The nature of silence

"I'm beginning to appreciate John Cage and all he used to say about the proximity of music to noise. His posturing silences were windows onto the world we're forced to listen to and, if we can, to harmonise. Every performance of silence is unlike any other. We participate by sharing it with other people and comparing, afterwards, what it sounded like.

One of the strange things about silence is that, having listened to it every Sunday morning for years, you begin to glimpse variations in its intensity, begin to notice differences within what should, by all rational analyses, be uniform. I first noticed it sitting in the British Library one day when an announcement was made calling for a minute's silence after the Madrid train bombs. It was a strange request, because - it being a library - everyone was silent anyway. But the nature of the silence changed and charged, as if you could hear the concentration and intercession."

From Utopian Dreams by Tobias Jones (Faber ISBN 9780571223800) - recommended. Now travel into great silence.
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