Silence* By Pico Iyer

Beautiful essay.

Every one of us knows the sensation of going up, on retreat, to a high
place, and feeling ourselves so lifted up that we can hardly imagine the
circumstances of our usual lives, or all the things that make us fret. In
such a place, in such a state, we start to recite the standard litany: that
silence is sunshine, where company is clouds; that silence is rapture, where
company is doubt; that silence is golden, where company is brass.

But silence is not so easily won. And before we race off to go prospecting
in those hills, we might usefully recall that fool's gold is much more
common, and that gold has to be panned for, dug out from other substances.
"All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by
Silence," wrote Herman Melville, one of the loftiest and most eloquent of
souls.

We have to earn silence, then, to work for it: to make it not an absence but
a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just
a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is
stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear
ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear
ourselves not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper
than mere thought allows. In silence, we might better say, we can hear
someone else think.

Or simply breathe. For silence is responsiveness, and in silence we can
listen to something behind the clamour of the world.

A "moment of silence" is the highest honour we can pay someone; it is the
point at which the mind stops, and something else takes over (words run out
when feelings rush in).

There is -- of course -- a place for noise, as there is for daily lives.
There is a place for roaring, for the shouting exultation of a baseball
game, for hymns and cries of pleasure. The great charm of noise, however, is
when it ceases.

Silence, then, could be said to be the ultimate province of trust: it is the
place where we trust ourselves to be alone; where we trust others to
understand the things we do not say; where we trust a higher harmony to
assert itself. We all know how treacherous are words, and how often we use
them to paper over embarrassment, or emptiness, or fear of the larger spaces
that silence brings. "Words, words, words" commit us to positions we do not
really hold, the imperatives of chatter; words are what we use for lies,
false promises, and gossip. We babble with strangers; with intimates we can
be silent. We "make conversation" when we are at a loss; we unmake it when
we are alone, or with those so close to us that we can afford to be alone
with them.
In love, we are speechless; in awe, we say, words fail us.

(1992)

*From Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions*
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