What Does Silence Feel Like?

 I had a really interesting discussion on Twitter the other day about the relationship between silence and solitude. Can you have one without the other?

In her excellent books, 'The Book of Silence' and 'How to be Alone', Sara Maitland teases out the relationship between these two spiritual disciplines. Is silence an abscence of speech and other noise that I make? Is silence an attitude of mind that I can seek to live? Is true silence something we can only experience in solitude? Is solitude that can be practiced in some way in contemporary life?

Musing on these questions made me wonder what it actually was that I was seeking to practice - was it silence or was it solitude, or in some way, both? What did the silence I am seeking to practice look, feel, and sound like?

Reading Erling Kagge's 'Silence: In An Age of Noise', he quotes a section of a poem by Rolf Jacobsen called 'The Silence Afterwards.' Whilst Jacobsen doesn't answer my musings, he does give a sense of what silence feels like, it's eternal presence. It's weight.

It's more than an abscence of noise, but perhaps the presence that fulfills all our longings.

Try to be done now
with deliberately provocative actions and sales statistics,
brunches and gas ovens,
be done with fashion shows and horoscopes,
military parades, architectural contests, and the rows of triple traffic lights.
Come through all that and be through
with getting ready for parties and eight possibilities
of winning on the numbers,
cost of living indexes and stock market analyses,
because it is too late,
it is way too late,
get through with and come home
to the silence afterwards
that meets you like warm blood hitting your forehead
and like thunder on the way
and the sound of great clocks striking
that make the eardrums quiver,
because words don't exist any longer,
there are no more words,
from now on all talk will take place
with the voices stones and trees have.

The silence that lives in the grass

on the underside of every blade
and in the blue spaces between the stones.
The silence
that follows shots and birdsong.
The silence
that pulls a blanket over the dead body
and waits in the stairs until everyone is gone.
The silence
that lies like a small bird between your hands,
the only friend you have.