What is silence? I am profoundly deaf in my left ear (I have a cochlear implant). The ear is useless for hearing, though it makes a pleasant decorative ornament and serves as a place to display earrings and anchor glasses; no sound can penetrate it. You would think that profound deafness is as silent as it gets. And yet it is not quiet in there. I hear deep space sounds, a hollow hum that washes in and fades away, changes in pitch and volume.

George Prochnik seems to have found a place that is even quieter than my deaf ear. The underground chapel at the Trappist New Melleray Abbey south of Dubuque, Iowa, is so quiet that visitors sometimes find themselves physically unable to remain there. Mr. Prochnik embraced it, wanting “to remain and sink deeper into it.” The silence allowed him to acknowledge “the limitations of our grasp on what lies within and without us, the knowledge that there’s something beyond the self.”

It’s an elegant and eloquent observation. But can you experience total silence in the presence of another person? Mr. Prochnik, who was with a guide, doesn’t address that.

He traveled far and near in his pursuit of silence: to Copenhagen to learn about “noise mapping” in urban areas, to a Zen garden in Portland, Ore., to a neurobiology lab in upper Manhattan, to one of New York’s vest pocket parks right around the corner from his office.