Maureen Dowd has written a fine piece in the New York Times about silence, lamenting its loss to us moderns.
She’s kinda right and kinda not.
You can’t actually lose silence, only shut it out, displace it with noise. Nor can you generate silence or even define it. It’s just there, like zero, as Hazanavicius notes, not nothing – it must be something since it’s the subject of this discussion – yet not something either, as that would contradict its nothingness.
Our modern malaise is about our struggle with this irony and the implication that what matters most cannot be defined or understood. After a long, bloodied search, we’re miffed at the apparent absurdity of the Silence of existence, a life without complete, ultimate answers. The noise and busyness is our way of coping, though of course it only ends up making it worse.
