Words that merely come from other
words are hard and aggressive. Such
words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is
due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence.
This repudiation of silence is a
factor of human guilt, and the melancholy in the world is the outward
expression of that guilt. Language is surrounded by the dark rim of melancholy,
no longer by the rim of silence.
Silence is present in language,
therefore, even after language has arisen out of silence. The world of language
is built over and above the world of silence. Language can only enjoy security
as it moves about freely in words and ideas in so far as the broad world of
silence is stretched out below. From the breadth of silence language learns to
achieve its own breadth. Silence is for language what the net stretched out
taut below him is for the tightrope walker.
Max Picard, The World of Silence
Reflection
– I wanted to return to this book, which I had
blogged about a while back. This really flows out of yesterday’s post, in which
I decried the level of anger and vitriol in so much of our public discourse
today, and particularly in the discourse that occurs online, even among
Catholics and other Christians who really should know better.
Yesterday I didn’t want to just add my
angry voice to the din, so connected all of this to Teresa of Avila’s famous
prayer ‘Let nothing disturb thee.’ I believe that the degrading of our public
discourse into polarized anger and name calling, etc., bespeaks of a loss of
interiority, a spiritual malady that ultimately has little to do with the
issues of the day and more to do with a loss of what is to be our true focus
and priority—God and our communion with Him.
Picard speaks here of this, masterfully
linking the degradation of speech and discourse to the loss of silence. His
words here are so clear that I hardly know what to add to them (the whole book
is like that – luminous thoughts flowing one after the other like a clear
stream of insight and truth).
Silence as the ‘net’ of tightrope walking
language, words becoming harsh and aggressive when they only come from other
words, the loneliness of words that do not come out of silence, the melancholy
of the world that is full of such words.
We really do have to take this to
heart—his insights ring so very true, and the decades since he wrote this book
have only amplified and confirmed the truth of his insights.
So, silence. Where is silence in our
lives? Do we find it; can we? We all know there are people in situations where
silence is not going to happen much. Mothers with lots of small children are
not going to have too many silent moments. But even there—I always think of a
friend of mine, homeschooling mother of a large brood, who would have a ‘silent
reading’ period in her daily curriculum. The older kids had their books,
the little ones would look at picture
books or color, the baby would (hopefully) be napping, and silence would reign
for a period in this large and normally noisy Catholic family.
In other words… it’s possible. And for
those of us not surrounded by toddlers, it is certainly possible to carve out
spaces for silence in our days. We just have to want to do it, and make the necessary arrangements. We can indeed decide to surround our language and our noise with the
great rim of silence, and even in our busyness to cultivate inner silence, a
interior disposition of listening and receptivity, non-judgment and
contemplation.
This is that ‘disciple’s tongue, so that
I may know how to respond to the weary’ that Isaiah 50 writes of. Language born
in the womb of silence, language that comes only slowly and with great care
from a deep well of repose—ultimately, from this whole business of ‘Let nothing
disturb thee… all things are passing… God never changes’ that Teresa of Avila
wrote of.
We really do need this, more and more
urgently all the time. When Catherine Doherty began to establish poustinias
in the 1960s she was truly prophetic, seeing that the lack of silence was in
fact the deepest poverty of all in our affluent society. And her final book—literally
her last word in a lifetime filled with words and language—was on the silence
of God as the wellspring of all words and all love.
So there we are—what else is there to
say? Without silence, listening, peace of spirit, our words are clamorous,
empty, vain, angry, and ultimately fruitless. And if we truly are lacking that
inner peace, perhaps it is better for us to remain silent rather than crowd the
world with our fruitless speech.