Author looks to spread well-deserved 'quietude'

It took me 17 years longer, but I recently arrived at the same conclusion as Anne McClaire.

I was watching a pro basketball game on television at the time. There were two lead broadcasters talking over each other, with a third who occasionally chimed in. Sometimes, when there was a break in the action, the picture would switch to a studio with three other announcers.

This was nothing new, but suddenly a shrill voice sounded off inside my head.

“Why don’t you all just SHUT UP?” the voice demanded. “It’s only a basketball game, for crying out loud! I don’t need an analysis for every move any player made, or your opinion on why he did or didn’t make it. I don’t care. Let me enjoy the game!”

By contrast, Anne LeClaire’s “ah ha” (or sh-h-h) moment came while she was walking on a Massachusetts beach.

“I was sad because my best friend’s mother was dying,” she said, “and I was trying to find some peace there. I started watching some ducks diving just offshore, and seeing if I could hold my breath as long as they could. The fact that I couldn’t even come close, despite the fact that their lungs must have been so tiny, filled me with wonder, and then gratitude about being part of such a wonderful natural world.

“Then a voice behind me said: ‘Sit in silence.’ I turned around, and there was nobody there.”

LeClaire is a novelist, poet, essayist and teacher, a cousin to Emily Dickinson. She is normally not a mystic.

“I had never heard a voice like that before,” she said, “and I haven’t heard one since.”

Almost immediately, LeClaire began observing the first and third Mondays of every month as days of silence. In other words, you couldn’t call her today to talk about it.

“It’s a promise I made to myself,” she said, “and I’ve never missed one of those Mondays. Generally, I stay home and work on my latest project, but there have been days when I had to teach, or go out shopping.”

When that happens, reactions from the non-silent world vary.

“I have a card that I carry that explains why I’m not talking,” LeClaire said with a laugh, “and sometimes when I show it to people, they say, ‘That’s very interesting — tell me about it.”

An eight-time visitor to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst County, where she often goes to work and seek (of course) peace and quiet, LeClaire has a new book out titled “Listening Below the Noise.”

“I had a growing desire,” she has written, “to share the immense peace and strength that I was drawing from the practice, as well as to convey to others how they can bring an important practice into a harried, modern world.”

She’s right, of course — there is little peace to be found anywhere. Between conversation, machine noise, canned music and everything else that is raising decibel levels, most of us move these days through an almost continual cacophony. LeClaire can’t stop it, but that doesn’t mean she has to contribute to it.

“Everybody’s talking at me,” singer Harry Nielson wrote back in the 1960s, “I don’t hear a word they’re saying. Only the echoes of my mind.”

That’s what Anne LeClaire has worked at getting at.

Her husband didn’t like her silent Mondays at first, she said.

“Which was natural,” she said, “because we lead busy lives, and there were things he needed to talk with me about. About four years, though, he told me he had learned from it. What I was doing made him realize there was so much false urgency in our world. Is everything really all that important?”

Meanwhile, she said, it’s taught Anne LeClaire how to listen.

“I have no choice,” she said.

She occasionally reads her essays on National Public Radio, which received a call from a listener almost immediately after she discussed her book on silence.

“A man said he had just heard me on NPR and wanted to tell me how much he agreed with me. At the time, he said, he was walking his dog and appreciating the silence himself.

“And I thought: ‘But how can you be in silence when you’re listening to the radio?’”

Planting and spreading quietude might be harder than she thought.