Alone, but together: the noise that protects us from silence

It is a late-summer afternoon and the beach is starting to empty. A little further along there is a group of friends I know well: beach umbrellas set close together, a shared cool box, someone loudly telling a story the others have already heard, and everyone laughing as if it were the first time. My son watches them for a while, then turns to me and says, with that disarming naturalness only young people have: “But they can’t stand each other. And yet they’re always together.”

I didn’t answer straight away. I had spent a lot of time with that group, gladly and with the kindness I try to show everyone, and I had never really asked myself what held it together. Yet the clues were there. In the confidences I received, each of them had something to say about the others: judgements whispered after a dinner, ironic remarks about whoever had just left, the openly admitted weariness of having to meet up again the following Saturday. And the following Saturday, without fail, everyone met up again, just as they did for the dinners, the concerts, the aperitifs, the outings and even the occasional trip. In one afternoon my son had seen what had been right in front of my eyes for years.

Noise as a refuge

Pascal wrote that all of humanity’s unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room. He said it in the seventeenth century, when “diversion” did not yet take the form of a group chat that is always on, but the mechanism he described is the same: we keep ourselves busy so as not to have to come face to face with ourselves. For him, divertissement was distraction, the act of looking elsewhere so as not to see our own condition.

There are groups of friends that work exactly like this. They grow out of a shared need to fill time rather than out of affinity, and a full calendar becomes the proof that life is going well. Yet if you listen carefully, what passes between them is background noise rather than intimacy: chatter that asks for nothing, jokes that risk nothing, people who are present without ever really meeting. It is an irritating noise, at times, but for those who need it, it has one enormous merit: it covers the silence.

The idle talk that holds them together

The glue in groups like these is often criticism rather than affection. Whoever is absent becomes the topic of the evening: one person’s job, another’s choices, the couple who have just walked out of the restaurant. People smile at whoever arrives and pass comment on whoever leaves. In private, each of them keeps a list of things they can’t stand about the others and shares it with whoever happens to be next to them at that moment, only to find themselves, the next time, sitting at the same table and raising a glass with the same people.

Heidegger called this kind of talk, which has lost touch with what it is talking about, “idle talk”: it repeats itself, passes from mouth to mouth, and gives the impression of having understood everything without ever having really looked. It is the most comfortable form of inauthentic life, the one in which we let ourselves be lived by what “they say” instead of answering in the first person. And there is a rule that anyone who has received many confidences learns sooner or later: whoever talks to you about others talks to others about you. In a group like this, everyone’s back is shared territory. Everyone knows it, and that is precisely why no one leaves, because leaving would mean becoming, finally and for everyone, the favourite topic.

Why silence is so frightening

Being alone with ourselves means listening to questions we usually keep at a distance. Who am I when no one is looking at me? What have I chosen in my life, and what has simply happened to me? Many people have had a great deal without ever really deciding anything: a house that was there ready for them, an inherited job, ties that came from habit rather than desire. It is not a fault, but it has a price. Those who have never chosen struggle to recognise themselves, and those who do not recognise themselves fear the moment when the room falls silent, because in that silence they might find no one there.

The group then becomes a kind of relational anaesthesia. People don’t love one another, but they keep one another company; they don’t hold one another in esteem, but they confirm to one another that all is well. It is a fragile balance and at the same time an extraordinarily resilient one, because no one has any interest in breaking it.

The prisoner who returns to the cave

Plato tells of a prisoner who, freed from his chains, leaves the cave and at last sees the light. When he goes back to tell the others that the shadows on the wall are not reality, he is not welcomed as a liberator. He is mocked, because his eyes can no longer get used to the dark and his words threaten a world in which everyone, deep down, is comfortable. Plato adds an unsettling detail: if they could, they would kill him.

Anyone who leaves a group like this, or who simply begins to see it for what it is, goes through something similar. There is no need to have said terrible things: it is enough to have stopped taking part in the noise. The distance of someone who doesn’t fall into line is experienced as an accusation, and the response is often irony, exclusion, a version of events rewritten for the benefit of those who stay. It hurts, and it should not be played down. But there is also a subtle consolation in that pain: it means you have left the cave.

An inhabited room

Sherry Turkle has spoken of a generation that is “alone together”, connected and at the same time unable to truly be with anyone. Her insight holds even far from screens. There is a solitude that isolates and a solitude that nourishes. The first is the one the noisy group protects us from and which, paradoxically, it feeds, because we are surrounded but nobody knows anybody. The second belongs to those who have learned to stay in their own room without running away, and who, for that very reason, can choose whom to share their time with. Rilke urged the young poet to love his solitude and to bear its pain, because that is where the ability to meet another person without using them takes shape.

That is the solitude I know. I spend most of my free time alone and I don’t experience it as a void to be filled: it is the time in which I write, in which I work on my book and on this blog, in which I try out paths I don’t know. I chose, for example, not to entrust my book to a publisher and to publish it myself, so as to learn first-hand what it means to bring an idea to people, through social media too. These are things you can only do when silence is an inhabited place and not a threat.

That is why that group was never a shelter for me. I spent time with them because I enjoyed it, because I believed it was friendship and because kindness towards others comes naturally to me. Perhaps this is exactly the difference that appeared so clearly to me that afternoon on the beach: those who are not afraid of their own room can leave the cave without looking back, while those who fear it need the cave to stay full, noisy, always inhabited by someone to talk about.

In front of the mirror

I am not writing these lines to judge those who stay in the noise. Everyone carries wounds that cannot be seen from the outside, and those who cannot bear silence often knew, as children, too much silence or too much din. My son’s words did not uncover a fear I did not have; they gave me back a clearer view of something I had mistaken for friendship. It hurts to realise it, especially when you have given sincerely, but it is a pain that sets you free, because it teaches us to tell apart those who seek us out and those who use us so as not to be left alone with themselves.

Perhaps the question worth taking home is both simple and uncomfortable: the people I spend my time with, did I choose them, or do I need them so as not to hear myself? There is no shame in the answer, whatever it may be. There is only the possibility, each time we ask it in earnest, of taking one more step out towards the light.