The Great Unsaid

There’s a lot of noise out there. My hearing aid makes it even louder. But even without amplification, I hear the noise of exhausted words (some of it, my own), which draws me to the great unsaid.  

I once participated in a Quaker meeting where nothing was said. We shared the silence and felt closer for it.

Theodore Roethke, the poet, wrote how he wanted to make his silences more accurate.

Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson he was an invaluable companion because of his gift for silence.

Henry Fonda portrayed men of few words. I can’t say enough about how I admired that.

Gary Cooper always played Gary Cooper but the way he gulped and said, Yup, spoke volumes to me.

Harpo expressed what Groucho couldn’t. The world was a broken piano and he made a harp of it.

Blessed is the man, said George Eliot, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

I need sunshine and the paving stones of the street without companions or conversation, only the music of my heart for company, said Henry Miller (of all people).

How much better is silence, to sit by myself with this coffee cup, this knife and fork, things in themselves, myself being myself………something invisible to others having shed its attachments.   Virginia Woolf

As happens sometimes, a moment settles and hovers for much more than a moment. John Steinbeck

Lincoln’s ten sentences at Gettysburg followed a notably unremembered two-hour speech.

Silent films lost its wordlessness to talkies with vacuous dialog along with the language of cinema, the artful camera.

Nuts, was the American General’s reply to the German demand to surrender during the Battle of the Bulge in Dec.1944. Short and to the point.