the Sting of Silence

     I went for a bike ride this morning in that strange place that exists before the morning comes but after it has already chased the night away. It was silent, which startled me. I think this is because most of us experience silence only rarely in a world filled with the sounds of cars, radios, and talking, talking, talking. The silence, then, was unexpected, but that still doesn't fully explain why it was so unnerving.
     I think that silence is unnerving because in it we find it more difficult to silence, as C.S. Lewis put it, "that inconsolable secret- the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence... The secret that we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both." In silence we cannot silence the idea that we not only want something more, something transtemporal and eternal and pure, but we also want to be pulled up into, absorbed by, and united with that beauty and love.
     And out of this longing comes the sting of silence, a bitter-sweet realization that we are not (yet?) what we desire.