Ten Seconds of Silence

Meditations on a Noisy World Layne Jackson Visual Artist

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Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude.

Delacroix, born on this day in 1798, on the importance of solitude in creative work and how to resist social distractions – wisdom from 200 years ago, even timelier today.  (via explore-blog)

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/17/delacroix-journal-solitude/

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Pinging mobiles, sniffling passengers, desk diners… The incessant noise of modern life never stops – and it’s infuriating Emma Beddington. So what’s the best way to find some peace and turn down the volume?

Ten years ago, I bought a box of earplugs. My partner occasionally snored and, at about £12 for 200 pairs, it seemed an absolute bargain. That was more than enough for a lifetime of peace, surely? I ran my hand through the slippery packets of foam slugs; they were yellow and pink, like rhubarb and custard sweets. I felt like an earplug millionaire.

The last time I put my hand in the box, I hit cardboard: a lifetime’s supply of earplugs, nearly gone. There are rhubarb and custards under my pillow and in my handbag, in the pockets of every coat I own, in our vacuum cleaner, even stuck to my back as I blearily shower in the morning. I measure out my life in rhubarb and custard earplugs.

My name is Emma and I have become a noise bore: a shusher, a tutter and a wordless fulminator. I Google “abandoned croft, Hebrides” regularly and spent months researching noise-cancelling headphones. I seriously considered trading my rhubarb and custards in for a £300 pair: £300 for earplugs! Barely a week goes by without me quoting the Road Traffic (Vehicle Emissions) Regulations 2002 at a driver with an idling engine, and I email Ian, the local council noise enforcement officer, more often than I email my sister.

I’ve been noise-sensitive for years. Maybe the seeds were sown in my first year at university, a stressful time, filled with harrowing sex noises and the Prodigy from the room next door as I tried to work or sleep. It might go back further: I went to a Quaker school with daily sessions of silent “meeting for worship”, which left me with an eerie ability to sit completely still for hours and a craving for calm.

FOR THE FULL STORY click here

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Prof Tom Pike from Imperial College London is part of the science team on the US-led InSight mission to Mars. His group has supplied tiny seismometers that will enable the Nasa lander to detect "Marsquakes", which should reveal the internal structure of the Red Planet. Here, Prof Pike tells us what happened when his team switched on its sensor system during InSight's 6-month cruise to Mars.

READ MORE: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46332684

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An Open Letter From a Dancer Who Refused to Participate in Marina Abramovic’s MOCA Performance

originally published in BlouinArt

http://blouinartinfo.com/news/story/751666/open-letter-tk

by

 Sara Wookey Published: November 23, 2011

I participated in an audition on November 7th for performance artist Marina Abramovic’s production for the annual gala of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I auditioned because I wanted to participate in the project of an artist whose work I have followed with interest for many years and because it was affiliated with MOCA, an institution that I have a connection with as a Los Angeles-based artist. Out of approximately 800 applicants, I was one of two hundred selected to audition. Ultimately, I was offered the role of one of six nude females to re-enact Abramovic's signature work, "Nude with Skeleton" (2002), at the center of tables with seats priced at up to $100,000 each. For reasons I detail here — reasons that I strongly believe need to be made public — I turned it down.

I am writing to address three main points: One, to add my voice to the discourse around this event as an artist who was critical of the experience and decided to walk away, a voice which I feel has been absent thus far in the LA Times and New York Times coverage; two, to clarify my identity as the informant about the conditions being asked of artists and make clear why I chose, up till now, to be anonymous in regards to my email to Yvonne Rainer; and three, to prompt a shift of thinking of cultural workers to consider, when either accepting or rejecting work of any kind, the short- and long-term impact of our personal choices on the entire field. Each point is to support my overriding interest in organizing and forming a union that secures labor standards and fair wages for fine and performing artists in Los Angeles and beyond.

I refused to participate as a performer because what I anticipated would be a few hours of creative labor, a meal, and the chance to network with like-minded colleagues turned out to be an unfairly remunerated job. I was expected to lie naked and speechless on a slowly rotating table, starting from before guests arrived and lasting until after they left (a total of nearly four hours). I was expected to ignore (by staying in what Abramovic refers to as "performance mode") any potential physical or verbal harassment while performing. I was expected to commit to fifteen hours of rehearsal time, and sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement stating that if I spoke to anyone about what happened in the audition I was liable for being sued by Bounce Events, Marketing, Inc., the event’s producer, for a sum of $1 million dollars plus attorney fees.

