Quiet Please!

Like a lot of people preoccupied with books I suppose, I would be described as an introvert - someone who instinctively shuns large crowds, noisy gatherings, ostentatious behaviour of any kind, and would rather be out of the limelight (whatever that is) than in it. As a result it's easy sometimes to feel marginalised from daily public discourse, to feel ignored and overwhelmed by the barrage of noisy people with often little of interest to say. And you're more likely to be treated with suspicion if you're naturally quiet - perhaps you're harbouring a secret or witholding information that everybody else feels they have the right to be party to? The infamous spy Kim Philby was the opposite - an extrovert - and hardly anyone suspected him of anything for decades. One of the world's great bluffers. As social networking becomes more popular and you're made to feel hopelessly adrift if you don't at least have a twitter account and a facebook page, and as vacuous celebrity culture continues to obsess the popular media to distraction, it's not surprising that introverts feel increasingly disengaged from society today. Susan Cain makes this point much more eloquently and at greater length in her wonderful book Quiet : The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Penguin paperback). I've just finished reading it and already I feel more re-assured about the value of my natural temperament, more confident about my (quiet) ability to make my point (I have this blog! Blogs are a Godsend to introverts!), and more optimistic that eventually enlightened thinking in business, politics, the media etc will start to listen to quiet people more often and more intently. I would hope that Susan Cain's book becomes required reading on any respectable 'management course' and in all responsible boardrooms in the country. She has drawn on a lot of evidence from trials, tests, surveys as well as anecdotal evidence to construct her basic argument that the world would be a better place if introverts were given more opportunity for their voices to be heard and to have their ideas more readily assimilated in public life. The book is not a tirade against extroverts though. Cain is very clear on the idea that extroverts also often have important things to say and that both ends of the temperament spectrum have a lot to offer each other. One of the most interesting things about this book is in fact the way that Cain decribes the differing relationships between introverted and extrovert behaviour - in marriage, business, etc. Perhaps unusually for an introvert (or maybe not - Cain also revealingly and subtly challenges the rigidity of such definitions) I am a football fan. An Arsenal fan to be precise. And one of the enjoyable benefits of reading Quiet is to be able to look at certain people in the public gaze and re-evaluate their behaviour and personality. Last summer Arsenal signed Mesut Özil, a world-class footballer so unlike any other player, temperamentally, at that level of the game that some vociferous voices in football who should know better have actually vilified him for some perceived character flaw that doesn't compel him to behave like a demented, hysterical, headless chicken when he's playing football. They don't trust him! Absurd and dispiriting. Ian Williams highlights the problem very well here : http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/08/arsenal-mesut-ozil-silent-gunner.html? Özil was in the German team that won the World Cup. Anyone who still can't appreciate his qualities after that definitely needs to read this book.