“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881; Scottish essayist, historian, and social commentator, known for his influential writings on history, society, and culture, especially his essays “Sartor Resartus” and “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.”)

Shhhhh. Quiet, please. I need to talk. I’ve gone and gotten myself into a mell of a hess this time. Here I am writing about “silence” simply because I took the time to look at my draft posts, and I came across one rather stupidly titled “Silence.”

“Say what?” I screamed before turning my Smartphone face down on my bed to hide the odious text that I was reading on the screen. Screaming was perfect because it broke the silence. Well, you’d scream, too, if you detested silence as much as I do. It grates on my ears. I suffer noise far more readily than I suffer silence.

So here I lie in bed, working on a post whose essence I deplore. But write the damned post I must because I have started it, and I will finish it, ever mindful of what my parents told me over and over again, never giving me a moment’s silence:

If a job is once begun,
Never leave until it’s done.
Be its labor, great or small,
Do it well or not at all.

Well, I don’t know how well I’ll do it, but I will do my best to write my way out of this mess. Don’t worry. This will be a fast read: I, who knows nothing about silence, will be forced to speed things up when I start gathering my thoughts about silence because I have so few thoughts about the subject. You’ll reach the end sooner than you expect. When you do, listen carefully. I might burst forth with the Hallelujah Chorus. If I do, join me and we can make a joyful noise together.

Fortunately, I had captured enough notes that I recall what prompted me to start the idiotic draft in the first place.

My electricity went out. Unexpectedly. Silence washed over the afternoon soundscape of my domestic sanctuary. My refrigerator, the unsung hero of my kitchen, stopped serenading me with its constant hum. My ceiling fans ceased their purring and hushed their constant chatter about my secrets. My bedroom air conditioner no longer piped its melodious duet of “whoosh and hush.”

I wasn’t using my dishwasher, but if I had been, it would have stopped belting out its “splish-splash” just as I would have stopped chiming in with “I’m taking a bath,” both as if to wash away my culinary blues. I wasn’t using my washer and dryer either. But if I had been, they would have paused their spinning, tumbling symphony of cleanliness. As for my television, I have one that’s never on, but I can still faintly remember the mysterious hum of its digital dreams.

By now, you surely understand the sudden and imminent danger that surrounded me: all of my usual household sounds had been silenced.

All, thank God, save one. In the very moment of my most silent despair and in the hushed stillness of my living room, my grandfather clock came to life as the hour hand gracefully settled upon the number two. With a solemn, almost reverent demeanor, it stirred the silence with a deep, resonant chime. I had been rescued. The God of Noise had heard my silent prayer.

I sat there wondering how long I’d have to put up with this sorry state of near silence. I didn’t have to wonder long because it was 95 degrees outside, and my house was becoming unbearably hot inside. I decided to go outside and sit by my Koi Pond.

As I was walking out, I automatically turned off my kitchen lights. Silly me. I had forgotten that they weren’t on. Still, I could hear the tune of the see-saw switch. I’ll bet you didn’t know that light switches make noise. I didn’t either until Charlie Pluth released his “Light Switch.” If you don’t know that song, get to know it. As you listen, lean in and be super quiet. You’ll hear light switches being turned on and off. It’s awesome, so much so that Pluth documented the sounds on TikTok. Check it out for yourself and hear what I’m talking about.

After I turned off the lights that weren’t on, I stepped the few steps that I had to step to get from my kitchen to my Koi Pond. There I sat, poised in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker, forever contemplating silence. I started thinking about how I could make the best of a bad situation even though it was a double-whammy combo of record-setting temps and deafening silence.

No problem. I decided that I would just sit there and think about everything that I had ever read or heard about silence. Immediately, I started crooning a poor rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.”

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

[…]

“Fools”, said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

I loved that song as a 1960’s young idealist. It reminded me of the consequences of remaining silent and complacent in the face of social issues. Despite my lackluster vocal talents, I sounded far better than I expected, and even if I didn’t, my singing broke the silence.

“What about silence in literature?”

“Excellent question. I was worried that no one would ask.”

