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relearn how to be silent, that is, to be ourselves.
Finally! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and now only I myself will make me suffer.’
‘musing on God, simple and without fear, this maiden performed her noble and worthy task, dreamy Silence was seated at her door’.
are really old people / Knowing secrets, knowing stories … / Which they have hidden in the black panes / Which they have hidden at the back of the mirrors.]
If I may compare aural sensations to those of sight, the silence that reigns over vast spaces is more a sort of aerial transparency, which gives greater clarity to the perceptions, unlocks the unknown world of infinitely small noises, and reveals a range of inexpressible delights.
Later, St Bernard, having renounced the world at the age of 22, become ‘extraordinarily enamoured of secrecy and solitude’, reflecting that the Cross had closed the mouth of Jesus, said to himself: ‘I will condemn mine to silence.’
At Clairvaux, when some monks found the ‘long and horrible’ silence of the monastery too harsh, Bernard told them that, ‘were they to think seriously about the rigorous examination the great Judge would make of their words, they would not have much difficulty in remaining silent’.23
‘the silence of rule, the silence of prudence in conversation, and the silence of patience in affliction’.
‘I have only a few moments to live; the best use of them I can make is to pass them in silence.’
I]t is in silence that we love most ardently;
the quest for silence means a search for silent places.
‘Some there are’, wrote Maeterlinck, ‘that have no silence, and that kill the silence around them, and these are the only creatures that pass through life unperceived’; this, he says, is because ‘we cannot conceive what sort of man is he who has never been silent. It is to us as though his soul were featureless.’
silence is just as contagious as laughter.
According to Michel Foucault, these disciplines, and the harsh punishment of any violations, were part of the ‘technology of toughening’ practised in these institutions.
Within many communities, silence is an instrument of power. ‘To refuse to hear and see the other, to prevent them from leaving a mark, is to condemn them to a form of non-being.’
It is useful, in this connection, to reflect on the silences of historians and on the reasons for their terseness. It is sometimes due to a lack of evidence, sometimes to a refusal to record. Either way, it is for the historian to ask what the silence means.
Let us listen to the testimony of those who are convinced, not that God hides and remains silent, but that he speaks above all when he says nothing. ‘Lord, let us never forget that you speak also when you are silent’, wrote Kierkegaard.
silence as speech unuttered.
[From the heavenly bodies to the smallest mite, the immensity listens … / Do you think that the waters of the river and the trees of the woods / If they had nothing to say, would raise their voices? … / Do you think that the tomb, covered with grass and with night, is only a silence? … / No, everything is a voice and everything is a perfume / Everything in infinity says something to someone… . We hear the sound of the beam of light God throws / The voice of what humans calls silence.)
‘I’ve done too much music today. I shall bathe my ears in silence.’
‘one of those paintings that one listens to more than one looks at’;
Silence, in his paintings, is ‘an invitation to remember’.
We need to understand that the people of this period looked at a painting differently from us. They contemplated it with fervour. They hoped for a silent colloquy that would inspire them in their pious practices. Today, we look at a painting with only aesthetic considerations in mind. It is the task of the historian to rediscover the old way of looking, and to explain it.
This painting, he believes, calls for silence. It demands that you listen to it so as not to lose any of the qualities it accrued during its long gestation.
They invite viewers to pause in their daily activities, to contemplate the end of their life, to anticipate death.
Listen, my child, to the silence. It’s an undulating silence, a silence that brings valleys and echoes down and bows foreheads to the ground.
The connection between silence and writing has fascinated many authors. The vertigo of the blank page is impregnated with silence, a link between nothingness and creation.
To write is derisory, said Maurice Blanchot:
a sea wall of paper against an ocean of silence. Silence – it alone has the last word. It alone holds the fragmented sense through the words. And it is towards it, in essence, that we tend … we aspire … when we write. To remain silent is what we all want, without knowing it, when we write.
O’Dwyer identifies no fewer than ten forms of silence linked to speech: silences that convey the annihilation of the subject or the incommunicability between human beings, the silence that delivers the subject to the ‘shadows of their being’, the silence that is an interior voyage, the threatening silence of the other that sends back to nothingness, the silence created in order to resist the racket of the world and, of special relevance to us, the silence of reflection and the silences which suggest the inexpressible.
‘Great waves of silence … vibrate in poems.’
[I dream of sweet verses and intimate songs, / Of verses that brush against the soul like feathers, / Of light verses where the fluid sense floats free / Like Ophelia’s hair beneath the stream / Of silent verses without rhythm and without system / Where the rhyme slides noiselessly like an oar.]
‘withdrawal into the static silence of the substance of the soul’.
It proves that silence, in the silent film, is material, a palpable fact.
it is the bodies that speak, more than the silence;
The art of keeping quiet
that silence should, above all, be regarded as a virtue: it implied speaking only to the purpose,
‘you should remain silent, or your words should be more valuable than your silence’.
‘There is no danger in keeping quiet, there may be in speaking.’
Gracián reflected at greater length on the tactics of silence, which he called the ‘holy of holies of worldly wisdom’, that is, moderation and discretion.
When you met someone you didn’t know, you should first test the ground. You should never talk about yourself and you should never complain. Above all, it was unbecoming to speak because you liked the sound of your own voice.
‘The things you want to say ought not to be said; and the things that are good to say are not good to do.’
The man of discretion should keep quiet when there was danger in speaking the truth.
‘silence is the safest option for he who mistrusts himself’.
‘It requires great skill to speak, but no less to say nothing’,
three types of silence: eloquent, mocking and respectful.
‘to be able to discover the inner self of another and conceal your own is the mark of a superior mind’.
‘if people only said useful things, there would be deep silence in the world’.
‘men are never more in possession of themselves than when in silence’.
Dinouart distinguished eleven types of silence: prudent, artful, complaisant, spiritual and stupid, not forgetting the silences which were a mark of approval, of disdain, of humour, of caprice and of political acumen.
