Icy pandemonium

“What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.” -Simone Weil

I really like this line by Simone Weil. I want to dig into it a little bit.

What man needs is silence and warmth. What does this mean? I think it means that we need to be in an atmosphere where silence is positive and full, rather than empty. Silence is often associated with emptiness, coldness, distance, and so on. But Weil is saying that we need a silence that is the opposite of this—a silence that is self-sufficient, that doesn’t need to be filled. A silence that doesn’t set your mind racing with anxiety or paranoia, worrying about how to fill it, but rather a silence that puts your mind at ease. A silence that warms you up and makes you feel that everything will be okay. That’s the most valuable thing there is. Usually silence is cold, but a warm silence, a full silence, where you can feel comfortable and at ease, is the rarest thing there is.

But as she says, we do not have that.

What we do have is what she calls “an icy pandemonium.” What does this mean? If something is icy and cold, it feels empty. You run around to try to get warmer. But this is that plus pandemonium—meaning no space for yourself. Usually when you are always moving around—as icy cold implies—you at least have some solitude and the peace that comes with it.

But not when there’s pandemonium—you have no time or space for your thoughts, everything is pressing in on you at once. So you have the rootlessness of being in the cold but also the crowdedness of pandemonium.

Another way to think of it is that usually in pandemonium there could be a kind of warmth—a lot is going on, after all, and motion can create heat. But an icy pandemonium is one where there’s a lot going on, but you’re like a ghost in relation to it. You’re a detatched spectator just watching it all go by. Lots of motion is happening but it generates no heat for you.

So an icy pandemonium is the worst of both worlds. She says that is what we exist in most of the time—instead of what we really want and need, which is silence and warmth. Silence implies a kind of stillness, so the opposite of pandemonium—but a stillness that is warm. Most stillnesses are cold—you have to move around to get warm. But a silence and stillness that is warm on its own—that can sustain human life in the most effortless possible way.

It seems like we always have one or the other—silence or warmth. If we have silence, it’s a cold empty silence. If we have warmth, it’s a noisy, crowded warmth. The trick is to have both—that’s what we don’t have.