I live a quiet life now.
By “quiet,” I mean, in part, uneventful—depending on one’s definition of “event.”
My husband says, “I never needed ‘exciting.’ I don’t need to get away from what I’ve got.” He knows how to cultivate both quiet and silence. I am learning about the former, but I struggle with the latter.
A friend asked me recently, “What is it you think other people are doing that’s so exciting? We’re just at home watching television, like you.”
Maybe I don’t need exciting, either.
By all accounts, Fernando Pessoa led a very quiet life. Yet he inhabited numerous other selves—his heteronyms—or they inhabited him; in any case, their voices must have filled his mind as they filled his pages, an ongoing chorus or cacophony or perhaps repertory company of players:
I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as
soon as it begins to be dreamed, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming
it, and not I.
To create, I’ve destroyed myself; I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist on the
inside except externally. I’m the living stage where various actors act out various plays.
And of course, a large number of the 25,426 fragments he left behind have been collected in The Book of Disquietude (sometimes translated as The Book of Disquiet), a title he himself proposed, initially for the “factless autobiography” of one of his heteronyms.
Everything gets measured: happiness, steps, cholesterol, stress, medication, pain, excitement. How would I measure quietude? Mine has little to do with talking or not talking, though sometimes that matters. It has something to do with staying at home, a kind of burrowing-in to my house. With not going much of anywhere. Sometimes music is playing, but it doesn’t detract or distract from the quiet. Sometimes I just play music in my mind. The cats have a great deal to say, which might be thought of as disturbing the quiet, when they’re not tucked into themselves asleep (one does snore, lightly, a soft, soprano outbreath), but their calls and cries and demands to be petted and loved slide easily into the smooth surface of the day.
The loudest sound by far, aside from the vacuum cleaner, may be my moans and screams in the midst of nightmares.
Oh, but I realize that though I am shaken, like the cats, by loud sounds—a telephone ringing can make me jump—I tend to create a certain amount of clatter on my own, dropping books or flatware, rummaging in the dish drain, shifting pots and pans. I actually scare myself with the sudden noise.
At night, my husband falls asleep almost immediately, his exhalations taking various forms and tones, but steady. I lie next to him, ever grateful for his presence, envious of his fast-falling-asleep capacity. I am trying to decide what to think about in order to fall asleep. “The point is not to think,” he’s told me.
In the afternoons, I sometimes find that despite any internal racket, I accomplish what feels like not thinking, like hollowness in the brain department, as if all thought has drained from me. This state is not the same as quiet or silence, since the void can roar. By nighttime, my brain has filled up again, and I can’t find a way to let the contents out. Brain as bathtub.
Not so long ago, Covid was a lurking presence, a clamoring, claustrophobic threat, assailing us with its daily death tolls. Strangely, however, I didn’t think much about my own dying, not in the way I did throughout much of my life. Until fifteen or twenty years ago, the words “I wish I were dead” rattled around in me. Such a wish, I realize now, is a category removed from “I want to die,” which implies and projects taking action, whereas the first statement, my companion for so long, presumes passivity.
Of course, death silences us: but is there eternal quiet, as we hope?
“Come up and be dead!” cries the seamstress Jenny Wren, whom Dickens calls “the little creature,” in Our Mutual Friend. Jenny, herself facing numerous hardships, beckons her friends to ascend to the roof, high above London, above “the people who are alive, crying, and working, and calling to one another down in the close dark streets,” for up there “such a chain has fallen from you, and such a strange good sorrowful happiness comes upon you! … Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!” That invitation, acknowledging and ironizing life’s miseries, offering a respite both simple and wise—offering quiet—deeply appealed to me.
Listen: Is there no silence within me?
Without, the furnace begins to tick, then the warm air whooshes; one of the cats snores, a tiny, high-pitched exhalation; my husband resettles himself in his office chair, which responds with a slight metallic grunt; crows squabble, their strident calls insistent; a car revs in, revs out, on the road below.
Within, words and sighs rattle, like Bingo numbers in their tumbler. Around and around.
How shall one thing, one thought, one sentence, follow from another? How to churn chaos into, if not gold, then coherence?
I was never a fan of fairy tales. They seemed dangerous.
Though my mind churns, I know that there is now some safety I can depend on.
Settle, says one voice. Settle for, or settle in?
Crave, says another voice.
Crave a place to settle, say my mind and body.
But they also say, You have that place now.
I think back, though more and more rarely, to the noise, the panoply of noises, that bombarded me—that bombards everyone save the most cossetted, the wealthiest—in New York City, where I lived for twenty-four bombarding, noisy years. The decibel level and the range of grating, grinding, overpowering sounds only increased the claustrophobia I felt in that packed city.
I never did find New York exciting, by the way. A quiet life seemed impossible there.
I close my eyes and see a highway, an interstate, cut into mountains. Not many cars, very little sound; even the normal highway whooshing is subdued. I see from the car I’m riding in, and I see from above. I seem to be en route to anywhere or nowhere. From both perspectives, inside the car and far above, I am floating, hovering, without a real destination, halfway lost, untethered, aware of a vagueness, an almost emptiness.
Fill up with words, spill them out. Let them make up for what you’ve attempted to know, what you’re tempted to know. Let them pretend to create that futile, vital hope for shapeliness and solidity. Let them compensate for the fear of the wind rushing through you, dispersing you.
Make up something, anyway, anyhow.
Read this sentence, from Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows, follow it, let the spaces open up: “Become aware that the space between each sentence and its subject-matter may well reach endlessly in directions unknown to me.” Look through one of the many windows, window after window. Be consoled by the fictional access to invisible worlds.
Be consoled by the words and the images that have drawn you. Return to Wallace Stevens’s “perfection of thought,” an ideal of reader, book, house, everything:
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book, and summer night
Was like conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and world was calm.
In its eight stanzas, “The House Was Quiet” transforms quiet—transforms reading—into meaning. It elides house and book, elides calm, quiet, truth, summer, night, the reader, so that they become, not one, but one another.
The poem allows the past tense to find an opening into the present.
I look out the window above my desk and see cardinals, jays, sparrows, finches, woodpeckers, bluebirds—I welcome their songs, even the squawk of the jays and the tenor drilling of the woodpeckers, since all amplify the quiet—and now, with a feeder for them, hummingbirds, who announce their flighty presence with the buzz-beating of their tiny wings. I think, This may be enough. It is just quiet enough.
Martha Graham Wiseman grew up in New York and North Carolina. She has been an acting student, a dancer, and an editor. She taught English at Skidmore College. Her essays have been published in The Georgia Review, Fish Anthology 2021, Ponder Review, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Under the Sun, The Santa Ana River Review, The Bookends Review, Streetlight, oranges journal (UK), Kestrel, Map Literary, Queens Quarterly (Canada), Broad River Review, and Cutleaf. She has also published fiction and poetry.