It's kicking off in the quiet carriage. At Reading, two elderly people get on and the lovely hush that has existed on this corner of the 09.59 from Paddington is over. "Which seats?" barks the wife. Her husband, two steps behind with luggage and tickets, replies: "Twenty-nine and 30." Snoozers awake confused and dry-mouthed, readers look up from their books crossly. "Did you book them facing or next to each other?" "I don't remember. Why?" "Because 29 and 30 are opposite each other. I don't want to sit opposite. I want to sit together." "Why wouldn't 29 and 30 be together?" "You would assume 29 and 30 would be together." "When I booked online, it looked as though 29 and 30 were together." "But they clearly aren't."
Cue low-volume tutting. Why, I ask myself silently, can't passengers who board trains be fitted with chips that give them a silencing electric shock if they speak over a certain decibel level? Surely that's not beyond the wit of First Great Western's engineers.
"I don't think they realise this is a quiet carriage," says one woman, closing her Maeve Binchy. She says this quite loudly. Another woman across the aisle shakes her head in shared disgust and stands up: "All we're asking," she says to the couple, who are now shouting at each other about what time they'll be arriving at Looe and whether Daphne will meet them for lunch at Penzance, "is not that you're silent, but that you're quiet. Or quieter than you have been since you got on." "Why don't you upgrade to first class if you're so bothered?" answers the loud lady, giddy as a rebellious teenager. "Oh, there's just no reasoning with people like you," snaps the first woman, flouncing off to another carriage. "People like us? What can she mean?" says the loud man. The couple start giggling.
I feel furious on Flouncing Woman's behalf. In earlier times, this is when I'd have got involved. But today I'm being silent so I can't, which is just as well. The only time I have seriously risked getting into a fight in recent years was on a Euston-Glasgow express, when I told a salesman in the quiet carriage that if he wanted to use his mobile phone for the 33rd of his fatuous business calls, he should take it to the vestibule. He came down the aisle threatening to punch me – but that wasn't the most annoying aspect of the encounter. When he finally got off at Wigan, another passenger – who had said nothing until that moment – piped up: "Well done for standing up to him, mate. Some people, eh?" To which I replied (albeit using my silent inward voice): "Where were you when I needed some support?"
Trying to achieve silence in a quiet carriage is like trying to catch water. They were not invented to provide sanctuary; they were invented to cause rows that distract passengers' attention from the train's other shortcomings – the fact that there is no soap in the soap dispenser, the tap doesn't work and you can't flush the toilet. Or so it is on the 9.59am from Paddington. This quiet carriage is, in noise terms, a microcosm of the modern world.
In deference to the licentiousness of Reading loudmouths, the noise level is rising: iPods become more audible, conversations get louder and – there it is! – a man tells his phone: "I'm on the train." The only answer to the hell of other people's noise is to put on your iPod and turn it up so loud you don't have to hear everybody else's incessant yip-yap. Leaflets on every seatback counsel against this, but nobody reads them.
Why are we like this? "People are responding to several generations of mounting infrastructure noise," says George Prochnik, author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. "We are so loud in part because we have to create our own personal noise, so that we don't feel we're being held hostage to the grind and clash of the environment."
That way madness lies. By deploying noise-cancelling headphones to silence others' iPods, phone calls and fatuous chat, I'm not only using my favourite music as a silencer (which is no way to treat something you love), I'm also putting my health at risk. "Noise wreaks havoc on all different parts of our bodies," Prochnik says. "The heart rate accelerates. We get vasoconstriction. It's been shown that the elevated blood pressure from night-time noise continues all through the day. Even if we're not fully aroused by noise, sleep is fragmented. Loss of sleep is tied to all kinds of immune system and heart problems, and a real laundry list of ailments. The really scary thing is even if we do habituate mentally to noise, that doesn't change what's happening to our bodies."
The composer John Cage understood this noisy madness when he wrote the silent music classic 4'33" in 1952. He wrote of what inspired that piece: "Many people in our society now go around the streets and in the buses and so forth playing radios with earphones on and they don't hear the world around them. They hear only what they have chosen to hear. I can't understand why they cut themselves off from that rich experience which is free. I think this is the beginning of music, and I think that the end of music may very well be in those record collections." It's not just my body that is suffering from noise, then, but my aesthetic sensibility, my ability to tune myself into the world.
And yet that noisy havoc is my world. I walk into a room and turn on the radio, TV or stereo almost without thought. I never leave the house without an iPod, and I even take it to bed just in case I have a sleepless urge to listen to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time. When I write, I often put on music.
