Silence!

Trump’s not a big reader. By some accounts he doesn’t read at all, not even “one-page memos”. It’s likely he hasn’t read this famous Lincoln quote: “Better to remain silent and be thought afool, than to speak out loud and remove all doubt.” Fairly certain, in fact, after the way he dissed Macron on Wednesday, wading into the French first couple’s private life. Macron, wisely, didn’t turn it into a slanging match. But what he said – “Maybe you shouldn’t be speaking every day…there is too much chatter” – is good universal advice.

We speak too much anyway. Although some cultures are more garrulous than others, a study across US, Australia, Serbia, and Switzerland found women averaged 13,349 words daily, and men 11,950. If you consider that the first Harry Potter book – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – has only 76,944 words, women would out-speak it in six days. And there are outliers who average 120,000 words a day – 7,500 each waking hour. Or, the whole War & Peace in five days. Know anyone who finished Tolstoy’s classic in that short time? Trump started his War on Feb 28, and isn’t any closer to Peace after 36 days.

There’s much to be said for silence. It aids thinking, and absence of noise – those 13,000 words a day – heals the body. Buddha and Marcus Aurelius recommended it, highly. American philosopher Thoreau – Lincoln’s contemporary – had only three chairs in his house: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society”. He advised everyone to think, and rethink, before speaking. Since Trump’s been talking guns and bombs of late, he’ll hopefully get this: “The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion, and fallen into its last and steady course, before it reaches the ear of the hearer.”