Comment

Stan Grant
The awe of silence

I am out of words. In this I am certainly not alone. Our world is surely too loud, and our words are not enough. At times such as these, I turn to another language that Plato says “penetrates to the centre of the soul”.

I turn to music.

The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has likened his music to “spiritual fasting”, an escape into “voluntary poverty”. It is a music of prayer.

Pärt is synonymous with the compositional style he developed, called tintinnabuli. Spare and meditative, it evokes a chant, with a repetitive arpeggiated triad echoing the sound of a bell.

Pärt says it emerges from his “dark hours”, when he searches for answers to a “complex and many-faceted world”.

Everything outside of this one thing, Pärt says, “feels as if it has no meaning”.

To 20th century philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch this would be music that echoes God, who “does not come with the noise of wrathfulness but as imperceptibly as a breeze”.

Jankélévitch called it a music of “interior voices”, an “invisible harmony”. It is a music of silence that allows us “to hear another voice, a voice speaking another language, a voice that comes from elsewhere”.

This “unknown tongue … hides behind silence just as silence itself lurks behind the superficial noise of daily existence”.

To Jankélévitch this is “the most secret of all musics”, music that pacifies “the monsters” in us all.

For me, the music of Arvo Pärt is a call into the silence.

As I write this, I have Pärt playing quietly. I am nestled in the hills of the Snowy Valleys of New South Wales, looking out onto a landscape of stark, bare trees and gently sloping fields that roll down into a creek.

This land complements Pärt’s music. Together they hold a truth, a love and a depth of compassion beyond my words.

It is somewhat to my regret that as a journalist I have contributed too many unnecessary words to a world already drenched in speech. I confess I have been burnt by words.

I need this silence.

Silence, Pärt says, is “fertile soil” that awaits our creative act, our “seed”. Pärt says silence must be approached with “a feeling of awe”.

In our maddening, noisy world, we have lost respect for silence. To be silent we are told is to be complicit. No. Our complicity is in our words that scream of justice but invite hate.

It is modernity’s curse that we become incomprehensible. Our words betray us. From the 18th century, the Enlightenment-infused language emphasised identity and individuality. I replaced thou.

Today our words are harsh. Words are too often weapons: censorious, prohibitive, vain and partisan.

We claim a moral high ground that disavows our common humanity. It is callous and poisonous. We are damned if we can mourn only the dead of “our side”.

Our words echo the worst of music, what Jankélévitch called “grandiloquent music, resembling angry shrieks … a form of emphatic stupidity: it sounds empty and contains nothing but wind”.

The slaughtered innocents of our world deserve better than our noise.

Eighty years ago, French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil warned against what she called an “icy pandemonium” that stripped our souls of “silence and warmth”.

Her lament speaks profoundly to our times.

Our discourse is cold and brittle. Amid a cacophony of news and performative rage, I fear we no longer know what silence is.

Silence is not the absence of sound, it is not non-speech; silence is what Jankélévitch called a “second hearing”.

In our silence we hear the distant voice that does not come from a far-off land but, Jankélévitch said, from “inside us”.

It is the “inaudible voice of absence”.

Silence is the true response to the cry of the afflicted: Why are you hurting me?

Affliction, Weil said, is inarticulate. The afflicted are beyond words.

In our affliction, said Weil, we are annihilated. Affliction is a “mechanism to grind the soul”. In our nothingness, our “total humiliation”, she writes, “is also the condition for the passage into truth”.

What is that truth? That in our affliction we have nothing left to lose. In the death of the soul, we are open to the “supernatural operation of grace” that itself opens us to love.

Weil reached for what she called “the extreme, absurd love that drove Christ onto the cross”.

In our cry of pain, we are at the foot of the cross when Christ himself had his moment of forsakenness.

Today we have even fewer words for the absurd love of a suffering Christ. To those in pain we offer instead the consolations of rights. Yet, as Weil said, “rights have no direct link with love”.

Weil said we put in the mouths of the afflicted only the words of the “middle region”: democracy or rights. These words, she warned, have no potential to do any good, and inevitably do more harm.

In so many conversations people tell me they have no words for the state of our world. They feel compelled to speak yet fear judgement, condemnation or vitriol whatever they may say.

In a world of wars and strife we can feel choked with anxiety or helplessness.

The protests, the social media pile ons, the influencers, the celebrities: it seems all too loud for me. It is louder than war itself.

I have some experience as an observer of war, and my prevailing memory is of how quiet it is. After the explosions, the bombings, the gunfire, the shattered glass, the sirens, war is as quiet as the muffled tears of a child.

Those tears should call us to attention. Attention is the sound of silence. It is a place beyond the noise and the news. In our attention we are alive to the soul of another.

Attention requires us to respond to the cry of affliction not with vacuous palliatives but with the deep silence necessary for love beyond words.

We should be cautious, though, of the wrong silence. Albert Camus told us that when silence contributes to the maintenance of abuse then there is no option but to “speak out”.

The wrong silence, the silence of resignation or a cowed silence, is cowardly. Yet there is still a silence of resolve. Silence as resistance. It is what Camus called us to when he said: “With all my silence, I shall protest to the very end.”

He is speaking of the silence that refuses the cruelty and injustice of the world and the words of politics that turn us from one another.

In his music, Arvo Pärt has created a language of love beyond words. His is the gift of the unity that is truth, the unity that says we all feel pain.

This is the music of silence that Vladimir Jankélévitch said “allows us to hear”.

In the silence we can truly hear the cry of the afflicted: Why are you hurting me? In the silence we can hear the voice inside us that says we too are hurting.

Then we can say no. No more.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "The awe of silence".

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