Where Did All The Silence Go?

Seriously.

Albert Camus

Only yesterday, the cicadas whispered gossip along the branches of the oak trees. Their message was so shrilling that the roots absorbed their squeals like sacred soliloquies and carried them across the soil until the news had spread like wildfire. The land understood its fate long before humans did. The message reached the shores of Antarctica and the rainforests of the Amazon before people in the city detected any hint of a problem. In an alcove gathering of the woodlands, centenarian pine trees huddled together to converse about the tragedy that spread across the world. The main question hovering between the branches was a simple one.

‘Where did all the silence go?’

Some believe it got choked out of the sky at the start of the industrial revolution and died a slow, menacing death in the air of the city buzz. Pascal said that ‘all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ And only now, do I understand the stress on ‘quietly.’ Silence was too vast for man to face, so we sought to diminish its power. We built trains and busses. Stacked our lives on top of each other in apartment blocks. Created asphalt tracks to carry metal boxes on rubber wheels. When one looks at human innovation from the desire to escape silence, the world becomes an absurdity.

No one stands up for silence. Its only ambassador is a mute gentleman that hasn’t said a word in forty years. Its committee is pin drop quiet. Baffled by the lack of verbose commitment for their party, opposition members voice their concerns in belligerent bellows. ‘Silence is violence,’ they shout. To be loud is to be proud, and to be loudest is to be brave. How backwards we seem to have got it! We envy the loudest when we should learn to pity them.

When I close my eyes in the city, I become immediately aware of the swell of traffic surging around me. Sometimes, between the diminishment of one engine and the imminent burst of another, there is what can only be described as holy—a reprieve. Stillness. Then it’s gone again and the world keeps turning, and I forget I’m here, standing on the pins of my feet. I forget that the world doesn’t owe me anything even though I expect tomorrow to come after today, and today to thin into yesterday. I listen as the headphones of the world clamp busyness around my ears and coax me into amnesia. This lacklustre awareness. This isn’t normal. This isn’t healthy. I just act like it is. The noise makes me believe it.

When I wake up in the grey grit of the early morning, I search for silence. I search for silence in the rafters of the roof, along the mossy walls of the communal garden, in the backroad mews that hide off the main road. I search for silence despite the seemingly seductive nature of breaking it. Young people are always trying to break the silence, for some reason. There are very few people who seem to be perfectly content with sitting next to one another and not saying anything and feeling good about it. Very few are able to leave their house without their headphones. Very few can stare into the world without the help of distraction. No one tries to hear the things that can’t be said.

I let my hand fly through the canopy of a cat’s fur and touch on my own envy. Man lives in time, in successiveness, whilst animals live in the eternity of the moment. What’s better? The latter, I assume, because the now is never deceitful. The now is always, now. The past and the future are warped glass, changing depending on how you look at it. Words mean nothing. They can be twisted into any form. Promises can’t be counted on. They’ll seduce the soul and lull the eyes. We are all so keen to label, yet silence can’t be labelled. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of silence?

How could we ever expect to interpret the vastness of the hush, if we can never muster the time to face it? The world is so keen on giving us the answers, in mulling over the possibilities, in considering this, or that, that we’ve forgotten what it means to remain open to the nothingness. This constant technological hum clads our life in cling film, creates a barrier between us and boredom. The more I separate myself from the never ending stream of feeds and scrolls, and continuous engagements, the more I start to register the distance between the noise. Perhaps, the silence never left. I just forgot how to hear it. Later that night, I stood in the garden and watched the cat paw at the sprouting grass. The wind whistled through the slats of the fence. The pine trees hung their branching arms over my head. They didn’t say a thing. Not even a word. There was no need.

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