Learning and the brain: On silence and the significant

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

- Blaise Pascal, Pensées

At the end of The Great Gatsby, after Gatsby's death, the narrator Nick Carraway rubs off "an obscene word, scrawled by some boy" on the white steps of Gatsby's now empty and meaningless mansion, the mansion that stands as a symbol of his ambition - for Daisy, for rebirth, for the American Dream.

The "obscene word" is something like a sacrilege, though of course Gatsby's house is not a holy place; still, the mansion represents a pure ideal, and by erasing this slur, Nick protects this ideal. Importantly, his final thoughts on Gatsby emerge as he is sprawled on the beach under the moonlight, silently pondering the brief, "enchanted moment" the first Europeans experienced on arriving in America; potentially, he considers, this was the last moment in the history of humanity when our imagination equaled our tangible reality.

From then on, we have desecrated the ideal of America, with our greed, our spiritual sterility and our ambition. This is one message from The Great Gatsby: the pollution of the sacred - the obscene word written on white stone, the commercialization of what we once venerated, the noise above the signal.

Gatsby's parties, their raucousness, the sheer racket, drowned out the purity of his dream, however mismanaged his dream was in other ways.

And as we left Williams-Brice Stadium during the third quarter of the Missouri game last month - my first game since 2011 - I felt something like Nick did on that moon-filled night, like I wanted the world to be at a "moral attention forever."

Possibly it was the mid-20s woman with the Gamecock T-shirt that boasted, unashamedly, expletives in front of my young children, my new readers. Or it was the drinking, the selling of beer at college football games, that had, like Pavlov, fans up and down the stadium stairs all night between drives. Or maybe it was how, from the moment we entered the stadium, music and video and fireworks kept my nerves at a level 10. It had become Gatsby's party - "The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot," like the trio of young, drunken women behind us, perfectly nice, but forgetting their experience as they're having it. On the whole, we have become a culture enslaved by titillation.

I had initially been excited for my daughters to hear "2001" for the first time, to experience what I did as a young boy, to witness their excitement, but when everything is crescendo and no rise, "2001" came and went with not much of an impact, unless the dozens of fans around me who filmed the moment made an impact once they'd posted it to their social media accounts. Make no mistake, we are all "Sandstorm" now - that's the new brand, every nook and cranny filled with noise and busyness and activity. Have we paused to consider whether all of this "stuff" is necessary? Are we honoring the place itself and what it has stood for for so long? What traditions are worth keeping, and what "fluff" can go? This is not a unique phenomenon at USC; it's happening around the country, but does that excuse us from the responsibility of holding a different standard? Certainly I am not alone in thinking that all of this is just a little too much.

There was never time during the game for a break. Every moment, from time-outs to the transitions between quarters, was stuffed with activity and "please turn your attention to the field" for the next thing. The football game itself, what has been so sacred to the American imagination, was secondary to the performance of the event. That is, the game was no longer enough to keep the fans' attention. We now require the bloating triviality to the precise significant moment.

Even the prayer and national anthem, which called us all to attention and a brief solemnity, were a box that needed checking before the debauchery could ensue, sort of like clocking in before taking our place on the assembly line of gluttony - for more beer, for more excitement, for more noise to drown our lives.

The writer David Foster Wallace pinpointed the issue in an interview years ago:

"When you walk into most public spaces in America, it isn't quiet anymore [and] it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet anymore. [It] seems to me to have something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for yourself and go all the time, there's this other part of you that is almost hungry for silence and [for] quiet and [for] thinking hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of 30 seconds that doesn't get fed at all […] I think it's true that here in the U.S, every year, the culture gets more and more hostile; I don't mean hostile like angry, just [that] it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to understand. There are a lot of reasons, but particularly now in computer and internet culture, everything is so fast, and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves, but don't feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet; that can live in quiet, that can live without any kind of stimulation."

And my fear is how this busyness is beginning to become a plague in our schools. Where do students and teachers experience silence during the day? When is silence part of the instructional strategies a teacher uses? I don't mean the silence natural to a classroom of students working on a handout at the same time; I mean silence that catalyzes contemplation, real thinking, as Wallace describes, as an opportunity to understand something complicated, problems that are too complex for easy answers.

And whenever those opportunities are offered, when students have space to organize their thoughts about a piece of literature or to begin working on a piece of art, how quickly do they ask if they can use their headphones during the activity? (i.e., Can I please pump music into this experience? There is something very unsettling about the silence.)

Consider this, some research demonstrates that, on average, teachers provide 0.9 seconds (less than a full second) for students to respond to a question. What message does that send to our students? When I observe teachers, though I didn't think this when I was younger, I recognize now that master teachers are not afraid of the long pause, not afraid of providing time and space for students to think, not afraid to sit with a question before moving forward to cover their curriculum. But like the White Witch in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, many schools create environments that are all winter but no Christmas - all flurries and busyness but no real depth.

It will be criminal, of course, if we raise a generation of children who cannot be silent at the foot of the mountain, at the artistry of a master or at the magnanimity of the sea. Children who cannot recognize the timeless moment, where the present and the eternal meet, and we are humbled into silence. How many of our children - how many adults, myself primarily - "wonder," in the words of Henri Nouwen, "in each new situation if people wouldn't be better served by our silence than by our words"?

My favorite Christmas song, like many of you, is "Silent Night" - Stevie Nick's version is my personal favorite - and the quiet that precedes the soft singing from the congregation during the Candlelight Service reveals the significance of the moment, hesitant as we are that if we are too loud, we might somehow disrupt the incarnation of Christ into corporeal form. We may, in short, wake the baby, the one who did and will continue to completely disrupt our petty notions of what we believe to be important.

As the poet David Whyte explains, "Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty." In short, silence is the language of the humble, and currently, in our culture, silence is a foreign language.

May you and your family have a wonderful, reverent, and, when appropriate, quiet Christmas!

Kaneft is the headmaster of Wilson Hall in Sumter.