All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
–Blaise Pascal, Pensées
![GC Myers- A Time to Listen](https://redtreetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/9924144-a-time-to-listen-sm.jpg)
A Time to Listen– At Principle Gallery
I was looking for something to attach to this new painting, A Time to Listen, that is included in my current Principle Gallery show, when I came across this post from about nine years back. The idea of sitting alone in silence in a room or listening silently in the great wide open seemed to be cut from the same cloth. Humans are often uncomfortable in silence or in listening to anything other than the sound of their own voices. I thought this quote from Pascal spoke for my painting. This is what I wrote in that original blog post:
This oft-quoted line from French mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal from back around 1660 shows us that even in that 1600’s world without smartphones and the constant crackle of 24/7 electronic and social media the idea of sitting in silence made most people anxious.
It’s an interesting thing to ponder. As I sit here, a little before 7 AM in my quiet studio, I can hear the thump of a bass from someone’s car stereo probably almost a mile away as it goes down the road. That is someone who obviously isn’t ready to embrace silence and believes that they are doing everyone else a favor by breaking it up so we won’t be bothered by it.
Hard as it is to admit, I was that guy at one point in my life. Noise was a way of making my presence, my existence, known.
The literal lion’s roar or barbaric yawp.
It was all an existential scream that tried to break through the ever-growing wall of sound from the outside world that threatened to obscure everything, melding all the noises into a huge suffocating drone of anonymity.
But my noise made no difference. No single sound, no one angst-filled scream could break through and show that I was indeed alive, that I mattered.
No, proof of existence was found sitting quietly in a room alone.
It wasn’t always easy. In the silence there is nowhere to hide from every random thought, every fear, every diminishment of yourself. But silence provides the gift of acceptance after a time and every relived thought and moment, good or bad, becomes equally part of the make-up of yourself. You come to realize that proof of your existence is in this acceptance and not in that barbarous scream that you once thought would leave a scar on the world as that proof.
It sounds too simple, I know. But simplicity is sometimes very difficult and I still find myself struggling to stay in the silence, to not revert to screaming out.
But most days I find that it is worth the effort.
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