Hello Chatter, My Old Friend

Our friend Maureen Dowd invokes Virginia Woolf and philosopher Max Picard in her discussion of the pleasures of silence and her review of the new silent film, The Artist, by French writer and director Michel Hazanavicius.

"As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: 'Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,' once as natural as the sky and air.

As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.

There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the 'cotton wool of daily life.'"