It is not outer reality that silence reveals, but our own innerness. Silence is essentially a surrender to the holiness of the divine mystery – whether we use these words or not. An atheist, calming his or her spirit in the peace of silence, is irradiated by the same mystery, anonymous but transforming. We are to listen. To what? To silence.
The stripping of pettiness from life in those early days of the war, the sense of unity and mutual help among all sorts and conditions of people, was a thing no one who was in England at that time could ever forget. There was an atmosphere of forgiveness everywhere, that most rare of human qualities...such moments reveal the beauty hidden in the most unlikely persons and affirm the truth, "what a piece of work is man, is woman!"