In The World of Silence, Max Picard describes silence as an active presence, a kind of independent and infinite substrate upon which all speech emerges from and then descends into. He believes silence to be a sacred and necessary component of living, and is quite distraught at the perceived lack of it in his day. Since he was writing in the middle of the last century, he’s particularly perturbed by the radio and it’s ever-present noise:

Through the continuity of radio-noise, therefore, man is inspired with a false sense of security. He is led to imagine that the radio represents something continuous and that he is himself continuous. A man goes to work: radio accompanies him, it surrounds him at his work. He goes to sleep, and radio-noise is the last thing in his consciousness before he sleeps. He wakes up, and radio-noise is there again, as if it were something quite independent of man altogether, something more real than man himself, and the guarantee of his own continuity. It is always around him, always available, and the one thing that seems always ready to care for him, to provide for him.

Picard, The World of Silence, page 206

It is perhaps not terribly remarkable that you could rephrase this to refer not to “radio-noise” but to the both visual and auditory noise of smartphones and it would be just as relevant. But as ever it feels useful to me to be reminded that many of our present-day troubles have roots in the past; not because it suggests we will never be rid of them but rather because it means we have the wealth of our ancestor’s experience to draw from.

Picard is more pessimistic:

There is no longer any space in which it is possible to be silent, for space has all been occupied now in advance.

Picard, The World of Silence, page 199

Here is where Picard and I diverge. Picard worries that we have banished silence from the world, that it may not be possible to restore it. This emerges, I think, in part from his Catholicism, and from a cosmology that centers “man”-kind. (He has scant attention for women.) But from where I stand, the universe is a great and vast silence, far older and more immense than anything humans have given thought to let alone spoken of. However much noise we insist on making on this one small and fragile world, we can never overcome that silence. It will always and forever remain—even when (especially when) we have not the wisdom to hear it.