Every week I write about sounds. This week I write about silences. I’ve been collecting them for quite some time now.
It’s hard to bring to mind the first silence of which I was ever aware. It must have been in the womb, one would think, but I cannot claim a memory as powerful and precise as all that.
The silence of our grade school library is perhaps the silence that I miss the most. I recall afternoons spent mostly alone among the stacks of one-minute mysteries and illustrated books of rhyme. Dust-mote days, breathers between the noise of school and home, like blank spaces cradled between parentheses. I hold those silences lonely and distant and precious.
For the most part the silences I love mostly have to do with girls, much like the pop songs that I love. There are bittersweet silences, like a certain silence that took place across a screen door, between a high school infatuation and myself, a silence that said that four years of friendship does not counter one semester of silly.
Happy silences, like the ones that happened when I was joined for breakfast at a coffee place one morning, by a girl I liked — she had arrived a little late and I had already started to do the newspaper’s crossword puzzle, and she sat beside me and helped me solve it. The three- to five-second silences as she pondered the clues, before she gave me the words with no doubt in her voice — she was one of those girls who is so good-looking it’s almost painful, but I don’t think she ever did anything sexier than solve that crossword with me that morning.
The comfortable silence of seeing someone I had just met back to her apartment, crossing a courtyard defined by residential buildings arrayed on either side of it — a silence that said we didn’t know each other that well yet, but we were looking forward to the possibility of other walks.
There are silences spawned by sudden strange circumstances.
I was standing once, on a sidewalk, with two acquaintances of mine, a man and a woman. They were not a couple, they did not even know each other very well; they shared a kind of pleasant awareness of each other’s existence. There they were, just standing on that sidewalk, waiting to cross the street, when all of a sudden, the man nudged her forward, into speeding traffic. This was no joke. Make no mistake, she would have been maimed, and possibly killed, by one of the swiftly-moving vehicles, had not another man standing next to her — who possessed, I must say, exceptional reflexes — seized her and yanked her back.
The silence that followed was profound and, it seemed, had the characteristics of a deep dark hole, or a blind spot. There were no stammered apologies, no eye contact, though the woman had a stunned look on her, and it was possible that the man’s face hid quickly-buried remorse. And then the cars paused, and we crossed. Later I would ask the man about it and he would profess absolutely no understanding of what he had done in that instant. It was an impulse, he said.
Oddly enough, that woman eventually fell in love with him. Understand that this was an attractive woman, who could certainly have ended up with many another man who had not tried to murder her. She pursued him after a fashion, pined away for him for many long years, and in all that time, he never treated her with more than a casual regard which often bordered on indifference.
A writer I admire broke a silence of half a century to condemn someone who wrote an unauthorized sequel to one of his books. I wonder about the quality of that silence, about the differences between its perception from his side and from ours.
There are silences that I wish I could collect but cannot. The slow silent spin of planets. The silence of a prehistoric dawn. The silence of a train of thought that changes everything.
There are silences I hope to collect in the years to come.
Here is the silence of the words that I will never say to you: