Whatshot
Silence Speaks
Silence Speaks
Date: 2025-03-27
What the hell has become of us? This insatiable need to experience everything in a rush. How did this psychology envelop us? My goodly God, the other day I saw a board that read: 'curry in a hurry'. A cuisine that became a global phenomenon because it allowed spices to linger and mix into a rainbow of colours, is now advertised as cooking at speed. How our eyes light up when we see the sign "Instant".
But I am happy to report that there is a counter-movement. Encouraging us to slow down. To let our gaze stay for an extra minute, to take in the slide from autumn to winter. To touch a bougainvillea and cook a meal over a fire for a couple of hours.
But crucially, given that I run a bookshop, there is a new craze in town. Believe it or not, it's called reading. Not so new perhaps. Around the globe, people have started to gather in restaurants, cafes, bookshops and bars, not to socialize, but to sit in silence. Reading. Instead of mooching around a shopping mall, looking for more stuff, readers are coming together in a celebration of communal introversion.
For thousands of years, readers have sat in silence, consumed by pages of prose. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that reading was a solitary and private business. "'All these books are the majestic expressions of the universal conscience and are more to our daily purpose than this day's newspaper...Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips, and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart.' In silence."
That age disappeared for some. For a while. But it is back. People are reading. Once more. Heads buried. The pages turn your mind into a world. You have a sense of community, but it does not have to be a shouting match, or congeal around a televised soccer match at the local watering hole.
Silent Book Club Durban will take place at Ike's Books and Collectables, 48a Florida Road at 11am to 1 pm on Sat 12th April.
Come. Walk up the wooden stairs. Turn Left. If you do not possess a book, grab one off the shelf. There is J.M. Coetzee's classic Waiting for the Barbarians, Violet Bulawayo's Glory and a First edition Enid Blyton.
There is only one rule; put it back on the shelf, not in your bag. Unless of course you get lucky and get to take Lauren Beukes home. But then you are faced with a conundrum, books can never be one-night stands.
48a Florida Road
Greyville
Durban
4001
Tel: 031 3039214