I was to be paid $150. During the audition, there was no mention of safeguards, signs, or signals for performers in distress, and when I asked about what protection would be provided I was told it could not be guaranteed. What I experienced as an auditionee for this work was extremely problematic, exploitative, and potentially abusive.

I am a professional dancer and choreographer with 16 years of experience working in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and I hold a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles. As a professional artist working towards earning a middle class living in Los Angeles, I am outraged that there are no official or even unofficial standard practice measures for working conditions, compensation, and benefits for artists and performers, or for relations between creator, performer, presenting venue and production company in regard to such highly respected and professionalized individuals and institutions such as Abramovic and MOCA. In Europe I produced over a dozen performance works involving casts up to 15 to 20 artists. When I hired dancers, I was obliged to follow a national union pay scale agreement based on each artist’s number of years of experience. In Canada, where I recently performed a work by another artist, I was paid $350 for one performance that lasted 15 minutes, not including rehearsal time that was supported by another fee for up to 35 hours, in accordance with the standards set by CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation/Le Front Des Artistes Canadiens) established in 1968.

If my call for labor standards for artists seems out of bounds, think of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG, established 1933), the American Federation of Musicians (AFM, founded 1896), or the umbrella organization the Associated Actors and Artistes of America (the 4A’s, founded in 1919), which hold the film, theater and music industries to regulatory and best practice standards for commercial working artists and entertainers. If there is any group of cultural workers that deserves basic standards of labor, it is us performers working in museums, whose medium is our own bodies and deserve humane treatment and respect. Artists of all disciplines deserve fair and equal treatment and can organize if we care enough to put the effort into it. I would rather be the face of the outspoken artist then the silenced, slowly rotating head (or, worse, "centerpiece") at the table. I want a voice, loud and clear.

Abramovic’s call for artists was, as the LA Times quoted, for “strong, silent types.” I am certainly strong but I am not comfortable with silence in this situation. I refuse to be a silent artist regarding issues that affect my livelihood and the culture of my practice. There are issues too important to be silenced and I just happen to be the one to speak out, to break that silence. I spoke out in response to ethics, not artistic material or content, and I know that I am not the only one who feels the way I do.

I rejected the offer to work with Abramovic and MOCA — to participate in perpetuating unethical, exploitative and discriminatory labor practices — with my community in mind. It has moved me to work towards the establishment of ethical standards, labor rights and equal pay for artists, especially dancers, who tend to be some of the lowest paid artists.

The time has come for artists in Los Angeles and elsewhere to unite, organize, and work toward changing the degenerate discrepancies between the wealthy and powerful funders of art and the artists, mainly poor, who are at its service and are expected to provide so-called avant-garde, prescient content or "entertainment," as is increasingly the case — what is nonetheless merchandise in the service of money. We must do this not because of what happened at MOCA but in response to a greater need (painfully demonstrated by the events at MOCA) for equity and justice for cultural workers.

I am not judging my colleagues who accepted their roles in this work and I, too, am vulnerable to the cult of charisma surrounding celebrity artists. I am judging, rather, the current social, cultural, and economic conditions that have rendered the exploitation of cultural workers commonplace, natural, and even horrifically banal, whether it is perpetrated by entities such as MOCA and Abramovic or self-imposed by the artists themselves.

I want to suggest another mode of thinking: When we, as artists, accept or reject work, when we participate in the making of a work, even (or perhaps especially) when it is not our own, we contribute to the establishment of standards and precedents for our cohort and all who will come after us.

To conclude, I am grateful to Rainer for utilizing her position (without a request from me) of cultural authority and respect to make these issues public for the sake of launching a debate that has been overlooked for too long. Jeffrey Deitch, director of MOCA, was quoted in the LA Times as saying, in response to receiving my anonymous email and Rainer’s letter, “Art is about dialogue.” While I agree, Deitch’s idea of dialogue here is only a palliative. It obscures a situation of injustice in which both artist and institution have proven irresponsible in their unwillingness to recognize that art is not immune to ethical standards. Let’s have a new discourse that begins on this thought.

Sara Wookey is an artist, choreographer, and creative consultant based in Los Angeles. Her Web site is www.sarawookey.com.

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'A great silence is spreading over the natural world'

Photograph: Courtesy of Hachette Book Group

Bernie Krause has spent 40 years recording nature's sounds. But such is the rate of species and habitat loss that his tapes may become our only record of the original diversity of life

"The birds are silent in the woods. Just wait: Soon enough You will be quiet too" - Robert Hass

When musician and naturalist Bernie Krause drops his microphones into the pristine coral reef waters of Fiji, he picks up a raucous mix of sighs, beats, glissandos, cries, groans, tones, grunts, beats and clicks.