I can think of many examples, and since you asked, I will share a few. For novels, I’ll start with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Silence is personified by Captain Ahab’s obsession with the enigmatic white whale, and his monomaniacal pursuit of it creates an atmosphere of foreboding silence as the crew hesitates to speak openly about their fears.

Then we have one of my all-time favorite novels: The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. I read it in high school. I had never heard the F-word. In my youthful innocence, I was surprised at encountering such explicit language in print. I didn’t hear the word, of course, since I was reading silently, but I still put my fingers in my ears so that I wouldn’t hear myself just in case I started reading out loud. Then I dog-eared that page for future ready reference. But I digress. Here’s my point. Poor Holden Caulfield’s inner silence is a prominent theme in the novel, as he often feels misunderstood and unable to express his emotions.

As you might expect, I thought of a third novel, too, while contemplating silence. It’s One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Silence in this magical realist masterpiece often signifies the unspeakable, as generations of the Buendía family grapple with their own secrets and tragedies, unable or unwilling to communicate their true feelings.

More novels came to mind, but for now, several plays are waiting in the wings, ready to make their grand entrance. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot enters first. I read that play in college. One passage often takes center stage in my mind, just as much now as it did then when I equated silence with existential waiting:

VLADIMIR: “What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—”

Another play, also from my college days, remains a favorite today. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and its exploration of the haunting silence that follows years of conversation in the Tyrone family:

MARY: “You can’t imagine, can you, what that silence can mean after all these years of having someone talk to you every day and then suddenly stop, and yet that silence, still saying something but what you don’t know yet—”

For the third act, Lillian Hellman’s Children’s Hour came to mind. Silence is a central theme in the play as it grapples with the consequences of a malicious lie that silences the lives and reputations of the accused:

MARTHA: “I do not like the silence. I will go on talking until you answer me.”

More plays bubbled up in my mind, but those three will suffice, thereby allowing me to briefly mention one short story that yelled riotously for attention.

It’s not Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” with Bartleby’s repetitive “I would prefer not to” showcasing the power of passive resistance and the silence of non-conformity. It could have been “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. The entire story screams of the eerie and unusual quietness of the townsfolk before the annual lottery. But it’s not.

Instead, it’s a story by Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The story’s climax, where the Misfit and the Grandmother engage in a fateful conversation in the woods, marks an ominous final silence.

As for the last literary genre embracing silence–poetry–I immediately thought of Amherst’s recluse, Emily Dickinson, and her famous quatrain etched in my mind forever. It seemed especially poignant, as I grappled with having been plunged unexpectedly into silence:

Silence is all we dread.
There’s Ransom in a Voice –
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face.

Needless to say, I can’t have a poetic reverie about silence without including a poem by Robert Frost. The one that popped into my head, first, is so appropriate for my home in the woods. It’s his “The Sound of Trees.” Listen as he teases in the first few lines:

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?

[…]

They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.

The third poem that spoke to me in my silence was by Kay Ryan, one of the most powerful voices in today’s contemporary poetic soundscape. Her poem “Shark’s Teeth” suits me well because of the interplay between silence and noise that it explores.

Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark’s-tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.

The poem suggests that noise, in its relentless and pervasive presence, has taken over and devoured silence, leaving only small, sharp remnants. The poem evokes terror, not in a literal sense but rather in the metaphorical notion that silence, once a prevailing and powerful force, has been reduced to fragments and is now as elusive, scarce, and sharp as shark’s teeth.

Ironically, as I sat in the stillness of a torridly hot afternoon contemplating various literary nuances of silence, a single drop of water fell from the lower most rock of the Koi Pond waterfalls that had stopped cascading. It landed with a delicate and shimmering grace, creating a mesmerizing ripple on the pond’s still surface. The concentric circles expanded, radiating outward like echoes, breaking the silence, and bringing me out of my reverie.

In that instant, I realized that I had tapped into a powerful and personal paradox. I found myself both repelled and intrigued by the multi-faceted nature of silence.

Silence may grate on my ears, but I came to realize that it can be a space for reflection, contemplation, and understanding. Just as a great poem or short story or play or novel holds within it the power of silence, so, too, does our everyday existence. Maybe–just maybe–it is in the pauses between our words, the stillness before our actions, and the quiet moments of our introspection that we can truly have glimpses into the essence of life.