In explaining why he wrote his book In Pursuit of Silence, George Prochnik offers a telling statement: “I’ve always been a lover of silence, and this love is bound up with my passion for books. The writer Stefan Zweig once defined a book as a ‘handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest.’ For years before I began writing about the subject, I’d been feeling that silence was a diminishing natural resource. I wanted to understand whether this was more than a subjective impression. If so, why had the world become louder, and what could be done to reinstate silence as a value in our
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