The water pulsates with the sound of creatures vying for acoustic bandwidth. He hears crustaceans, parrot fish, anemones, wrasses, sharks, shrimps, puffers and surgeonfish. Some gnash their teeth, others use their bladders or tails to make sound. Sea anemones grunt and belch. Every creature on the reef makes its own sound.

But half a mile away, where the same reef is badly damaged, he can only pick up the sound of waves and a few snapping shrimp. It is, he says, the desolate sound of extinction.

Krause, whose electronic music with Paul Beaver was used on classic films like Rosemary's Baby and Apocalypse Now, and who worked regularly with Bob Dylan, George Harrison and The Byrds, has spent 40 years recording over 15,000 species, collecting 4,500 hours of sound from many of the world's pristine habitats.

But such is the rate of species extinction and the deterioration of pristine habitat that he estimates half these recordings are now archives, impossible to repeat because the habitats no longer exist or because they have been so compromised by human noise. His tapes are possibly the only record of the original diversity of life in these places.

"A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening," he writes in a new book, The Great Animal Orchestra. "Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened. There has been a massive decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small. The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence.

"If you listen to a damaged soundscape … the community [of life] has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus."

Hawaii, he says, is the extinction capital of the world. "In a couple of centuries since the islands were populated by Europeans, half the 140 bird species have disappeared. In Madagascar, 15 species of lemur, an elephant bird, a pygmy hippo and an estimated half of all the animals have gone extinct."

Even partially disturbed habitats lose much of their life for many years, says Krause. Recordings of a meadow in the Sierra Nevada mountains east of San Francisco before the surrounding forest was selectively logged in the 1980s sounds very different to when Krause returned a year later.

"The overall richness of sound was gone, as was the thriving density and diversity of birds. The only prominent sounds were the stream and the hammering of a Williamson's sapsucker. Over the 20 years I have returned a dozen times to the same spot at the same time of year but the bio-acoustic vitality I had captured before logging has not yet returned."

One in four mammals is threatened with extinction, he says. With the exception of a few sites, frog populations are in decline worldwide and birds are beginning to show radical signs of territorial shifting.

"Things are beginning to quiet down in the pristine habitats. The combination of shrinking habitat and increasing human pandemonium have produced conditions under which the channels … necessary for creature survival are being completely overloaded. The voices of the wild in their purest states where no [human] noise is present are splendid symphonies."

But the wild natural world, comprised of vast areas not managed by humans, rarely exists now except in a few isolated places such as the Alaskan wilderness, the far Canadian north, Siberia, the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, and the Brazilian Pantanal which are still rich with natural sound, he says.

"The fragile weave of natural sound is being torn apart by our seemingly boundless need to conquer the environment rather than to find a way to abide in consonance with it."

PHOTO CAPTION: Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause has spent 40 years recording over 15,000 species in many of the world's pristine habitats. Photograph: Courtesy of Hachette Book Group

LINK TO STORY: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/03/bernie-krause-natural-world-recordings

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The Quietest Room on Earth

February 14, 2013

http://todaynews.today.com/_news/2012/11/23/15385024-the-sound-of-silence-sai...

By Chiara Sottile, NBC News

As a Petty Officer on active duty in the U.S. Navy, Nick Hair spent nine consecutive months living on a ship the size of a city with 4,000 sailors on round-the-clock shifts. He slept in a room stuffed with 100 other people and longed for the days he spent hiking in the woods and running in wide fields back home near Westchester, New York.

A few months before returning to solid land, he heard about a silent room at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minn., called the "anechoic chamber," a room with no echoes. More than three feet of Styrofoam wedges, concrete and steel insulation make it 99.99 percent sound absorbent, earning it the Guinness World Record for the world's quietest place.

Hair wrote an email to Steve Orfield, who founded the lab in 1971, and offered to volunteer at the end of his deployment.

"You could consider my desire to spend time in your chamber as a therapeutic option in an effort to return my life to some degree of normalcy," Hair wrote.

Orfield was touched by the sailor's request, and agreed to honor it despite the fact that his laboratory is typically used to test product sound levels on devices ranging from motorcycles to hearing aids. He warned Hair that it might not be as therapeutic as he hoped.

"As you have less and less background noise, your hearing gets more and more sensitive and you can hear remarkable levels of things," explained Orfield. "You become your own noise source. And you start to hear your heart, and you might hear your lungs, and you might hear your carotid arteries, and you might hear all kinds of bodily sounds."

Humans rely on the environment — and sound reflections in it — for balance. But in the anechoic chamber, 99.99 percent of sound is absorbed, which would leave almost no information for Hair to judge his position in the room.

No one had ever stayed in the chamber longer than 45 minutes. But Hair was eager to wipe clean the memories of jet engines roaring for takeoff from the flight deck, and to erase thousands of hours of relentless chatter in the belly of the boat.

Putting the chamber to the test

It's not just the level of noise, but also the "character" of sound that brings clients to Orfield Laboratories. Clients like Smiths Medical use the anechoic chamber to measure their products and make them quieter in operating rooms around the country. Steve Orfield has studied other consumer products, like vacuum cleaners, and found that consumers don't actually just want their products to be as quiet as they possibly can be.

"What people wanted was not a loud or a quiet vacuum, but one in the middle that had a lot of smooth low frequency and just sounded like it was doing what it needed to do in an unobtrusive and comfortable way," said Orfield. "We don't want products to be noisy, we don't want products to be quiet, we want products to be in a certain zone that sounds like they're operating under a quality mode," he continued.

Dr. Peggy Nelson is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and the Chair of the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences there. She studies how noises affect people and agrees that, "There are sounds that make you say, 'Oh, that's a high quality machine.'" Like cars, for example.

In an automobile that sounds like it is of high quality, "The doors shut in a certain very 'thump' sort of way. The engine makes a nice roaring noise," said Nelson. "So we're looking to try to identify those (sounds) and maximize those," said Nelson.

Once Smith Medical completed their testing for the day, it was Hair's turn inside the anechoic chamber.

"I think you might have the sense after even just five minutes or so, that this is an unusual place, and it might not be a place I want to stay much longer," said Nelson.

He exchanged his crisp collared shirt for a comfortable T-shirt, took off his shoes, and tugged open the double doors.

Hair settled into the lone chair in the corner of the chamber, and arranged his feet on the wire floor. “The world’s quietest place. Cool,” he said, smoothing his jeans with both hands. It only took a few minutes before Hair started rustling around in his chair and breathing and swallowing more frequently. After about 30 minutes, his voice was hoarse voice from the long silence. "My right ear is playing a trick on me,” he said. “Sounds like wind."

As Orfield and Nelson had predicted, he did feel "bugged out" and "queasy" at intervals, with only the internal movements of his own body to provide sound.

But in the end, Hair defied all odds, beating the previous record of 45 minutes and staying in the chamber for a full hour. When his time was up, Hair braced himself against the chair and slowly straightened up. “I feel wobbly,” he said. “But I feel good!”

And after an hour in complete silence, he could no longer hear the jet plane engines taking off — a sound that had haunted him since his return. “I believe it’s been negated to some degree,” Hair said. “Hopefully long-term. But, for now, it’s good enough for me.”

"There is such a thing as absolute silence," said Hair. But that's not something he would seek again, at least not for a full hour. "Maybe, you know, a good 15, 20 minutes at a time," he said with a smile.

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Silence/Stylus Radio

A Wonderful Hour of Listening

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Day of SILENCE- APRIL 17, 2015

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Beethovene-SILENCIO

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Silence. Charlie Haden.

Rest in Peace, Charlie Haden.

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On Writing by Rebecca Solnit

"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure that I ordinarily can’t imagine saying them to the people to whom I’m closest. Every once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers. Said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading. Is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two? Is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?

I had started out in silence, written as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away — first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud another voice, once I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one, and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not-yet-born, the unknown and the long-gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk."

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Christopher Ricks reads Paul Goodman on SILENCE

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The Cost of Paying Attention

By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD   MARCH 7, 2015 New York Times International

A FEW years ago, in a supermarket, I swiped my bank card to pay for groceries. I watched the little screen, waiting for its prompts. During the intervals between swiping my card, confirming the amount and entering my PIN, I was shown advertisements. Clearly some genius had realized that a person in this situation is a captive audience.

Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it. And yet we’ve auctioned off more and more of our public space to private commercial interests, with their constant demands on us to look at the products on display or simply absorb some bit of corporate messaging. Lately, our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed. And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think.

What if we saw attention in the same way that we saw air or water, as a valuable resource that we hold in common? Perhaps, if we could envision an “attentional commons,” then we could figure out how to protect it.

The sad state of this commons is on display everywhere; consider the experience of being in an airport. I have found I have to be careful when going through airport security, because the trays that you place your items in for X-ray screening are now papered with advertisements, and it’s very easy to miss a lipstick-size flash memory stick against a picture of fanned-out L’Oréal lipstick colors.

I am already in a state of low-level panic about departure times, possible gate changes and any number of other contingencies. This fresh demand for vigilance, lest I lose the PowerPoint slide show I will be presenting in a few hours, feels like a straightforward conflict between me and L’Oréal.

