The Big Read: A moment's silence. Please

In 1969 a Frenchman named Bernard Moitessier was competing in the first solo non-stop unassisted around-the-world yacht race.

Moitessier was closing in on the race leader, who had set out two months ahead of him. He had survived the heavy rollers of the Cape of Storms and the green Southern Ocean with its Himalayan seas. He had passed south of Australia and rounded ferocious Cape Horn and was through the doldrums on his way home. He was on course to being the first and fastest human ever to complete a ceaseless solitary circumnavigation.

Moitessier had been seven months at sea with no contact with the world. The event was sponsored by an English newspaper and already headlines were being prepared, columns being written analysing his success, and other columnssaying there were more important social issues to write about than a man alone in a boat.

Back in France, the Legion of Honour was his to collect. But as he moved further north, he began to sense the gathering chatter of voices, the press of the world, the hum and buzz of fuss and opinion. The world is too much with us, Wordsworth once wrote, and although he wrote it in English so Moitessier probably never read it (although he wrote poetry of his own), I imagine him leaning against his mast on a bright night off the coast of Brazil, musing the Gallic equivalent of:

"This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

the winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune."

Moitessier made a decision. He steered towards the first ship he saw and used a slingshot to get a message onto the deck, explaining that he was leaving the race "because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul". There and then, without touching land, he turned around and set out to sail a second time around the world.

Bernard Moitessier died in 1994 but I sometimes think about him in my daily round and wonder, if he lived today, how many times he'd have to pass Cape Horn, all alone with only the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sails shaking (and a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking), in order to keep his soul saved.*

Some years ago, for a long time and for similar reasons to Moitessier, I gave myself one day of silence each week. Every Monday I would neither speak nor listen to a human voice. I stayed at home for the most part, or wandered the Sea Point streets and bought groceries with a smile and a nod for the cashier rather than a cheery greeting. This was easy for me, of course, because I had no family or office job, but it worked a tonic.

My mind was stilled and Tuesdays felt like waking from a deep, refreshing sleep. My Mondays weren't a withdrawal from the world but an insulation from the frettings and struttings and blatherings of the ego - mine and others'. In a way it brought me closer to the world, and for the rest of the week I felt quieter and happier and more kind.

It fell away, of course, as good habits do, but lately I've been considering reinstating it and extending it to include all electronic and social-media avatars of the human voice. The babble of opinion grows more oppressive by the day. When something terrible happens - let's say Charlie Hebdo - you have about five minutes with the news, five minutes to feel it and live with it before it's commandeered by the voices that invisibly besiege us.

In five minutes there was "Je suis Charlie" -- I confess I was one of them - and in 10 there were people explaining why not everyone is Charlie, 15 till someone opined that no one is Charlie, 20 before someone snarked that no one should be Charlie.

There was a perfect storm of Charlieness and anti-Charliedom in op-eds and on talk radio and social media, a strident, one-upping dinner party of egos coolly explaining to other egos why their own take was more subtle and smart and engaged. It was like being at a cocktail party made up entirely of actors and English students.

The event itself - Charlie Hebdo or Boko Haram or Miss World - becomes a premise, the MacGuffin for a display of opinionising virtuosity, however sincere and incisive the opinion might be, and the result leaves me grey and drained, especially if I've been drawn into it by the insistence of my own ego to be heard.

What's the solution? I don't know. I'm not offering one. The world has too many opinions; that includes mine.

*Writer's note: Parts of this paragraph are a quote from the poem Sea Fever by John Masefield.