I have recently read two magnificent books on the same topic – silence. One was written in 2948 by Max Picard, a Swiss philosopher of art and entitled The World of Silence, the other – called Quest for Silence (published in 2000) – is a work of Harry Wilmer, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst. Neither of the books is contemporary, yet it made me think a lot about the noise of the Internet that we are all caught in. Picard does vent against the meaningless chatter of the radio, though, which can be easily related to the worldwide web of words – the endless updates, comments, blog posts that we are flooded with at our own choosing. Wilmer quotes from Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra:
“Everyone among them talks – no one knows how to understand any more. … Everyone cackles, but who wants to sit quietly in the nest and hatch eggs?”
I found both books very nourishing and both pointing at what Meister Eckhart called “the central silence, … where no creature may enter, nor any idea, and there the soul neither thinks nor acts nor entertains any idea… .”
I do not have much to add to the wonderful passages from both books. In Wilmer’s book I was especially moved by the chapters dedicated to the trauma of the war (Hiroshima, Vietnam and the second world war with the Holocaust) and the chapter on the Japanese word MA – “the silent space in painting, music, speech, and between things.” The Japanese believe that it is thanks to that opening, that space, that light can shine through. Wilmer devoted a lot of space to communication, listening and silence. I was quite astounded that dolphins communicate by means of the intervals of silence between the sound they emit. For them, silence communicates.
Some of Max Picard’s passages deserve to be quoted extensively. Here I present a handful of them – I believe any comment would be gratuitous:
“When language ceases, silence begins. But it does not begin BECAUSE silence ceases. The absence of language simply makes the presence of silence more apparent.”
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“…language becomes emaciated if it loses its connection with silence.”
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“Silence contains everything within itself.”
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“Here in Silence is the Holy Wilderness…”
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“Speech came out of silence, out of the fullness of silence. The fullness of silence would have exploded if it had not been able to flow into speech.”
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“… the silence that precedes speech is the pregnant mother who is delivered of speech by the creative activity of the spirit.”
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“Silence reveals itself in a thousand inexpressible forms: in the quiet of dawn, in the noiseless aspiration of trees toward the sky, in the stealthy descent of night, in the falling moonlight, trickling down into the night like a rain of silence, but above all in the silence of the inward soul…”
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“Silence can exist without speech but speech cannot exist without silence. The word would be without depth if the background of silence were missing.”
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“Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive. Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence.”
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“On the river of tears man travels back into silence.”
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“The world of myth lies between the world of silence and the world of language. Like figures that seem to loom larger than life in the gathering twilight, the figures of the world of myth seem huge as they emerge from the twilight of silence.”
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“Ekbatana, the city of the Medes, had seven circular walls, each with different coloured battlements. They were, according to Herodotus, the heavenly spheres enclosing the sun castle, and the obelisks were sunrays in stone. No word could express so well the power of the heavenly spheres as this monument in the silence of stone. In the silence of these stones the heavenly spheres and the rays of the sun lived again on earth, and in their silence one heard their movement in the sky.”
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“Silence has locked itself up in cathedrals and protected itself with walls.”
J.M.W. Turner, Interior of an Italian church (via https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-interior-of-an-italian-church-d16140)
