Shaddap You Face: Why a Vow of Silence Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea

“Shhh! You’ve just entered a no-talking zone.”

The last time I heard that one was two years ago when my best friend and I accidentally ended up in the “quiet car” of an Amtrak train in New York City’s Penn Station bound for Washington D.C. Don’t speak? Nothing makes you want to say something more than being told that you can’t.

But a little vow of silence never hurt anyone. Indeed, the zipping of the lips seems to have done wonders for those Buddhist monks I encountered in Thailand, and I like to think that the peaceful, serene aura that hovered over them like a halo inspired my own recently newfound composure and self-possession, from the outside in.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never taken a vow of silence that lasted more than five minutes. If I had, though, the ideal time for me to take it would have been before last Thursday’s post-mortem lunch with my ex.

I don’t believe this type of meeting ever goes well. The last one I had, on Valentine’s Day almost exactly 10 years ago, was more superfluous than disastrous — it added nothing to the love story, interrupted. But when you find yourself having an out of body experience mid-conversation, floating above the table, admonishing your seated self — “Why are you still talking? Shaddap you face!” — it becomes painfully obvious that strong and silent can be a far more flattering social pose than annoyingly loquacious, darting from topic to topic like some Olympian conversationalist.

Ugh!

In a classic case of too little too late, I haven’t said more than a few words since I hugged my ex goodbye and wished him well. Sure there has been the odd “thank you,” ‘have a nice day,” “my Wi-Fi isn’t working,” “one for the 1.30 showing of The Artist,” to supermarket workers, to one of the ladies who answers the phone at my building’s reception desk, to the guy selling movie tickets at Kino Cinemas in the Melbourne CBD, but not much more coming out of my mouth aside from an occasional yawn.

It’s been so long since I’ve worked in an office, where “Must engage in small talk” is often part of the job description, that I sometimes forget that to speak or not to speak is mostly my prerogative. But yesterday when I was walking, solo and silent, to the supermarket, it dawned on me: I hadn’t had a single live full-length face-to-face conversation, or uttered more than one sentence in one sitting (or standing), in nearly a week.

Do emails count? One of the reasons I hadn’t even noticed my physical silence is because my days had been filled with communication. I’d been writing emails, posting Facebook status updates, tweeting, sending text messages and even instant messaging (which I rarely do, but I must have subconsciously been overcompensating for my lack of vocal participation in everyday life), so while no one has heard a peep out of me, that doesn’t mean they haven’t heard from me.

But are you talking if you aren’t saying anything? Have all the rules changed in the 21st century, this age of semi-anonymous communication by machinery? Our capacity for holding face-to-face conversations has been diminishing for more than a decade now. Perhaps in the future, voices will be necessary only for singers and for actors who want to be stars in the era of talkies?

Is The Artist, which, appropriately, I saw a few days into my silent phase, as prescient as it is enjoyable? Although it’s not so much a silent move — there’s lot of music, loud music — as one that’s devoid of audible conversations, if you tilt your head and look at it a certain way, the strong contender for the Best Picture Oscar can be seen as a companion piece of sorts to The King’s Speech, last year’s winner that was all about the gift of gab and whose lead character, like George Valentin in The Artist, was similarly crippled by difficulty speaking. Was The Artist so enjoyable because no one in it spoke out loud? Would I have loved Jean Dujardin’s performance so much if he had been as chatty as George Clooney in The Descendants?

And what about me at this very moment? Have you broken your vow of silence if you are still making noise as your fingers furiously strike your laptop keyboard, racing to keep up with your thoughts? Tap tap tap… tap tap… tap tap… tap tap tap… Since I stopped talking, these are the sort of questions that have joined the cluster of thoughts already crowding and boggling my mind.

Use it or lose it. That’s what they say. I don’t know if it applies to the voice, too, but lest I become a mute, yesterday when I realized that I hadn’t really spoken in five days, I turned up my iPod and sang along, out loud. “There ain’t nobody better, oh, baby baby, we belong togetheeeeerrrrr.”

I didn’t sound nearly as good as Mariah Carey, but at least I could still let out an off-pitch squeal that, judging from the stares I received from passersby, was probably just as bad as whatever I was babbling to my ex about during my last full-on conversation.

Before you assume that I’m turning into some Greta Garbo-esque recluse, I’m not. (Though I’ve always imagined that someday, if I make it to 80, I would disappear into my ivory tower, never to be heard again.) I have people to talk to, a loose social circle, but even the life of the party needs to take some time off now and then.

Following the double-header of last Wednesday’s Soundgarden concert (I tried so hard to emulate Chris Cornell, it’s a wonder that I didn’t end up with laryngitis, which, come to think of it, wouldn’t have been the worst that could have happened, considering what did happen the next day) and Thursday’s ill-fated lunch, I needed some time to sit still, alone, in silence.

Which is pretty much what writers do anyway. As anyone who saw Young Adult knows, it can be one of the loneliest professions, one with lots of typing and very little talking. But the interesting twist is that no matter what our mouths are doing, writers are constantly communicating — with words, if not, George Valentin-style, with over-the-top mugging. That’s why it’s so difficult for us to differentiate sometimes between what we’ve written and what we’ve said.

One of the more interesting lessons that I’ve learned from my six days (so far) of silence is that being a writer isn’t so different from being an actor. We both hide behind masks of a sort. For actors, it’s a character. For writers, it’s words, beautiful, florid, powerful words, expressing all those things that many of us wouldn’t dare say out loud. But from the safety of behind our laptops, we erase our self-imposed boundaries.

Actors say that listening and reacting are the most important technical aspects of acting. It’s similar for writers: Say less, and you’ll listen more, you’ll see more, you’ll have more to write about. I will talk again — that’s a vow — but for now, I think I’ll just continue to enjoy the silence, my own, and all of the mental benefits that come with it.