The nature of silence

 

Silence is nothing merely negative; it is not the mere absence of speech. It is a positive, a complete world in itself.

Silence has greatness simply because it is. It is, and that is its greatness, its pure existence.
There is no beginning to silence and no end: it seems to have its origins in the time when everything was still pure Being. It is like uncreated, everlasting Being.

When silence is present, it is as though nothing but silence had ever existed.

Where silence is, man is observed by silence. Silence looks at man more than man looks at silence. Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.

One cannot imagine a world in which there is nothing but language and speech, but one can imagine a world where there is nothing but silence.

Silence contains everything within itself. It is not waiting for anything; it is always wholly present in itself and it completely fills out the space in which it appears.

It does not develop or increase in time, but time increases ın silence, It is as though time had been sown into silence, as though silence had absorbed it; as though silence were the soil in which time grows to fullness.

Silence is not visible, and yet its existence clearly apparent. It extends to the farthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it as concretely as we feel our own bodies. It is intangible, yet we can feel it as directly as we feel materials and fabrics. It cannot be defined in words, yet it is quite definite and unmistakable.

In no other phenomenon are distance and nearness, range and immediacy, the allembracing and the particular, so united as they are in silence.

Silence is the only phenomenon today that is ‘‘useless”’.

It does not fit into the world of profit and utility; it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.

All the other great phenomena have been appropriated by the world of profit and utility. Even the space between heaven and earth has become a mere cavity for aeroplanes to travel through. Water and fire have been absorbed by the world of profit; they are only noticed in so far as they are parts of this world: they have lost their independent existence.

Silence, however, stands outside the world of profit and utility; it cannot be exploited for profit; you cannot get anything out of it. It is “unproductive’’. Therefore it is regarded as valueless.
Yet there is more help and healıng in silence than in all the “useful things”. Purposeless, unexploitable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-purposeful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.

It gives things something of its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence itself ıs: holy uselessness.

Above all things, it is necessary that one should leave untouched the virgin soil, divinely built according to pure law. (Hôlderlin)

Here in silence ıs the Holy Wilderness, because the wilderness and the building of God are one. There is no movement here to be regulated by the law: existence and activity are one in silence. It ıs as though the whole orbit of a star were to be suddenly concentrated into a single light: that is the unity of existence and activity concentrated ın silence.

Silence gives to things inside it something of the power of its own autonomous being. The autonomous being in things is strengthened in silence. That which developable and exploitable in things vanishes when they are in silence.

Through this power of autonomous being, silence points to a state where only being ıs valid: the state of the Divine. The mark of the Divine in things is preserved by their connection with the world of silence.

from the book The World of Silence
Max Picard