Silence, Sant’Ambrogio and the Importance of Reading

Noise is everywhere. Traffic on the streets. Planes flying overhead. Music in the stores and on people’s personal stereos. The world has grown increasingly noisy.

Pythagoras was once asked about the ‘Music of the Spheres’ – the supposed harmony the planets might make as they move in their courses. If the harmony surrounds us, then why can’t we hear it? The real answer, of course, is that noise does not travel in the vacuum of space. But Pythagoras’s ingenious response was to say that, because it is in our ears since birth, we would only notice it if it stopped suddenly – the way we notice a fridge has been humming only when it suddenly grows quiet.

The idea of silence is present in human civilisation in the vows of silence taken by certain orders of monks. Silence can also be used as a punishment. People are told to be quiet. In one of Ovid’s tales, Philomela has her tongue cut out by her abuser, Tereus. The stump of her tongue twitches and wriggles horribly in the dust like a snake once it has been lopped off. 

Silence in a larger sense can involve censorship – political, religious, artistic. But silence can also be playful, as in John Cage’s composition 4’33”, comprising four minutes and thirty-three seconds of musical silence.

The quietest place in the world is an ‘Anechoic chamber’, where no external sound can be heard at all. Here it is so quiet, you can hear your own heartbeat. The longest time a human being has been able to endure such silence is 45 minutes.

Our human hearing is much less good than dogs, dolphins, bats, whose range is much greater than ours. But emotionally we are more sensitive to its opposite – silence: the silence of dead civilisations, of the vanquished, of women through the ages, of an unanswered text or call. Shakespeare’s Hamlet ends with ‘The rest is silence’, referring to the ultimate silence of death.

It’s always interesting to see a game in which young children see how long they can remain quiet. But long gone are the days when we wanted children to be silent. We need them to listen and pay attention, of course, but we also want them to be responsive and articulate and to learn to communicate effectively.

The one time that silence is necessary is when students are reading. And of course we have the patron saint of Milan, Sant’Ambrogio, at least partly to thank for that. He is credited as being the first person in human history to read silently without speaking the words aloud.

Noise is a fact of modern, urban life. But sustained silent reading is crucial for students to progress academically. And so in the school library, and crucially at home, we hope students can carve a little space of quiet where they might read, contemplate and reflect, making them more effective learners, enjoying the larger harmonies that silent thought allows. 

Chris Greehalgh
Principal and CEO