All or nothing

A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland

The BBC sound archive has a range of different silences: ‘night silence in an urban street’; ‘morning silence, dawn, the South Downs’; ‘morning silence, winter moor’; ‘silence, sitting room’; ‘silence, garage’; ‘silence, cement bunker;’ ‘silence, beach’. You only have to read those phrases to know, viscerally, that their differences are true and real, and that you could add any number of others. Silence, kitchen, with fridge; silence, theatre; silence, restaurant, across the table; silence, restaurant, rural, general; silence, car, after argument; silence, bath; silence, bed, 3am; silence, at the Cenotaph; silence, friendly and silence, not. When Tess and Angel Clare were approaching Stonehenge, ‘the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day.’ But where did those qualities come from: the doomed lovers, Hardy, the chalk, the silence of the dawn? Or from the relationship of all of them? As Sara Maitland says, silence is ‘a mind event’.