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The Signs of Silence

Many Have Glimpsed a Mystery in the Quiet Intervals

by Steven Faulkner

Sitting on a limestone outcropping on a summer night, my skinny boy arms wrapped around the worn knees of my jeans, an old bolt-action Marlin twenty-two my father gave me lying beside me in the prairie grass, I was watching the moonlit valley below and listening to the wind. Beyond that little valley, the Flint Hills of northeast Kansas rolled away beneath a pale night sky flecked with a few faint stars. Above the hills, the south moon was rising impossibly large, a pitted limestone wheel.

I was ten or eleven, in love even then with the summer wind—the steady, warm blowing that was traveling from somewhere beneath that moon—running lightly over miles and miles of prairie hills. Thirty feet below me, a two-lane blacktop road ran west with the night, segmented center lines stepping away into darkness. A limestone farmhouse a quarter-mile away rested in the restless shadows of cottonwood trees, and one window echoed the rising moon. Beyond the house was a quiet stream where I had often hunted and fished.

The wind came as a voice in my ears, yet at night, on the prairie, it seemed one with the wider silences. And even a boy caught by the yelling of day games and laughing friends and barking dogs will sometimes care for silence.

Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk, says, "Nature's silence is its one remark," and the limestone blocks, thick and irregular, that dropped away beneath me in layers of stone and shale and chert and dust to the empty blacktop registered that remark.

Out of & Into Silence

Now I sit, waiting out a late-summer night in a folding chair on a backyard deck in southern Virginia. Listening. The air lies still, the mercury easing away from the nineties now, the sky moonless, scattered with clear stars above a dark forest of sweet gum and oak and juniper—a tall forest that in comparison to Kansas rarely feels the breathing of the wind. And the quietness has deepened within me.

We are not a people given to silence. We don't have the patience, though silence surrounds us infinite as space, both through time and distance, reaching out between the burning stars and their volcanic planets and passing beyond icy moons and into the impossible reaches of the cosmos. Pascal said, "The eternal silences of these infinite spaces frighten me" (Pensées). And well they might. However we understand the vast silence, it is clear that we will soon pass into it.

"Man," says the French writer Max Picard, "lives between the world of silence from which he comes and the world of the other silence to which he goes." Yet, he says,

In the modern world language is far from both worlds of silence. It springs from noise and vanishes in noise. Silence is today no longer an autonomous world of its own. . . . It is a mere interruption of the continuity of noise, like a technical hitch in the noise-machine . . . the momentary breakdown of noise. (The World of Silence)

Walking down a long, forested road this evening, I was startled by a strange, repeated wailing. I stood and listened. A desolate, unfamiliar despair. In time it came to me as the calling of the screech owl—not despair at all, but the call of desire and hope. And that calling wasn't the only sound in the forest night. Tree frogs creaked and grated all through the high trees, and earlier, before the sun subsided, the locusts of August had been rasping out their noises like so many tiny machines revving up to an infernal pitch, then releasing the accelerators—the sounds coasting away. Not quiet. True enough. But like the winds of Kansas, somehow a part of the greater silence, the great darkness. And now, after midnight, even the tree frogs have retired and "all the air a solemn stillness holds."

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