A winter nearly forty years ago, Jane Brox had her most profound encounter with silence, while house sitting on the remote eastern shore of Nantucket. It was during that winter, as she writes in her new book, she began her “first serious attempt at a writing life, and I think those days allowed me to glean an understanding of what is possible in silence.” “…it gave me the freedom to begin, and once I had begun, to work intently.”
Since then, she has published five books including the latest Silence: A Social History Of One Of The Least Understood Elements Of Our Lives. She acknowledges her gratefulness to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough “for providing me with the quietest of places to work” during her entire writing life.
Jane Brox will be at The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough to sign and discuss the new book on Saturday, Feb. 16 at 11 a.m. “Silence” is a compelling history of silence as a powerful shaper of the human mind–in prisons, in places of contemplation, and in our own lives. Through her evocative intertwined histories of the penitentiary and the monastery, she illuminates the many ways in which silence is far more complex than any absolute; how it has influenced ideas of the self, soul, and society. Brox traces its place as a transformative power in the monastic world from Medieval Europe to the very public life of twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton, whose love for silence deepened even as he faced his obligation to speak out against war. This fascinating history of ideas also explores the influence the monastic cell had on one of society’s darkest experiments in silence: Eastern State Penitentiary. Conceived of by one of the Founding Fathers and built on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the penitentiary’s early promulgators imagined redemption in imposed isolation, but they badly misapprehended silence’s dangers.
Jane Brox is also the author of three books related to her family farm in Dracut, MA as well as Brilliant: The Evolution Of Artificial Light, one of Time Magazine’s top ten nonfiction books of the year in 2010. She now lives in Maine.
This event is free and all are welcome. The Toadstool Bookstore is located at 12 Depot Street, Peterborough, NH. For more information, call the bookstore at 924-3543.