Notes on Silence

The Sustaining Power of Silence

A Reflection by Jessie Chaffee ’97

Before I entered Friends in the sixth grade, being quiet was something I felt embarrassed about. As a shy young person, I assumed that silence wasn’t a strength, but something lacking. Then I got to Friends, where every day began with silence during Meeting for Worship. All 100+ Middle Schoolers would funnel into the Meetinghouse—laughing with friends or dealing with social rifts, anticipating a test or an upcoming game, self-conscious about the millions of shifts we were experiencing or impatient for those changes to arrive—and then we’d settle into the rows of benches and stop talking. Adolescence is a noisy time, and those quiet moments were a gift. It was only 10 minutes, but in those 10 minutes, we could hit pause on some of the chaos and reflect on it—or not reflect on it, if that’s what we needed.

We weren’t always perfectly quiet—I remember finding ways to communicate with friends across the Meetinghouse, or mornings we’d dissolve into giggle fits, the bench backs shaking against us—but by and large, the silence in the room held. What was powerful wasn’t the silence alone, of course. It’s that we were in silence together. And it was out of that communal silence that students often felt comfortable being vulnerable, standing up to break the quiet with their own thoughts. In my seven years at Friends, I heard my peers open up about confusion, joy, sadness, losing themselves and finding themselves.

And I found myself in those years too. In English classes with Christina Moustakis, John Byrne and Maria Fahey, I found my voice as a writer. In drama classes with Jennifer Hayes and music classes with Bob Rosen and Linda Monssen, I became comfortable on stage. I was still shy and often quiet, but less so. By senior year, I had enough confidence to stand up in morning Meeting and break the silence myself. Shortly after graduation, I went on a trip with a group of close friends. One of my sharpest memories of that time is pausing on a hike to hold our own meeting. Sitting quietly together, the silent woods around us, we contemplated our changing worlds and the new places we would scatter to in the fall. It was grounding, and it made me realize how much I would miss being in silence with others. In the years that followed, I sought out similar opportunities, and silence remained an important part of my life.

As a writer, silence is something I rely on. I often think about a story we discussed in Christina Moustakis’s class— Borges’s “A Bao a Qu,” a riddle of a tale in which a tower guarded by a mythological creature promises a view of “the loveliest landscape in the world.” The only way to reach the the summit is to forget that you’re making the climb. For me, writing works best when I become lost in the act of doing it, and the way I get there is through silence. It is when I am still and quiet that I can best see the world’s movement, feel myself in it while also forgetting myself, and then find the words to describe it. As I experienced at Friends, silence doesn’t have to mean isolation, and whenever I can, I write with others. We’ll meet at a library, or someone’s home, or, during this pandemic, on Zoom, and then we’ll write—in silence, but together.

When I became a teacher, I often began writing classes with silent walks—we’d circle a city block, taking in as much as we could before putting pen to paper. Before the sixth grade play I directed each year, I would, as Jennifer Hayes had done before Friends productions, have students stand in a circle holding hands in silence, sending each other good thoughts. It helped to calm the pre-performance jitters and allowed students to appreciate themselves and their classmates—dressed as Greek gods and heroes and monsters—before we broke the quiet with a pulse that would travel hand to hand. They were ready to take the stage.

When our officiant asked my husband, Brendan, and I what traditions we wanted to incorporate into our wedding ceremony, the first thing I mentioned was a minute of silence. Those 60 seconds, when we could hear the wind moving through the trees and the birds at work, allowed us to be fully present with our family and friends, binding us to them and to each other. When Brendan and I had our son, Finn, several years later, one of my favorite moments was the quiet of the recovery room. Neither Brendan nor I had slept for many hours, but I didn’t want to sleep—I wanted to stay present in that exhausted, joyful silence with my family, in the magnitude of the moment, Finn’s soft hiccups punctuating the quiet.

Now a dynamic and energetic one-and-a-half-year-old, Finn loves to talk and sing and laugh and run, run, run. He also enjoys sitting quietly with me, sometimes watching the busy world out our window, and sometimes simply contemplating each other. In her essay “The Delusions of Certainty,” Siri Hustvedt describes these moments of intense looking—gazing in silence, but with intention—as empathy-building, learning about other people and what it means to be a person. That’s what Meeting for Worship offers as well—the opportunity to look inward, yes, but also to look outward, to connect with the people with whom you’re sitting, with empathy and openness.

One of the books Finn and I read together is The Quiet Book, a picture book about all the different kinds of quiet, some of them solitary, but many of them shared: Right before you yell “SURPRISE!” quiet; Before the concert starts quiet; Best friends don’t need to talk quiet. I hope that Finn will continue to be expressive and exuberant, that he won’t sink into silence out of insecurity or doubt. I also hope that he’ll have the confidence to be quiet, with himself and with others, and to discover, as I did in my years at Friends, the sustaining strength that silence can provide.

ABOUT JESSIE

Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, “Florence in Ecstasy,” was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2017 and was translated into six languages. She received a Fulbright grant to travel to Italy to complete the novel. She is a contributing writer at Words Without Borders, and she previously taught at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine and the City College of New York. She is very grateful to her Friends Seminary teachers for instilling in her a love of writing and teaching. She lives in New York City with her husband and son.