SEARCHING FOR SILENCE
memory-essay #4
video 2025
For me it was a question of almost, without sounding too pompous or pretentious, sinning. I had committed to myself so many sins. I was trying to make up for it, and the struggle to get back was harder because of that. I’m talking about sins as far as work is concerned.2
Thirty years old and I thought I couldn’t ever escape flat-sharing. Then, luckily, I was accepted in a secure housing scheme and it became possible in theory to live a different kind of life on my own.
I lost a long-term job at a cultural institute. I visited Malcolm in his grand college rooms filled with his collection of art books which seemed like something out of another age. I asked for his advice. “Try to be an independent,” he said. He also told me that his illness was in remission, but he died not long afterwards. He never enjoyed the peak of his eminence. And maybe it wasn’t a small matter that he made the time to give honest and difficult advice to a former student who felt lost.
Then I was a contractor working from home, years before the pandemic made it normal. Instead of giving me independence, gradually the work invaded my home. It was the mid-2000s and I remember reading somewhere the idea that what went along with increasingly insecure terms and conditions was a new level of subjection to work, the proof of it being (the writer said) that, more and more, people dreamt about work, and so it was for me.
There was restructuring, a new regime, and suddenly I thought “at last I have a reason to leave”. But it made me nervous and so I weighed the pros and cons. I wrote lists, the good and the bad, feared what might follow but kept realising that there was no-one in this whole literary world that I truly admired. Some I respected for their ability or even brilliance, but where was anyone really resisting the careful institutional instinct of pushing it only so far no matter what, which bit by bit eats away at you and which now I was deciding to reject?
I went to see my old tutor in his plush common room and admitted that sometimes I felt like a failure. Why couldn’t I realise my potential, build a career? Why wasn’t I nimbler at working within the rules? There was more than a trace of a smirk when he asked me, “Do you want to be some kind of saint?” And what he said hurt me, this man I so want to be kinder and cleverer than he is, but also all my life until now, all the almost forty years since I was brought to this country I have been in one way or another surrounded by the barren culture of its education system, with all its envy and ambition and mediocrity, and I have tried in earnest and good faith to adapt to it, and even if part of me wishes I could have succeeded on its terms, I also loathe it. And so now I’ve given up whatever standing I had, and if that now means I can be scoffed at as someone trying be a saint, and if also I don’t yet know the true nature of the trials of regret and self-doubt that are coming, still I am determined to seek something better than a false home.
When you first take up an instrument in the beginning, that’s all that is, isn’t it? So why should you want anything different now than you wanted in the beginning? Because it’s just your love of what it is. I wouldn’t play to anyone, I’d just sit in a room on my own and play. The room and the silence is totally important because that’s what you’re doing, you’re just existing in a room and then it’s like you’re trying to break into the silence. Yeah absolutely, and then move out of it again. I like silence. I get on great with silence.4
2. Scott Walker interviewed by Alan Bangs (German radio: “Night Flights”). YouTube.
3. Ibid.
4. Mark Hollis interviewed by Rune-Schjøtt-Wieth (footage subsequently edited for Danish television). Accessed on YouTube 2025.