Silence: redux

I don't know about you, but I can't stop thinking about this week's mind-blowing line:

It was a matter of silences, not words.

There's that old cliche that silence is golden, but what if it was the opposite?

What if silence were the blackest terror? What if silence precipitated danger, bodily harm, the kind of waiting that ends in a violent, unimaginable loss?

If that were the case, to embrace silence wouldn't just be isolating or lonely. It would be suicide.

To give in to silence would be to give up, to cease the struggle that has kept your face above the waves and disappear, sinking, irrecoverable. To let the icy black tide fill your lungs; to let your limbs, now deadweights, only drag you deeper. Nullification. Annihilation.

Annihilation.

Of course, it wouldn't be an actual suicide: like Eric in Cosmopolis, you'd be "alive", waiting corporeally for the sun to rise on another day, for the world to tick over and start up again.

The thing is, it wouldn't matter: you'd be sinking still, endless fathoms deep in suffocating darkness, waiting for the closedown of the last synapse, waiting -- always -- for the ultimate loss.

From this vantage, silence is a vast, unending death. A place in which we are perpetually poised on the brink of annihilation, and which itself annihilates by virtue of that fact.