Quiet Time

George Prochnik pursues silence:

There's that beautiful line from Thoreau, that silence has various depths of fertility, like soil. I felt again and again when I was traveling how each one of these different microclimates of silence, a pocket park or a monastery or a Zen garden or a neurobiology laboratory, had such a different texture to it. And with the array of silence that is out there, I think if we made a commitment to try to help people who don't have any access to any kind of silence currently, to explore something of that spectrum, that there really would be tempting silences there for almost everyone.