MonoMay 17

The Sound of Silence

I make no excuses for the title, it indeed comes from the song:-

Hello, darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

I had an exchange with my tutor on the forum of the course I was doing a while back which set me to thinking. It was an exchange about the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and I made the point that I found the Holocaust Tower quite disturbing, and that, for me, the silence gave time, and space, for reflection. She came right back at me with the question “In other words, one would be inclined to assume that silence would aid reflection?”. This set me to thinking about silence, what it is, how we experience it, and whether, or not, we ever encounter true silence.

So, I went in search of a definition, and the first definition in most dictionaries seems to be along the lines that silence is the “absence of any sound or noise; stillness”. So, what is silence? Well, the definition tells us that it is that absence of sound or noise, but I am not sure that this is totally correct, and leads me to the question about whether, or not, there is ever an absolute ‘absence of sound or noise’. How do we experience silence? I guess that to experience silence we, individually, have to have a preconceived notion of what silence is, and that is probably different for each individual. Then, do we ever encounter true silence, that really is the tough one, and is, probably, dependent on circumstances. What follows are my thoughts.

I guess that I have a strange relationship with silence. I like to be alone with my own thoughts at times, and find turning off the music, having no human interaction, and shutting the world out quite therapeutic. I don’t really think of silence as the absence of sound but rather as the presence of something that was there but is no longer - that is my idea\preconception of what silence is. My experience of silence follows from this, in that this perceived presence\absence leads me to thoughts of what is missing, why it is not there, who was there that created what is missing, and why they are no longer there. Do we ever encounter true silence? I think that the answer to that is that we don’t. Even sitting alone in a room with the doors and windows closed one would be aware of the sound of one’s breathing, and if reading a book the subtle sound of turning the page, along with all of the many sounds, on the periphery of hearing, sounds that constitute a house functioning. Some may argue that one would experience total silence in a soundproof room, I would argue that even then one would be aware of one’s own breathing, or the rustle of one’s clothing (that is unless one were naked), one’s own movements etc.. There is always sound, even if only vestigial sound on the very edge of hearing. I don’t think that there is ever a true absence of sound, a pure silence, and I think that if we ever encountered such a ‘pure silence’, such an ‘absence of sound’ for any prolonged period it would drive us to the very edges of madness.

In conclusion I think that my tutor raised an interesting point. Given that we never really experience true\pure silence - there is always some sound or other, and we need it for a degree of sanity, sound is an essential component of life. So, to return to the question that sparked off such thoughts - “In other words, one would be inclined to assume that silence would aid reflection?” - I think that my answer to her question would be that yes, in my case, I think that silence is an aid to reflection.