In fact, I'm not always trying to silence the outside world. Rather, I suspect I'm doing something more radically self-harming: I'm trying to silence myself.
This time yesterday, I was in the Royal Albert Hall, listening to one of the world's more beautiful sounds, bass-baritone Bryn Terfel sing the role of Hans Sachs in Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Today, I keep thinking about Sachs's so-called "Wahn monologue" in act three, where he sings about the madness of self-delusion all around him. He sings of the typical man: "Driven to flight, he thinks he is hunting/ hears not his own cry of pain/when he digs into his own flesh he thinks he is giving himself pleasure". Sachs could have been singing about how we use noise to silence noise, or how we use noise to cancel the unbearableness of silence, or about how I, ostensibly giving myself pleasure in listening to music or radio voices incessantly, am hurting myself.
At Castle Cary in Somerset, I leave the train. As I pass the loud couple, I place the train company's guide to how to behave in the quiet carriage (point five: "Please watch your volume when talking to other passengers") on their table and narrow my eyes in silent but, I hope, eloquent reproof.
I am heading to a silent retreat at the Self Realization Meditation Healing Centre in the nearby village of Queen Camel. "We're getting a lot of requests for silent retreats these days," says the centre's meditation teacher, Christy "Little Mother" Casley, over tea when I arrive. "People are looking for ways of finding who they really are through silent contemplation and pure meditation." The centre was established in a 17th-century house in 1988 by Mata Yognanda Mahsaya Dharma (her pre-spiritual name was Rena Denton) and her husband Peter Sevananda, in response, as the blurb puts it, "to the needs of the age we live in".
One of those needs is an escape from our madding noise. As if to underline how that need is growing, a new BBC TV series called The Big Silence tracks the spiritual journeys of five Britons as they take part in an eight-day silent retreat. The Benedictine monk who leads the participants urges them to try using silence to direct them to God. It's a venerable Christian and non-Christian spiritual practice – but I have a humbler goal. Not to find God, but to find out what silence is like and what I am like in it.
First, I have to have my picture taken. "The challenge here," says photographer Jim, "is to make you look as though you're in something, rather than waiting for something." We roam the centre's gardens, which have been designed for quiet reflection. I try to look serene – inside, though, I am screaming. A bell rings: it is 12.45pm and, for the next quarter of an hour, everyone should be as quiet as possible.
Guests who have arrived for a meditation course stop chatting and silently tilt their faces to the sun. Jim sits back and closes his eyes. I fumble for my book and read. What a cop out! And yet how me! Always looking for something to do, even in silence. I think of the title of another book I've just reviewed, Tim Parks's Teach Us To Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing. I'm not a sceptic about this world of self-realisation and meditation, but I do need to be taught to sit still and just "be".
This simple task is, I find, very difficult. At 1pm, guests go to lunch, which will be silent. I find myself opposite a man who looks like the comedian John Bird and a woman with enviably high cheek bones and an elasticated head band. A wet-haired woman on my right ahems gently. I look round. She nods at the butter, which I pass to her. Everybody's eyes seem to be on me. I'm incredibly uncomfortable: they look so serene, self-confident, while I feel furtive, uncomfortable, sweaty.
Insanely, I imagine how the Two Ronnies would have developed this silent lunch into a sketch, and get the giggles. If only I could tell the man who looks like John Bird what I'm thinking, we could a have a good old laugh. But we can't. So I concentrate on the cabbage-and-celery soup (more tasty than it sounds) and, as soon as I can, leave.
When it's my turn for the therapy pool, I am glaringly alone with my silence. I've never had a swimming pool to myself, so I belt up and down, alternating lengths of front crawl and backstroke. And then I stop and just float. I realise I have been thinking all the while about how I am going to write this story. Such thoughts blight the silence, but I can't help myself: my head teems with worries about daughter, partner, brother, mother, friends, money, work, towel (did I bring one?) and how I'm coming across to Christy "Little Mother" and her equally spiritually developed colleagues. I have got rid of one layer of noise, only to find another seething below. It is a seemingly unstoppable din.
After the swim, I am given a crash-course on meditation by Christy's husband Daniel Francis, whose spiritual name I never learned. We sit cross-legged, facing each other in a little chapel while I silently practice the "I am Peace" breath, in which one is supposed to see and feel peace flowing through one's whole being. But I think of George Costanza's angry dad in Seinfeld, forever bawling heavenwards: "Serenity now!" Serenity eluded Frank Costanza then, as it eludes me now.
