As much as anyone else, I fantasize about checking out. I would love to remove the pinging notifications from my days, for my mind to wander without being thrown askew by each incoming tweet. But visions of total unplugging also seem a bit grotesque.

Think of Erik Hagerman, a former corporate executive at Nike, who decided shortly after the 2016 election to blockade the outside world, rigorously avoiding all news as if it might kill him. A New York Times profile last year followed him to a cafe where he plugged into white noise and read only the weather report. He watched basketball games on mute. His life seemed sad and lonely, not exhilarating. His decision to disengage was also, particularly now, the height of irresponsibility, an abdication of that most basic duty of citizenship: staying informed. Or consider the unnamed protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s recent novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” who decides to take enough drugs to, literally, sleep for a year: “If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.” But there is nothing hopeful about her hibernation. It is the act of a vacuous narcissist.

How much silence is too much? Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who was among the most influential Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, pondered this question intently. What drew him to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky was the opportunity for a life of quiet contemplation. His greatest fantasy, he wrote, was “to deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light.”

When his popularity as an author made it more difficult to achieve solitude, he retreated even further, living for long stretches by himself in a toolshed in the hills of the monastery grounds. But the world intruded, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, as the Cold War ramped up and a nuclear standoff seemed imminent. He began to wonder whether the life he had constructed for himself, so sustaining to his soul, justified the disengagement.

Merton’s dilemma is central to Jane Brox’s SILENCE: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27), her meditation on the pain and the joy of being quiet. “When is silence power?” Brox imagines Merton asking himself. “When is it an accomplice to fear?” Merton did not want to contribute to what he repeatedly called the “noise” of American society (“the noise of slogans or the repetition of clichés”; “the amplified noise of beasts”). But he also knew it wasn’t right to ignore his own stake in the world’s problems. What he sought instead was a “genuine and deep communication,” one achieved, he insisted, only through a continuous recharging in silence. The very element that might seem to make us bad citizens or antisocial is at the same time a prerequisite for thoughtfulness and more profound connection with others. Since most of us can’t yo-yo in and out of solitude (despite the meditation apps that promise to help us do just that), we have to live with this paradox.