The Quiet Book: An Illustrated Love Letter to Life’s Meaningful Pauses
by Maria PopovaA sweet celebration of the nuanced stillnesses that comprise aliveness.
“There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy… the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul… the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos,” wrote Paul Goodman in his sublime taxonomy of the nine kinds of silence.
If silence’s sister faculty — solitude — is partway between apathetic extinction and deliberate eradication because we’re failing to cultivate childhood’s essential capacity for “fertile solitude,” then it follows that the survival of silence depends in large part on cultivating a healthy relationship with it, as well as a deep appreciation of its many gifts, in childhood.
That’s precisely what writer Deborah Underwood and illustrator Renata Liwska set out to do, with great subtlety and sensitivity, in The Quiet Book (public library) — a gentle reminder that, despite what our culture of compulsive stimulation may have led us to believe, silence is itself the stuff of substance; the moments it fills are not the inbetweenery of life but life itself — rich and nuanced and irrepressibly, if quietly, alive.
There is the wistful (“last one to get picked up from school quiet”), the mischievous (“thinking of a good reason you were drawing on the wall quiet”), the tender (“sleeping sister quiet”), the enraptured (“first snowfall quiet”), and all kinds of other quietudes that call to mind Maira Kalman’s beautiful and evocative phrase “the moments inside the moments inside the moments.” Liwska’s delicate illustrations, inspired by vintage Polish poster art and yet unmistakably, singularly her own, deepen and make more dimensional Underwood’s already bewitching words.
What emerges is at once a Goodnight Moon for a new generation and a modern celebration of adulthood’s increasingly endangered art of seeking out those pockets of stillness where, as Wendell Berry memorably put it, “one’s inner voices become audible.”
Complement The Quiet Book with Christopher Ricks’s bewitching reading of Goodman’s nine silences, then revisit Bertrand Russell on why happiness is contingent on our capacity for “fruitful monotony” — for what is quietude if not a supreme monotony of sound that enlivens the soul?
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