“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls, and whispered in the sounds of silence” – Paul Simon
One of my long-standing companions in the realm of melody and meaning has been Paul Simon, a singer-songwriter of rare subtlety, whose ability to marry lyrical intimacy with musical invention places him, in my book at least, somewhere between a troubadour and a theologian. His songs not only entertain; they provoke, soothe, and occasionally, interrupt.
One such interruption came today. I was minding my own business, perched by the window with a lukewarm cup of tea, when a passing car, an ordinary hatchback with rather a questionable spoiler, drifted by, and from its open window came that unmistakable harmony: “Hello darkness, my old friend…” And just like that, I was undone.
There it was, The Sound of Silence. A song so familiar, so oddly tender, and yet so theologically mischievous, it never fails to stop me in my tracks. It always has. There’s something in that paradoxical phrase—sound of silence—that invites us to listen, not just with ears but with the whole architecture of the soul.
I found myself pausing, genuinely pausing, not the artificial kind one does before checking email, as I remembered Malcolm Gladwell’s luminous Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, in which Simon reflects on the peculiar alchemy of songwriting and meaning-making. He wrote, after all, in a time of turbulence, civil unrest, political disillusionment, the fraying of cultural certainties. Not unlike our own day, though we’ve managed to digitise our turmoil and monetise our anxieties.
What does it mean, then, to welcome the darkness as a friend? To listen to the still, small wisdom that arises when all the noise recedes?
That, dear reader, is what led me, by melody and memory, to this day’s quiet reflection:
The Wisdom of Silence.
It is a most peculiar business, silence. We treat it, by and large, as one might a wasp at a picnic, unwelcome, unnerving, something to be swatted away with small talk about the weather or yesterday’s football scores. A pause in conversation and suddenly we’re rummaging for a fact about hedgehogs or asking after someone’s aunt, lest the quiet accuse us of awkwardness.
But I have come, through no particular brilliance of my own, to suspect that silence is not absence at all. It is presence of another order. It does not shout for attention; it waits, like a wise old uncle in the corner of the room, humming to himself while the rest of us clatter about making fools of ourselves.
Now, my own education in silence did not occur in a chapel, or on some windswept monastic retreat with Gregorian chants echoing through cloisters. No. I learnt it on a fishing boat off the coast of Saint Lucia. The fellow who owned the vessel spoke perhaps a dozen words in four hours. At first, I was certain I ought to rescue us both from the unspeakable horror of unspoken minutes. Ask about the tide, perhaps, or mention cricket.
But then something shifted. The waves found their rhythm. The oars groaned like old knees. The sun put a warm hand on the back of my neck. And I realised: in saying nothing, he had given me everything. Silence wasn’t the absence of sound, it was the recovery of presence.
You see, silence is a kind of tutor. Not the flashy kind, with coloured markers and PowerPoint slides, but the old-fashioned sort, stern, patient, and strangely kind. (Ms Richards comes to mind) It does not lecture, but it listens. And in so doing, it invites us to listen too. Not merely to what is said, but to what lies beneath the saying. To the tremble behind the smile. The longing that never made it into language.
Not all silences are equal, of course. There’s the silence that tiptoes in when a truth is too delicate to name. There’s the chapel hush that falls at twilight, thick with reverence. There’s the solemn silence at a graveside, where even birdsong seems to bow its head. But we must also name the darker kinds, the silence imposed by cruelty or fear, the kind that erases rather than honours. I want to be clear here, let us not mistake repression for reverence.
Still, what troubles me most in these modern times is not the silence we enforce, but the silence we have forgotten. We have, it seems, developed a sort of allergy to stillness. The moment we are alone, we lunge for a device. We scroll, swipe, refresh, twitching ourselves into oblivion. As if the mere act of being unoccupied were some sort of existential failure.
And yet, life, real life, grows in silence. Seeds germinate in darkness. Friendships deepen not in declarations, but in the comfortable hush between sentences. Faith, I suspect, rarely descends in trumpet blasts; it tiptoes in on still, small voices.
So perhaps the call is not to seek silence as if it were a rare orchid, but to honour it when it visits. A pause before speaking. A moment by the window with no agenda. A walk without earbuds or updates. These are not indulgences, they are necessary rituals for the soul.
And should you be fortunate enough to share silence with another, do not rush to fill it. Hold it, if you can, like a porcelain cup. Some silences are not voids, but vessels, brimming with grace, waiting to be received. For indeed the words of the prophets are whispered in the sounds of silence.
So let us, in this clamorous age, choose now and then to be quiet. Not to disappear, but to arrive more fully. Not to retreat, but to deepen.
Silence, I am beginning to think, may be one of the last honest places left in the world.
Would you care to join me there?
