Virtual Silence

When you live alone, there are many hours of silence. Where I live, there is no noise from furnace fans or air conditioners, no noisy neighbors or barking dogs, and no traffic. This morning there is no wind, and the birds are still asleep or have flown south.

If someone were here, we could sit in silence. But how do we sit together in silence virtually? I must write so that you know I am present. I do not speak the words I write—I write silently. You read silently. How do I know that you are there if I cannot see you? This is the nature of virtual silence.

In a silent place, you can experiment. Close the books; turn off the music and spoken word. Allow no ideas or concepts to form in your mind. If they do come, you can challenge and interrogate them. Call them out—you are a concept created by the language of other people. Perhaps you even know where the idea came from.

In a silent place, you can imagine that there is only process. The house will never be perfect. It is a continuous process of taking out, rearranging, adding and taking away. So, too, with your body, which never reaches a perfect end state.

Writing a Substack is a process. You set it in motion. Readers come and go. You have lots to say or nothing to say. If you put no energy into it, the Substack process begins to slow down and dissolves into nothing. But, perhaps, it has generated other processes along the way.

Faras Cathedral’s St Anne (7th–9th century). National Museum in Warsaw, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ruby Granger’s videos are all about processes. She shows us the process of making tea, of setting up her room, or of studying for her degree. In this week’s video, she talks about the importance of taking time off and resting when you are ill (1:34).

At Oxford, your dissertation supervisor is often in a different college. Both of my supervisors were at St. Catherine’s College. In a surprising coincidence, Ruby’s dissertation supervisor is at my old college Keble. She includes a few walking shots of Keble on her way to see her supervisor (9:27–9:42).

I was also surprised to learn that Oxford is still using Philip Gaskell’s book A New Introduction to Bibliography. This is hardly new. It was required reading nearly forty years ago, as was D. F. McKenzie’s books and articles. Ruby says, “I love McKenzie’s work. He’s one of my favorite projects.” I felt sad to hear her say this. McKenzie taught the bibliography and textual criticism class when I was at Oxford. So, I was able to learn directly from him. I wonder what Ruby would think if she knew that I saw him pushing his bicycle and chatting with his student Christine Ferdinand on S. Parks Road near Rhodes House in 1986 and that he divorced his wife in 1989 and married Christine in 1994. Perhaps this happens often in Oxford. Iris Murdoch’s book The Severed Head describes a similar situation.

I remember that I wanted to meet Iris Murdoch (my first supervisor John Bayley’s wife) and the great Joycean biographer Richard Ellmann, but both were too ill by that time. Maybe there are younger people who would be envious that Terry Eagleton was my second supervisor. Don’t be. We met once a term at the King’s Arms near the Bodleian Library over a pint of beer. Instead of discussing my dissertation, we talked about playwriting. I was writing a play called The Feast of Merit, and he was writing a play called The White, the Gold, and the Gangrene. He invited me to come to St. Catherine’s College to hear its first reading, which I did. My play had its first reading at Keble the following year.

Ruby mentions in her video that she likes to do some creative work alongside her academic work. It would be interesting to take a look at all the creative side projects that Oxford students have produced when they were supposed to be studying or writing their dissertations.