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Kindle Notes & Highlights
As for silence in literature, many authors would have done well to be inspired by it and to have published nothing.
the silences of ‘inertia’, of ‘sangfroid’, of ‘incredulity’, of ‘doubt’, of ‘irony’ and of ‘bearing’ (adopted by those who don’t understand what is going on), and not forgetting the ‘silence of delicacy’, silence in the presence of the old, and the silences of ‘respectful reserve’, of politeness, of resignation and of ‘dolorous sympathy’.
The peasant gave, by way of reply, a minimal definition of prayer: ‘I perceive him, and he perceives me.’
An ancestral fear of saying too much might be fostered by the traps laid during inquisitions, by tax officials, by the police or by the magistrates.
The historian must distinguish between imposed silences, deliberate silences, implicit silences, instrumentalized silences and those that were the result of a lack of mastery of the spoken word; nor should we forget the refusal of the elites to record peasant speech, regarded as impoverished, inept, even incomprehensible.
‘When I wish to love very tenderly someone dear to me, and pardon her everything, I need only look at her for a while in silence.’
‘Be silent’, she seems to murmur, ‘be silent’, so I may hear you. ‘It is easier to love when one is silent’, because ‘in the silence love can reach out into the remotest corners of space’.
‘Happy are two friends who love each other enough to be able to be silent together’,
which emerges in moments of introspection, when ‘we peer down in appalling silence into a black void’.
As soon as two or three persons are gathered together, their first thought is of banishing ‘the invisible enemy’. ‘Of how many ordinary friendships’, asks Maeterlinck, ‘may it not be said that their only foundation is the common hatred of silence!’
