What’s So Terrible About Living a Quiet Life?

Life should be an adventure. But there’s gold in silence too.

Nobody makes those movies anymore.

The extensional suffering of a small-town clergyman or the deep silence of some Arctic island. Movies now are fast and loud, designed to be understood without words in deference to the foreign market.

It’s hard to talk about silence. Perhaps that’s why we don’t. Quiet lives don’t make for good stories, and contemplation isn’t sexy. It doesn’t look good blown up on a movie screen. Then again, nobody goes to the movies anymore anyway.

We like to hear about exciting lives. The glory and the drama. And when I was young, like all young people, that was what I wanted. A life that would someday make a story worth telling. A narrative you could cling to. A three-act structure with setbacks and triumphs in exactly the right places.

Life doesn’t work that way, and we ought to be glad. There is glory in a quiet life.

All our days are quiet now. The skies have fallen silent. We can’t see the way bees do, so we don’t notice the electromagnetic chatter. We’ve all been forced, at least temporarily, into living a little more quietly.

Is that such a bad thing?

The bus used to wind its way through narrow medieval streets. For all I know, it still does.

The houses crowded in on either side. I would sit on the top deck, eye level with dark bedrooms only an arm’s reach away.

I hated it. I hated everything back then. I suffocated on hatred with the kind of passion that’s only available to the young. That kind of hatred, I’ve since learned, is just a mask of love. But love makes you weak, and I wanted to be strong. I wanted to escape.

Sometimes, on a rain-soaked bus ride with my blaring headphones feeding me hate inspiration and my eyes clouded with despair, loathing seemed to cling to me like particles of the gray clouds outside. I hated those dreary little houses on that long dull drive.

How can anyone settle for so little? The car. The kids. The mortgage. The dull dream coffins people stuff themselves into, hacking off their best and most interesting parts to make for a better fit.

This kind of sneering superiority isn’t charming on anyone, but it’s more forgivable in a teenager. At least, I hope it is. At the end of that glistening road lay a period of disintegration, wandering in a wilderness less alive than a desert. Beyond that? Some deaths. Some departures. Some new arrivals.

All of it leading here, to the monastic existence I find myself living now. A life I designed for myself, based on my own preferences and needs.

It turns out the quiet life is far richer and brighter than I ever thought it could be.

Young people need adventure.

Millenials — the maligned cohort I’m reluctantly included in — place more importance on foreign travel than their parents did. And the ominously named Generation Z already looks like repeating the pattern. Travel is a young person’s game — especially if you’re poor. Anybody who’s lugged a suitcase through the winding alleys of Venice knows that much.

If you’re going to travel, do it when you’re young and poor. Or when you’re old and rich enough to pay a young person to do the heavy lifting for you.

There’s nothing new about this. To be young is to be constantly seeking adventure. Take a look at the advert Shackleton posted in the newspaper to hire men for his quest to the South Pole in 1914. “Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful.” Thousands applied. With the exception of the officers, the average age of the crew on the doomed voyage was 30.

We need adventure. Joseph Campbell called life “the soul’s high adventure”. At its best, that’s what it should be. The joy that mountaineer George Mallory talked about, the joy that is what life means and what life is for. That’s adventure.

There are lines to climb Mount Everest now. The South Pole has been tracked and trodden ad infinitum. The only blank spaces left on the map are the depths of the ocean or the cold reaches of space where you and I will never go.

And we can’t go anywhere right now anyway. What adventures are still open to us are mainly intellectual.

Euripides wrote that “the good and the wise lead quiet lives.”

To Cicero, if you had a library and a garden, you had everything you needed. Watching lizards scuttle in the ruins of his villa on the shore of the whispering ocean, I suspected he had a point.

To Thoreau, most men lead lives of quiet desperation. When I rode the bus on my way to a college I hated along with everything else, that was all I could see. The scream behind the smile. The long dark tea-time of the soul.

When all you’ve seen is bars, of course the world looks like a prison. On those wet-floored buses, everything seemed to be a trap. I couldn’t know at the time that my escape was only a year or two away. My high adventure was about to begin. And in time, it would teach me the virtues of a quiet life.

Cincinnatus retired from his position as a consul of Rome to work on his farm outside the city. When the city was threatened with invasion, the authorities made him dictator to lead the defense of Rome. He was plowing his fields when they came to tell him he had supreme power. Cincinnatus led the battle to defeat Rome’s enemies, then gave up the throne and returned to his farm fifteen days later.

Inspired in part by this example, George Washington gave up the presidency after two terms, over the objections of those who wanted him to rule more like the king he had helped defeat.

These are examples of men who changed the course of history, despite their own desire to live more quietly. But the world is full of people who live lives of quiet glory.

The soul’s high adventure doesn’t have to be an outward journey.

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell tells the story of the concierge at Chartres Cathedral who lived in a small room behind the choir screen. It was the home of a man living in constant, lifelong meditation.

When the weather allows, I head to the park.

There’s a spot on a cliff that overlooks the ocean. Eagles sometimes fish in the bright bay. Now and then, the hulking shape of cruise ships slip silently by in the distance.

The spot is so gorgeous that even the sun likes to linger there, warming the rocks and warming me as I lounge in a cheap hammock between two friendly trees.

I read. I write. I watch sleek seals play in the restless water below. And no matter how long I spend there, I’m always alone. No one disturbs me. In that perfect sunny solitude, I rule over a tiny kingdom of absolute silence.

The truth is, the happiest times of my life have been the quietest.

Being young in a foreign city was an adventure I recommend to anyone. But even then, my day-to-day existence had the same monastic quality to it. My apartment was silent when I would come home to it, everything left where I had put it. It was wonderful.

Later, when I spent two years living in Europe with my wife, I wasn’t alone. We had our share of adventures. But that same silence was there, on our evening balcony in the shadow of Vesuvius or in our garden in the south of France. Life was quiet. And in that silence, you can hear the gentle music of your own deepest self.

What nasty teenage me didn’t realize is just how difficult it can be to live quietly. The fortitude it takes to keep a house in order, to raise a family, to maintain what you have against a world that wants it back. The quiet heroism of the everyday.

It’s easy to feel superior, to look at lives more dazzling, more colorful, more thrilling. Every movie and TV show tells us that we should be out saving the world, killing our enemies, and having protracted unprotected sex with strangers.

But some of the best people I’ve known lived very quietly indeed. I think of my grandmother, whose life was one of duty and self-sacrifice. I think of my father, who traveled the world as a young man and now has no desire to go even as far as the next town over.

I think of those people, in a world that seems designed to pit us against each other, who have managed to hurt far fewer people than me.

Adventures are a fine thing, especially when you’re young. But there’s another kind of magic in things with deep roots. And there’s real gold in the silence of a quiet life.