Back at my room, dinner is served, silently: a tray of crudites, dips and wild rice. For the next few minutes, I hear nothing but the sound of crunching vegetables and, without anything else to do, I savour this simple meal properly. I feel something bordering on contentment.
A knock at the door. David silently hands me a notebook in which he has written: "I've come for the tray." I hand the tray to him and say, witlessly, "Cheers mate." The staff are treating my silence more seriously than I am. I study the notebook: this is how I am supposed to communicate – writing notes because I can't talk. Homer Simpson had to communicate similarly for dietary reasons in the episode called Jaws Wired Shut. He learned to be a good listener, writing things such as, "And what happened next?" to family members as they bleated their daily gripes. Perhaps I could become a listener too. Maybe not. After David leaves, I start giggling: I have just remembered the scene in which Homer listens to his daughter Lisa blether on. A thought bubble pops up above Homer's head: "Wonder if a hug would cork her cryhole?" My laughter rings out across the silence, possibly activating alarm bells in the centre's control room.
At 7.30pm, it's time for group meditation. John Bird, Elasticated Headband Lady and nearly 20 others are already silently meditating as I remove my shoes and glasses (they interfere with focus, apparently) and assume the position on my meditation stool, eyes closed. I perform the changing breath technique, designed to calm one ahead of a new task. Then I start the "I Am Peace" breath, trying to focus on the words "I am" on the inhale and "peace" on the exhale. I hear pigeons cooing in the eaves, the digestive tracts of fellow meditators working hard (all those raw vegetables!), quarter hours sweetly sung by the church bells, and the evening breeze in the birch trees.
The poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff loved dusk and night, when civilisation's noises are muted so one can hear the melody of nature's symphony. This evening, I know what he means. If I were in London now, there would be sirens, booming car stereos, airliners howling into Heathrow, ice-cream vans – all the noises of civilisation. Eichendorff wouldn't have liked 21st-century London.
But maybe, in this tranquil corner of Somerset, I will find nature's symphony. Or maybe not: there's another noise in the distance – a motorbike. The rider is pulling vexingly on the throttle. He (I am sure it's a he) goes through the same noisy routine repeatedly as I meditate. It is insufferable. Why, I ask myself inwardly, doesn't someone from the Self Realization Meditation Healing Centre string one of the lanes round here with cheesewire? That would settle motorcycle boy's hash.
I'm missing the point of silent meditation. I should focus on peace, not bloodthirsty noise-cancelling fantasies. Before I go to sleep, I check my BlackBerry (I shouldn't: using computers, iPods and phones is frowned on here). "Hope you achieved enlightenment x," says a text from my partner. But I haven't achieved anything yet.
The following morning, I try again. Daniel Francis has told me about a technique called "blanket covering over", in which you visualise a blanket or blind lifting from the coccyx over the front of the body to the top of the forehead. Weird. Visualising this supposedly helps one conserve energy, and stops one's chakras (the Sanskrit word for wheel-like vortices: humans have seven each – have fun trying to locate them after reading this article) leaking. It's a seemingly barmy technique, and yet it helps.
At 6.45am, I see that blanket and it helps me concentrate on silent breathing and peace. I stop thinking about decapitating motorcyclists, rumbling stomachs, church bells, and concentrate on my stuff. That said, I'm still smug when I come to leave – only three fellow-meditators remain, proving to my satisfaction that I am getting good at this. Idiot: as if the length of meditation mattered.
As I leave, Christy "Little Mother" counsels me to try to find quiet places for the journey back to London, so the transition isn't too abrupt. I know what she means, but I am not sure how to achieve it. My seat for the return journey is not in the quiet carriage. It proves, though, much quieter than the outgoing journey. The woman next to me reads her Louise Bagshawe. The lady across the aisle does her wordsearch puzzle. I check emails and doze. I call my partner and she says I sound more relaxed. My limbs feel heavier, my voice more calm and lower-pitched. The silent treatment seems to have done some good.
Maybe it isn't that this carriage is quieter than yesterday's. Perhaps, rather, I have changed. I try to meditate on the 14.44 to Paddington and visualise myself surrounded with light, just as Daniel Francis's handout for his meditation foundation students prescribes. Some people are, it says, particularly sensitive to negativity from the environment and other people. I think of Flouncing Woman, near to tears in the quiet carriage yesterday – a sensitive soul in a world of noise, who needs to protect herself better. The light technique seems to promise just that: a means of modulating this clamourous world, of dialling out the interference and concentrating on what really matters. We could all do with some of that.
The Big Silence will be shown on BBC2 in the autumn.
