Silence

Sometimes silence is a beautiful thing, true silence, without sound.  And yet, true silence is a very hard thing to come by, even during the early morning hours sitting in a house, staring at a computer.  If you sit long enough, without talking, music, or any distractions, the subtle noises that fill a house come to life, become louder, and speak volumes.  Just take the ticking of a clock, that innocent tick tock, tick tock, perpetual as long as the battery lasts that goes completely unnoticed during normal living.   It comes to life and gradually grows in volume the more you sit in silence.  The more I think about it, the more I actually like the ticking of a clock.  You never think to much of it anymore because for the most part, many clocks these days are digital, plastered on stoves, microwaves, computers, phones, etc.  Yet the larger wall clocks, powered by that innocent invention called the battery, are still around and still carry us forward.  If it wasn't for the clock, where would we be?  I would like to think at times that life would be a little simpler.  Things wouldn't be set in a finite world of numbers, time, schedules, and so on and so forth.  We could judge things by the sun, the setting of it, the rising of it, the moon and its phases.  Yet, we probably wouldn't be as productive without the clock.  We would lack definition.  But we would also have a more complete silence without the clock. 

 

I think that in the modern day, it is almost impossible to create a room in a house that is completely void of all sound.  That is, unless we deem it necessary to pad our walls with sound absorbent material, to create thick ceilings and padded floors where even the pitter patter of our feet would go silent.  That is the stuff that horror movies and secretive government facilities are made of, not ordinary houses.  We have our refrigerators with their incessant hum, their little jolt to life that unless everything else is silent, you would never know occurred.  Even the hum of electricity can be heard if all else is turned off and silent.  For many these days, I can imagine that the slight hum of computers, and all our appliances is a welcoming, subtle, background noise.  It takes away the possibility that something is hiding in the corner, waiting to pounce on us, or that there might be a monster behind the curtain just waiting for us to walk close enough to grab us.  These thoughts all come flooding back the moment the power goes off.  Thinking of this true silence now, the only time we really get it is when the power is knocked out by a storm of some other calamity.  Only then do we get a glimpse of true silence, and only if there aren't backup generators running somewhere near us.  Sometimes I enjoy silence, but then again, I never truly get to experience it, so do I really love it, or do I just think I love it.  Even when I am in the woods in Vermont, nothing is ever truly silent.  Even the dark of night, there are sounds to be heard coming from the woods.  To think about silence as a complete absence of sound can be unnerving, mostly because we never really experience it.  Have you ever experience complete and utter silence?  I really can say if I have or not, but I probably haven't.