Part One
Have you ever tried to calm yourself to such an extent as to stare at “nothing”? It is a feeling akin to looking past the “now”; one in which you do not really know what you are looking at. However, you intuitively know you are looking at “something”, yet at the same time “nothing” in particular. I call this the “Absurdity of Standing Still”. Life is in some sense absurd. “Everything happens for a reason,” some people say. But when you ask them what this reason is, they will not be able to give you a satisfactory answer. To some degree, life is absurd because we cannot give an answer to that statement. If there is a goal, we blindly grasp at that goal. To say a God or religion is the goal is not satisfactory because we cannot comprehend such a goal. To say you understand God (read: nature, religion, and so on) is absurd because our finite mind cannot comprehend something infinite (in this regard). Following Jean-Paul Sartre, it would be inauthentic to say God or religion is the goal of one’s life.
The point I want to make is that in those absurd quiet moments when nothing around you is making a sound, when your thoughts are quiet yet complexly busy when you can look beyond the now and the “nothing”, you simply need to move. You must grow. You need to take your own life and say:
“Life is absurd, but I am going to make something absurdly beautiful.”
Life is special but to find the uniqueness thereof you need to dive into the absurdity and move through it. To stand still and merely look at life is inauthentic, unreal, unfaithful. You fall back into the security of being and life. You must move forward/beyond and see the beauty in the absurd life. To constantly be on the move and to learn something new every day is where life finds its absolute beauty.
Part Two
Close your eyes, be quiet. Close the door and put off anything that makes a sound. Be quiet. Put your fingers in your ears, be still.
Can you be honest and say you experience quietude? Stillness? Can you hear silence? Is it not theoretically impossible to hear silence? We might say that silence is the “absence of sound”, to hear includes the idea of “observing the observable sound”, thus it will be illogical to state that you can “listen to silence”. If you think about it, can we ever observe silence? Taking this even further, does silence exist? When you place your fingers over your ears, you are still hearing something. When you walk outside in the night you still hear something. Silence does not exist. Can we come to the (rapid) conclusion that silence is instead a “feeling” rather than “the absence of sound”?
Google (at the time of writing this essay in 2014) states that silence is the “complete absence of sound”, and my home language (Afrikaans) dictionary says it is “quietude”. However, of more importance, it also states that it is “calmness”. Calm can include the idea of peace and tranquillity. Is this what silence is? A feeling of peace and tranquillity? A quote from Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook) sums up this feeling:
We sit silently and watch the world around us... It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel [happy]. … silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is a great paradox.
Silence and happiness are integrally linked but, in this context, silence is the lack of speaking or talking. The word silence is used in different ways. I do not want to look at the particular usage of the word silence, but the inherent (pure) meaning of it.
Chaim Potok, in The Chosen, writes:
I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
In this quote, we see the usage of “listening to silence”. If we accept that we can listen to silence, then we can begin to accept that silence is a feeling. We can listen to these feelings and learn from them. We can sit next to someone close to us and just be quiet, that is, to say nothing. We can harness happiness from this silence and learn from it – that words are not always necessary. But this still does not bring us closer to an understanding of what absolute (pure) silence is.
In a comical quote, Sarah Dessen (in Just Listen), writes:
Silence is so freaking loud.
This cliché of sorts – silence being loud – explicitly produces the opposition or inherent contradiction. Silence is loud. How can the absence of sound be loud?
The statement brings us close to the true meaning of silence, that silence is in fact a contradiction. Silence is then an absurd statement to make. Especially the claim that silence is loud. To better understand this claim, one can claim that silence – in the sense of an absence of words between two people – is indeed loud. Taking this further, the discussion between people without words can be more meaningful. But this again brings us back to the problem that silence is a feeling.
I want to conclude with a quote by Woody Allen:
God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.
Post Scriptum, or A New Conclusion to an Old Essay
The above is an essay I wrote in 2014 in Afrikaans (my home language). It is funny to read your old work. I forgot about this essay and stumbled upon it searching for something else. I read the second part and knew I wanted to translate it into English. Hence, the above essay. It is almost surreal to read your own work. I cannot remember when I wrote this, I cannot remember the reason why. I made homebrew beer back then, so maybe this is something of those days. I was a 1st-year university student if my math is correct, and I thought I knew a lot. Obviously, I did not. I tried to keep it as close to the original as possible, even though I do not endorse the views of my old self anymore. I hope you enjoyed this new translation of an old essay. My youthful philosophical mind is very naïve. But I think it was an interesting take on a complex idea. The photographs are of my own, and the musings are my 2014 self’s property. Are we the same? Our past self and our modern self? That is yet another interesting question.