Quiet, Please

We live in a noisy world. Pico Iyer reflects on a life spent searching for silence

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HOURS PASSED WITH SCARCELY A SOUND.

Three fin whales were breaching by the prow of our small ship; a black-browed albatross circled overhead. On a brilliant midsummer morning, my wife and I stepped into a black Zodiac raft and drifted noiselessly among icebergs five stories high, their emerald and aquamarine walls gleaming above sapphire waters. Later we wandered onshore amid thousands of penguins that busily waddled along their way as leopard seals eyed them from the rocks.

Yet what stays with me most from my 10-day Silversea cruise around the Antarctic Peninsula six years ago is the expansive noiselessness that seemed to stretch for miles. No sirens, no drills, not even the possibility of a car alarm. In response, we passengers grew hushed ourselves, united in a silence that was less an absence than a presence: the presence of subtler notes like birds and water and wind that so often are lost in the clamor of the world.