Summary: If silence could tell us a story about itself, what would it say?<br> This could be the question that Jane Brox answers in her most recent book, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements in Our Lives (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Brox is the award-winning author of several acclaimed works of literary nonfiction, including Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light and Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm.<br> <br> In her fascinating study, Brox explores how silence impacts people both as individuals and as communities, by considering how silence has shaped two of the most archetypal institutions in western society: the monastery and the penitentiary. But she also considers the ways in which silence has particularly impacted the lives of women — both inside and outside such institutions.<br> <br> Silence has always been important to my life, partly because I'm a writer and to me, there's never enough silence when I'm working. Not only when I'm working at the page, but before and afterwards — that's the place in which the work grows. — Jane Brox<br> Brox offers us tremendous insight into how silence is critical to her process as a creative writer. Having first encountered silence in her childhood on a farm, she grew up to embrace the writer's life, and discovering how essential silence has been to her ability to think — and create — in a comprehensive way.<br> <br> <br> <br> She talks about having a long-standing appreciation for Thomas Merton, which led to her organizing her book around his story — and the story of an obscure nineteenth-century convict from America's first penitentiary. But she also looks at how women have experienced silence in some very different ways from men's experience of silence.<br> <br> What emerged for Brox was a deepened appreciation for just how complex the human relationship to silence really is — that a simplistic distinction between "imposed silence" (in the penitentiary) and "chosen silence" (in the monastery) simply does not adequately reveal just how nuanced the social history of silence truly is.<br> <br> Some of the resources and authors we mention in this episode:<br> <br> Jane Brox, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements in Our Lives <br> Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light<br> Jane Brox, Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm<br> Jane Brox, Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History<br> Jane Brox, Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and its Family<br> Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain<br> Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas<br> Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals<br> Thomas Merton, A Life in Letters<br> William Shakespeare, The Complete Works<br> Benjamin Rush, The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush<br> Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind<br> Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence<br> Tillie Olsen, Silences<br> Seamus Heaney, Field Work<br> Agnes Day, Light in the Shoe Shop: A Cobbler's Contemplations<br> <br> Silence is an extreme place; and it's total exposure. Even the most balanced person is tested there. That's in part why people seek it, to see where they will go; that's in party why people flee it, because it's so terrifying. There's no protection in the silence... There's no place to hide in silence. — Jane Brox<br> Episode 54: The Social History of Silence: A Conversation with Jane Brox<br> Hosted by: Kevin Johnson<br> With: Cassidy Hall, Carl McColman<br> Guest: Jane Brox<br> Date Recorded: February 4, 2019
