Cioran - Silence

 Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!

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To expend oneself in conversations as much as an epileptic in his fits.
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Withdraw into yourself, perceive there a silence as old as being, even older….

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The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.
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A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
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The pure passing of time, naked time, reduced to an essence of flux, without the discontinuity of the moments, is realized in our sleepless nights. Everything vanishes. Silence invades — everywhere. We listen; we hear nothing. The senses no longer turn toward the world outside. What outside? Engulfment survived by that pure passage through us that is ourselves, and that will come to an end only with sleep or daylight. . . .
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... he took refuge in complete silence ...
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...temptation to silence...
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After having palavered for hours, I am invaded by the void. By the void and by shame. Is it not indecent to display one’s secrets, to proffer one’s very being, to tell and to tell oneself, whereas the fullest moments of one’s life have been known in silence, in the perception of silence?
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... laconism must resign itself to silence if it wants to avoid a fake enigmatic profundity.
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Moreover, what could she own and utter, when silence stood for her soul and perplexity for the universe?
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When we see someone again after many years, we should sit down facing each other and say nothing for hours, so that by means of silence our consternation can relish itself.
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We are beyond all human calculation, beyond any notion of salvation or perdition, of being or non-being, we are in a particular silence, a superior modality of the void.
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No accident that the Trappist order was founded in France rather than in Italy or Spain. Granted the Spanish and the Italians talk ceaselessly, but they do not hear themselves talk, whereas the Frenchman relishes his eloquence, never forgets he is talking, is consummately conscious of the fact He alone could regard silence as an ordeal, as an askesis.
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Saint Seraphim of Sarov, in his fifteen years of complete seclusion, opened his cell door to no one, not even to the bishop who occasionally visited the hermitage. “Silence,” he would say, “brings man closer to God and makes him, on earth, like unto the angels.”
What the saint should have added is that silence is never deeper than in the impossibility of prayer….
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“Sicknesses, some by day, others by night, in their fashion, visit men, bearing suffering to mortals—in silence, for wise Zeus has denied them speech” (Hesiod).
Fortunately, for, being mute, they are already excruciating—what would they be if they were garrulous as well? Can we imagine even one proclaiming itself?

Porchia: A new pain enters and the old pains of household receive it with their silence, not with their death.
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Although I have sworn never to sin against blessed concision, I am still in complicity with words, and if I am seduced by silence I dare not enter it, I merely prowl on its peripheries.
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The only valid attitude is absolute silence or a cry of despair.
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... metaphysical reality, requires, most of the time, silence ...
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Man has forgotten the meaning of silence...
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Facing Silence
Once you have come to set great store by silence, you have hit upon a fundamental expression of life in the margins. The reverence for silence of great solitaries and founders of religions has far deeper roots than we think. Men's presence must have been unendurable and their complex problems disgusting for one not to care about anything except silence.Chronic fatigue predisposes to a love of silence, for in it words lose their meaning and strike the ear with the hollow sonority of mechanical hammers; concepts weaken, expressions lose their force, the word grows barren as the wilderness. The ebb and flow of the outside is like a distant monotonous murmur unable to stir interest or curiosity. Then you will think it useless to express an opinion, to take a stand, to make an impression; the noises you have renounced increase the anxiety of your soul. After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.
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Silence can be so deep sometimes that you hear thoughts rustling in freshly dug graves.
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True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.
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God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
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“No language can hope for anything but its own defeat” (Gregory Palamas).
So radical a condemnation of all literature could come only from a mystic—from a professional of the Inexpressible.
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Each time I think of the Essential, I seem to glimpse it in silence or explosion, in stupor or exclamation. Never in speech.
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Existence might well have had some attraction before the advent of noise—let us say, before the neolithic age. When will he come, the man who can rid us of all men?
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Immense, supernatural aridity: as if I were beginning a second existence on another planet where speech is unknown, in a universe refractory to language and incapable of creating such a thing for itself.
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At the Luxembourg, a woman of about forty, almost elegant but with a certain bizarre look about her, was speaking in an affectionate, even impassioned tone to someone who was not to be seen. As I caught up with her, I noticed that she was clutching a marmoset to her bosom. She then sat down on a bench, where she continued her monologue with the same intensity. The first words I heard as I passed her were: “You know, I’ve had about enough.” I walked on, not knowing whom to pity more: her or her confidant.