting him crooked smiles, like "sorry, dude".  Neither of us would get a moment's peace.  Looks can be louder than words, you know.  

And of course, that would defeat the purpose.  Because I think what Michael means by "silence" is an environment of peace, calm, and silence.  If you had a mime out on the lawn, frantically trying to get out of his invisible box, that might be silent, but I think I would find it highly distracting.  Wouldn't you?  There's good silence and bad silence.  Mimes employ the latter.  I much prefer when they're invisible, too.

Anyway, like a lot of folks I try to get in my silent time throughout the day.  I don't have or want an ipod or any such device that essentially handicaps me out in the world, nor do I have any compunctions about turning off my phone.  So when I'm riding my bike or pulling weeds in my garden, that's usually an approximation of silent time for me.  But it's not enough.  There are constant distractions totally beyond your control.  A whole month of dedicated silence, while it would drive some people crazy, definitely appeals to me.

While it's not something people do these days, I've long had a fantasy of checking myself into a sanitarium, say, somewhere in Provence — like the Cloister of the Monastery Saint-Paul de Mausole where Van Gogh spent some quality time going quietly mad... 


Quietly is the operative word.  Silence sometimes feels like a luxury.  I had a roommate once who used a white noise-maker to "mask unwanted sounds."  Kind of like an aural whore bath.  But only real silence is golden. 

One night, back when I lived in Dorchester, after a particularly harrowing commute by T, I wrote about my idea of Heaven...

My idea of Heaven is a sanitarium. I think of Prince Muishkin. I’ve always thought The Idiothad a happy ending. Off to the sanitarium for an endless vacation.

InHeaven everything is white, just as people imagine. There are no TVs,maybe off in the distance you can hear a radio, but all they play areaccordion waltzes. The lamps are old fashioned. No skittering, nervousfluorescent lights. It’s summer, but it's not oppressively hot.  And anyway there's a ceiling fan that turns slowly, slowly, slowly...

It gets dark late, and the lights aredimmed at night. They comfort you. There’s a big window across fromyour bed, and an old oak tree outside. There's a courtyard, and sometimesthe nurse-angels wheel you out in the early afternoon, if you cleanedyour plate at lunch (though no one makes you if you don't want to), and you can feed the sparrows and the pigeons,talk to the squirrels, whatever.

There’s an old gardener who’s verykind. He’s the only one who sometimes you talk to, but he doesn’texpect you to say anything. He may ask you a question, like ‘lovelyweather, isn't it?’ but you don’t have to answer. You can if you want, of course.  He’ll smile at you (in anice way), and tell you a story, leaning on his spade, about when hewas a boy. You love his stories. They never go on too long. And he so enjoys them.  It's like he's talking to himself.

Thebeauty of it is, you can sleep just as long as you like, and nobodydisturbs you, and even if you have a visitor, which you don’t often,you can close your eyes. You don’t have to talk to anyone, and you canlisten or not, as you choose. No one expects you to understand them.And after a while you don’t. You never really did, you were justpretending to. Now you don’t have to. They make sounds like the birds,or some of them like the squirrels. Maybe they are speaking a differentlanguage. Maybe they always were.  

And here you have time, nothing but time and forgetting, forgetting, forgetting, until finally you've forgotten everything...

I'm not quite ready for all that just yet, but a month out of the year wouldn't be so bad.