Silence, please!

Winter afternoons and the heft of cathedral tunes...Emily Dickinson tolled the time and her chimes and charms persevere. However, silence predominates too, whether willed or arriving over the threshold of the evening. Silence, like our notions of death, can be approximated but never become a full essence, an embodied totality: we approach its condition but can never ever truly reach its sanctum. Even a sensory deprivation experiment will yield the noise of one's own blood pulsing through the temples (a sublime dual meaning that). In this raucous internet-friendly world, a world of telecommunication that only underwrites our loneliness, a culture of noise merely conceals the absym of silence. Silence is existential, pathological, necessary, and taken for granted. I've been silent on this blog for some time; to recover the pause between words, the caesura between breaths. But I reach for Beckett, my favorite advocate of silence, and shut my ears between his pages, pages configuring and prefiguring silence, passage to the final destination. -curley