Somehow L’Oréal has the Transportation Security Administration on its side. Who made the decision to pimp out the security trays with these advertisements? We travelers have no clue, so we search instead for a diagnosis of ourselves: Why am I so angry?

Making my way through O’Hare International Airport, I am not feeling especially receptive to the endlessly recurring message from the Lincoln Financial Group, applied to the moving handrail on the escalator: You’re In Charge®.

Settled in at my departure gate with an hour to kill, I shift in my seat and try to avert my gaze from the chattering of CNN, but find that the fields of view that haven’t been claimed for commerce are getting fewer and narrower. Of course, you can seal yourself off by putting on noise-canceling headphones, staring at a smartphone or opening a novel. But what is lost is the public space that is required for sociability, the kind that depends on people not being self-enclosed.

An airport lounge once felt rich with possibilities for spontaneous encounters. Even if we did not converse, our attention was free to alight upon one another and linger, or not. We encountered another person, even if in silence. Such encounters are always ambiguous, and their need for interpretation gives rise to a train of imaginings, often erotic. This is what makes cities exciting.

The benefits of silence are off the books. They are not measured in the gross domestic product, yet the availability of silence surely contributes to creativity and innovation. They do not show up explicitly in social statistics such as level of educational achievement, yet one consumes a great deal of silence in the course of becoming educated.

If clean air and water were no longer the rule, the economic toll would be enormous. This is easy to grasp, and that is why we have regulations to protect these common resources. We recognize their importance and their fragility. We also recognize that absent robust regulations, air and water will be used by some in ways that make them unusable for others.

A notable feature of many formerly Communist countries is the apparent absence, or impotence, of any notion of a common good. Self-serving party apparatchiks have been replaced by (or become) quasi-free market gangsters. Many citizens of these countries live in the environmental degradation that results when economic development is left to such interests, with no countervailing force of public-spiritedness. We in the liberal societies of the West find ourselves headed toward a similar condition with regard to the resource of attention, because we do not yet understand it to be a resource.

Or do we? Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I heard only the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. I saw no advertisements on the walls. This silence, more than any other feature, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious. When you step inside and the automatic doors whoosh shut behind you, the difference is nearly tactile, like slipping out of haircloth into satin. Your brow unfurrows, your neck muscles relax; after 20 minutes you no longer feel exhausted.

Outside, in the peon section, is the usual airport cacophony. Because we have allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want yours back you’re going to have to pay for it.

As the attentional commons is appropriated, one solution, for those who have the means, is to leave it behind for private clubs like the business-class lounge. Considering that it is those in the business lounge who make the decisions that determine the character of the peon section, we may start to see these things in a political light.

To engage in inventive thinking during those idle hours spent at an airport requires silence. But other people’s minds, over in the peon section, can be treated as a resource — a standing reserve of purchasing power to be steered according to the innovative marketing schemes hatched by those enjoying silence in the business lounge. When some people treat the minds of others as a resource, this is not “creating wealth” — it is a transfer.

There are many causes for the increasing concentration of wealth in a shrinking elite, but let us throw one more into the mix: the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.

I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested.

 ORIGINAL POST

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Ampuero

CAS participates in silent protest in Ampuero

“On August 26 CAS International participated in a silent protest in the Spanish town of Ampuero (Cantabria).

Our sister organization Huellas Cantabria organized this protest against the bullfights, bullruns and novilladas that take place during the local festivities of Fiesta de la Virgen Niña in Ampuero (6-9 September).”

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BUY THE BOOK HERE

On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Mount Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a young Oxford scholar of twenty-two with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.   In this magisterial work of history and adventure, based on more than a decade of prodigious research in British, Canadian, and European archives, and months in the field in Nepal and Tibet, Wade Davis vividly re-creates British climbers’ epic attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. With new access to letters and diaries, Davis recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous terrain and furious weather. Into the Silence sets their remarkable achievements in sweeping historical context: Davis shows how the exploration originated in nineteenth-century imperial ambitions, and he takes us far beyond the Himalayas to the trenches of World War I, where Mallory and his generation found themselves and their world utterly shattered.  In the wake of the war that destroyed all notions of honor and decency, the Everest expeditions, led by these scions of Britain’s elite, emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope.   Beautifully written and rich with detail, Into the Silence is a classic account of exploration and endurance, and a timeless portrait of an extraordinary generation of adventurers, soldiers, and mountaineers the likes of which we will never see again.

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We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. ―

Elie Wiesel

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La minute de silence de Nelson Mandela