“You never find a place that is total silence,” Mr. Kagge said. “I’ve been looking, and I have not found it.” Erling Kagge is a 54-year-old Norwegian explorer, author and publisher. The closest he came was trekking to the South Pole, which he reached in early 1993. He was alone in frozen isolation for 50 nights and days. Given a radio to make emergency calls, he’d tossed the batteries on Day 1. “When you start, you have all the noise in your head,” Mr. Kagge said, but by the end “you feel your brain is wider than the sky. You’re a guy being part of this bigness, this greatness. To be alone and experience the silence feels very safe, very meaningful.”