On [Temporary] Silence

My act of resigning from a demanding, modern journalism often feels like a highly personal embrace of Susan Sontag’s essay "Aesthetics of Silence." 

When I step away, I'm not just changing jobs; I’m executing the ultimate gesture of intellectual renunciation—a move toward necessary silence.

And the scene changes to an empty room.

In her essay included in Styles of Radical Will (1969), Susan Sontag discusses the ultimate gesture of artistic and intellectual renunciation: permanent silence. 

Sontag argues that permanent silence is the highest moral and philosophical choice. It is a calculated act of abandonment that grants one's previous work immense authority. 

Sontag points to the intentional abandonment of a celebrated career by figures like the poet Arthur Rimbaud and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as profound examples of this concept.

Arthur Rimbaud—regarded as one of France’s brilliant poets but twisted human beings—renounced poetry at the age of 20 and joined the Dutch colonial army, sailed all the way to Java in Indonesia and then deserted and fled into the jungle. 

He then proceed his journey  to Abyssinia—present day Ethiopia to make his fortune in the slave trade. 

Wittgenstein, known for seminal works like Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, found it morally impossible to teach philosophy while World War II was raging and instead chose to work as a hospital porter, focusing on practical, non-intellectual labor. 

Both men declared their previous work—in poetry, philosophy, or art—”as trifling, of no importance”. 

For Sontag, this choice of renunciation—of severing the dialogue with the audience—is a form of spiritual liberation. These men were freeing themselves from the burdensome, corrupting influence of the world, which attempts to dictate, judge, and commodify their work. 

My own resignation from journalism—with its patronizing demands for clicks and its distorting noise—feels like this exact Sontagian bid for freedom.

The resignation, therefore, is my attempt to achieve a temporary silence—a necessary retreat to reclaim my sensibility. I am refusing to be held in "servile bondage" to the media landscape that acts as patron, client, and judge. 

The hope is that this silence will, as Sontag suggests, retroactively grant an added power and authority to the work I was forced to break off. I step into an empty room, a purifying void, to detoxify from the noise and restore my professional integrity.

However, the dilemma for a writer or journalist is that Sontag’s aesthetic retreat runs directly counter to George Orwell’s moral urgency. Orwell—who himself worked for the BBC as a talks assistant and producer from 1941 to 1943—saw the great threat not in the noise of culture, but in the malice of politics.

While Orwell is not explicitly mentioned alongside Rimbaud and Wittgenstein in Sontag's famous essay on silence, but his life offers an example of a moral and political renunciation of a different kind of "vocation" or identity.

Unlike Rimbaud—who stopped writing altogether, or Wittgenstein—who chose a non-intellectual profession, Orwell's renunciation was a radical commitment to a different kind of writing and a different life. 

He used his powerful, ethical prose as a form of moral action, making his writing anything but silent.

Orwell’s life was defined by renouncing corruption (the euphemistic, dishonest language of the establishment) but doubling down on clear, ethical noise. 

His path was not silence, but a radical commitment to transparent writing as a form of moral action. For him, silence is the totalitarian state’s ultimate weapon—the removal of words needed for rebellious thought.

By focusing on the "corruption of language," we see how Sontag and Orwell diagnose the sickness of modern society, but prescribe entirely different cures—silence versus clarity.

Both Sontag and Orwell saw that the relationship between words and reality was broken in the mid-20th century. However, they attributed the corruption to different forces and sought different remedies.

Sontag's concern is that language has become corrupted by being overly talkative, analytical, and consumerist. The corruption happens when language is used to tame and consume art.

My resignation is the struggle between these two moral poles: the Sontagian need for purity through silence versus the Orwellian duty to engage through clarity. The temporary silence is the breathing room required to find the latter with the integrity of the former.