Silence receives too little appreciation, silence being a higher, rarer thing than sound. Silence implies inner riches, and a savouring of impressions. Babies value this too. They lie silent, and one can suppose them asleep but look closer, and with eyes wide open they are sparkling like jewels in the dark. Silence is beyond many of us, and hardly taken into account as one of life's favours. It can be sacred. Its implications are unstatable. It has a superiority that makes the interruption of the spoken word crude, rendering small what was infinite.
"How silent it is," he whispered. I started to shiver. The smoke from our stovepipe cast crazy shadows on the moonlit snow. "Come, let's go back in," he said softly. "Listen," I requested. The silence beat upon our empty ears. Not a sound. Nothing. My mind stretched into the
wilderness night, listening. It was different from the muffled silence of falling snow which sucks up every noise. Neither was it the silence of plugged ears. This was the clear, cold music of thousands of miles of nothing to hear. We lingered, breathing it in. "It's the silence of a million ears," I said at last. "Of life, waiting."