Silence
“Wang Yun listened, silent, but stamping on the ground as with irritation and perplexity.” - Luo Guanzhong, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Silence unnerves people. This is as true of real life as it is of the doomed watchmen in movies who, misty-breathed and muttering, intone to one another that it’s quiet….. Yeah, too damn quiet. I remember silently trying to read Joyce on a train whilst, behind me, a young deadbeat clattered and battered and thumped and banged, opened and closed and reclosed the windows, switched seats and twitched and tip-tapped the table, and it was only gradually I realised that, empty as he was, his actions were the only possibly evidence of his existence, that he could not sit silently for fear that the non-entity of his inner life would be sucked up into the stillness like indigo ink into a night sky, and he with it.
In my mind’s eye I am already throwing the punch before I have even left my seat, leaping across space like Perseus or Floyd Patterson, and would do, were not my heart so heavy an anchor to the earth. The sadness and the pity; the horror, the horror! Imagine not being able to imagine anything!