Alain Corbin

Just like in his previous booklet, about silence, Corbin does not offer a historical analysis. His main objective is to put people on the trail of sensory experiences that pass by almost unnoticed in the course of a human life, and therefore also in history, but which are nevertheless essential. Thus also a thing as banal the "experience of grass". Corbin departs from the nostalgic memory of how grass, meadows and fields are inextricably linked to childhood experiences: the green hues of the view, the smells, the feeling of rolling through grass and hay. With numerous quotes from literature (luckily this time a bit wider than just French literature), he illustrates the various emotions associated with grass, up to and including the wide views of Caspar David Friedrich or the 19th-century realists. In an epilogue, he notes with relief that grass is on the rise again, that even in cities wild gardens are being cultivated again and the era of flat-cut, pesticide-infused verges along motorways is over. So that we can reconnect with an age-old, basic human experience.This book is not a historical study, but a fresh grass green spring breeze, without much pretension.… (meer)

This is rather a kind of phenomenology of silence, a description of the different forms of silence and, in particular, how it is experienced by people. And if this booklet teaches something, then it is that those experiences are extremely versatile, highly diversified (religious-romantic) and also filled in in very different ways (sometimes with concrete techniques, such as the meditation exercises of the Jesuits, that seemed like an early form of mindfulness). But Corbin limits himself mainly to literary quotes, and then almost exclusively from French literature (the classic French myopia, you know). This booklet is a succession of quotes, some of which are nice, but you wonder what this says about the evolution of how we experience and seek silence. Inevitably we come to the opposite definition: “silence as absence of noise”, and the most interesting passage of this booklet - to me - was his brief outline of how noise evolved in western cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Corbin says in his introduction, that this is no more than a pioneer study, a tentative start. And it is.… (meer)