There’s something about silence

Fosterverse Weekly #32

Dec 11, 2024

It wasn’t until it snowed four inches and I woke up to my backyard transformed into a fairy tale’s winter wonderland, that I noticed just how much quieter things are out here. And it wasn’t until the sunset at 4:28pm on a cloudy new moon, that I noticed just how much darker.

Of all my teachers, silence has been the most nourishing and darkness the most instructive.

Stepping out of my house and into the first snow felt like trespassing into the lungs of a forest holding its breath. I’ve never felt more like a guest in someone else’s silence.

I’ve since learned that snow traps air in its fluffy porous structure and acts as a natural sound absorber. A great quiet quilt was created outdoors, not just by the absence of animals, but by the absence of air itself.

Silence is characteristically an absence, and yet somehow an all-enveloping presence too. Max Picard called silence an “autonomous reality” – a something in and of itself. “Silence is not visible, and yet its existence is clearly apparent. It extends to the farthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it as concretely as we feel our own bodies. It is intangible, yet we can feel it as directly as we feel materials and fabrics.”

Darkness too is supposedly an absence, and yet everything that’s anything emerges from it. “Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding" as the famous ancient proverb tells us.

I’ve been basking in the snowful silence ever since, and it’s doing things to me — working on and through me, stripping away the non-essential, softening my once noisy streams of thought, chiseling me down day by day into something rawer and realer.

As writers, we simply cannot know what it means to say something without first knowing what it means to say nothing at all.

We learn to sit still and listen, and eventually, we learn to write. Words inevitably emerge against the backdrop of silence. The silence cannot lie, whereas Rumi reminds us, every word we utter ultimately falls short of the Truth. Words will never get us there, but we can get closer over time.

“Real speech is in fact nothing but the resonance of silence.” — Picard