A Taxonomy of Silences

There is the silence after someone has said something unforgivable. It is not empty — it is extremely full. It presses against the walls of the room.

There is the silence of a library on a winter afternoon: collaborative, purposeful, the shared agreement of people who have chosen the same sanctuary.

There is the silence of a person who has stopped listening. This is the loudest silence. It rings.

There is the silence after music ends — not the absence of the music but its echo, the shape it left in the air, the way the room holds it for three seconds before releasing it.

There is the silence of new snow. Entirely different from all the others. Soft and total, a silence that says: everything has been covered. You may begin again.

There is the silence between two people who love each other and do not need to say anything. I have experienced this silence only twice. Both times I was afraid to move in case I broke it.

There is the silence at the end of a long story. The reader's silence, when the last page is turned and the book is closed and there is a moment — sometimes just a moment, sometimes longer — where the person sits with what they have read the way you sit with something heavy that you are not sure you can carry but will carry anyway.

I am a linguist. I study what can be said. But I am increasingly convinced that the most important things arrange themselves in the spaces between words — that language is the scaffolding around an absence, and the absence is the point.