“Thinking is often killed in half in much of your talking. Because the mind is a bird of space, it can spread its wings in a cage of words but it cannot fly.”
When one spends extended periods of time alone, around trees, away from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions, something strange and wondrous starts to happen — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self.
When Wendell Berry said that “real isolation is found in the wild areas, where one is without human obligation” — the locations where “one’s inner voices become loud” — he was well aware of this.
But I’ve discovered that the inner voice exists in opposition to the outside voice; the more we are pushed to talk, the more we are asked to direct our lips and ears to the outside world, and the harder it is to hear the hum of the world within and feel its magmatic churns of self-knowledge. Ursula K. Le Guin stated in her excellent poetic, philosophical, and feminist more-than-translation of the Tao Te Ching that “Who knows doesn’t talk. Who talks doesn’t know.”
Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931), another philosopher-poet of the highest order and most timeless hold, addressed the connection between silence, solitude, and self-knowledge in a section of his 1923 classic The Prophet. This was two and a half millennia after Lao Tzu and a century before Le Guin and Berry.
When pressed to address the issue of talking, Gibran’s prophet-protagonist replies:
When you can no longer live in the solitude of your heart, you speak, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. When you can no longer live in the solitude of your heart, you speak. Additionally, a lot of your speech kills thinking in the process. Because the mind is a bird of space, it can spread its wings in a cage of words but it cannot fly.
The prophet of Gibran continues, reiterating Hermann Hesse’s emphasis on the fortitude required for solitude:
Some of you look for talkative people since you don’t want to be alone. They want to go away from the solitude’s silence that exposes their naked selves to their sight. And then there are people who speak while revealing a truth that they themselves do not comprehend without awareness or planning. There are also those who are truthful inside, but they choose not to express it verbally. The spirit resides in rhythmic quiet in the bosom of such.
