“To Seek by Way of Silence”

Abstract

Our students are busy, busy taking classes, busy working part-time (sometimes full-time) jobs, busy talking/texting on their cell phones, busy surfing the Internet searching for information to complete the most recently assigned paper or project. All of this busy-ness occurs within the contexts of environments filled with the visual and auditory noise of twenty-first-century American life inside and outside of classrooms and schools. The activities and the environment are the taken-for-granted milieu in the lives of our students. In our own lives as well if we are honest with ourselves. We do not, like Jakob in Anne Michael’s novel Fugitive Pieces (1997), know how “to seek by way of silence” (111). It is important to point out that the silence I reveal in this chapter is of a particular kind, because as Paul Woodruff argues, “Excessive noise and [a particular species] of silence both fall away from the ideal of reverence in the classroom” (2001, 193).