Is silence just the absence of sound, of speech, just as some thinkers say that evil is just the absence of good?
Actually, silence may open up unexpected horizons filled with heights too high to ever climb to the top of, and depths too deep to ever wholly fathom.
More Than an Absence
“Silence is never more audible than when the last sound of music has died away.” This is the signature line from philosopher Max Picard’s writings on the nature of silence. After encountering it, one can never think of silence as just an absence again.
Max Picard wrote about many things, and many things about silence, but the book in which he focused on this phenomenon is “The World of Silence,” published in 1948; it was the work of a Swiss Jew in a Europe still stunned into silence by the horrors of World War II….