The above title is inspired by a writer, Elisabeth Elliot, who, I find, often brings a sense of calm in her devotionals. Elliot, 84, author of many books, is best known to older Christians for Through Gates of Splendor, the story of the death of her husband Jim and four others in 1956 while trying to make missionary contact with a remote tribe in Ecuador.
Elliot's devotional today (titled "Stillness") while mainly about quietness before God, also articulates concerns about the proliferation of noise in the world. She quotes C. S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters (his classic book purporting to be correspondence between Screwtape, undersecretary to the Devil, and his nephew Wormwood) in this regard:"My dear Wormwood: Music and silence--how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell...no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise...But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it. Research is in progress." Elliot then adds, "C.S. Lewis died in 1963. Research in noise-making has made considerable progress since then, don't you think?"
The problem of noise impinges on writers in this way: to write well, we need calm and quiet-- time to collect our thoughts. But the stimuli of new technologies mitigate against allowing ourselves such periods ("Instead of staring out the window, you could have answered that e-mail--or added another 400 words to your manuscript!"). However, books that will still be read in a hundred years, I think, will be those written by those who took the time to write thoughtfully and well. I wonder if those also are the books that tend to minister a sense of calm instead of noise--particularly when the author has, like Elliot, also taken the time to "be still and know that I am God."
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