Monday, March 15, 2010

The Sound of Silence

The inimitable Guy Kawasaki pointed to this article from the Financial Times about silence.

One of the things I noticed most clearly about our 24 hour visit to the 1800s while the power was off, was how quiet our house was.

From the article:

"Silence is in fact a curiously elusive concept. The moment we are quiet, we start to hear things we don’t normally hear: the sighing of the wind, birds, insects, even our own heartbeat or blood pressure. (I should make an exception for the profoundly deaf, but it seems that a profoundly deaf person such as the brilliant percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie still hears something). Perhaps, as the composer John Cage believed, silence doesn’t really exist; or, as Maitland’s friend Janet Batsleer writes to her in a letter, “all silence is waiting to be broken”. "

No question that I fill my life with noise so that I can't pay attention to my thoughts.

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