I have never been a fan of treating silence as a dominant theme in literature. I quickly tire of debates about its depths, its echoes, its melodies, or its supposed teachings. For me, as a reader and someone who reflects on what he encounters, the topic loses its grip after a while. I acknowledge that silence experienced through meditation, the vow of discipline, or solitary practice can be a wellspring of insight, yet as a literary material it has never cast a spell. It is the silent chorus of a hundred thousand moments that sometimes circles the words I read, and yet remains elusive in the mind of the listener.
Most often, I find myself aligned with lovers of language and masters of words. Before the impossible task of saying everything, there is the endless possibility of saying something worth hearing. While many experiences are not verbal in nature, language remains the only route through which we can interpret and convey what we endure. And yes, I am someone who occasionally struggles to find the right words, even for what feels most essential.
In the title of this piece, the silence being described is not metaphysical silence, nor the vast hush of a poetic abyss, but rather a kind of ordinary, everyday quiet. It is the modest stillness of a street at dusk, of a room where thoughts drift without fanfare, of a world that moves with quiet persistence. It is the silence that stands in contrast to the din of the modern moment, a silence that is almost pedestrian in its presence and its frequency.
For a long stretch, the author recalls the steady chirp of cicadas on hot days, their sound persistent and unrelenting. The rhythm of their cries seems to yearn for a silence that bound them to a memory of summers past—a silence that once held the nights together and let the days breathe. Those cicadas may not have existed in the exact way remembered, but their memory carries a sense that our current habits overflow with noise, sometimes louder than needed, sometimes louder than useful.
In those older summers, the landscape was not dominated by thunderstorms, nor by a flood of exhaust from motorcycles, nor by public rituals built around excessive revelry. Instead, there were small gatherings of amateur musicians playing in the town square with a plain, human charm. The sound was not colossal or overwhelming; it was intimate, almost homemade, and carried a warmth that crowded streets seldom achieve today.
The Spanish festivals that persist through the ages often celebrate festivity with unabashed energy. The person who leads the revelry does not sleep, and the display of joy is not hidden or guarded. Yet even in those moments, there is a sense of balance, a rhythm between noise and rest, between devotion to the moment and consideration for the hours that follow.
From this perspective, the author proposes a gentle critique of what some call social rituals and the idea that everything must be showcased to be considered real. The notion that meaning emerges only through display, that scandal must accompany every performance, seems to override more subtle forms of expression. Music alone is not enough if the sheen of loudness becomes the default measure of value. A quieter, more reflective culture could offer a different kind of proof, one that rests in memory as much as in spectacle.
The longing remains clear: a missive for the quiet that once shaped a self, a longing for the earlier version of a person that time tends to blur. It is not simply nostalgia for a past tempo but a search for a quieter cadence that allowed thought to catch up with feeling. In that search lies a suggestion about how we might approach art, community, and daily life with more room for pause, for the breath between phrases, for the silence that helps words land with intention.