Martin Hähnel

A Quiet Moment

[...] I took a hike out to a quiet place on the far side of the lake. There, I could stand for fifteen or twenty minutes listening to a layer of the world beneath our civilization. Birds sang, insects chittered, the breeze stirred the grass, but even the lake was quiet.

Those twenty minutes of quiet recharge me more than any other meditation, more than a good night’s sleep, more than a holiday weekend at a resort. Sometimes, when I need a quiet place, I’ll imagine standing in the midst of the Great Plains a thousand years ago, with nothing but the sound of the wind in the grass. The brief time at the lakeside was as close as I had come to that fantasy of a quiet place.

I love this note by Jamie Todd Rubin. But I wanted to juxtapose this with Nick Simson's sentiment:

The web is this inherently noisy, chaotic place. Trying to tame it into a genteel, country club atmosphere never works out well either. I wish I learned this lesson much earlier and wasted less time in various walled gardens and silos that only looked nice on the outside. I’m so much happier on my front porch on my little block of our noisy digital neighborhood.

Because Rubin had embedded this beautiful moment in something else:

The world is a noisy place and it is hard to tune out the orchestra of modern life. So I seek quiet places. I returned to one such place over the holiday weekend, at a resort in West Virginia. The resort itself is noisy and chaotic as resorts often are. But it is surrounded by a state park, and early each morning before the revelers stirred and just as the sun was about to wink above the hill, [... see the Quote above].

The word genteel - for bad or worse - has become somewhat of a warning sign. So much so that a certain kind of writing that I have enjoyed has become satire.[1]

I guess what I want to say is this: Peace and quiet, wanting to write about it, wanting to experience it, dreaming about it, wanting to share it, is not on its own an indicator of ones values. I wish to continue to read (and as far as I am able: also to write) about all kinds of stuff. The loud moments as well as the quiet ones. On the web and otherwise.

My introverted desposition means that I seek out the quiet, the peaceful, the harmonious more than the loud. I feel like I thrive in the quiet. I wouldn't want to cede all of this aspect of life to genteel centrists. I would hope that there are moments and spaces where the quiet away from it all can still be felt and enjoyed without guilt. And that these places are not rendered politically problematic just 'cause they happen to be quiet places.

  1. To be clear: This satire is equal parts about AI, priviledged tech snobs and writing about peace and quiet. I only mourn the writing about the peace and quite part, to be exact. ↩︎