The Language of Silence
Words can sometimes act as masks that conceal our true feelings. True comfort comes not from eloquent words, but from the profound silence of staying by someone's side. Do we know how to say more by saying nothing at all?
Hello, this is Ditto.
We live surrounded by too many words.
We endlessly pour out words to prove ourselves, to clear up misunderstandings, or simply to fill the awkward air.
But have you ever felt your heart grow emptier the more you talk?
Laozi said this in Chapter 56 of the Tao Te Ching:
"知者不言 言者不知. Those who know do not speak, and those who speak do not know."
Truth is not found in flowery rhetoric. Rather, it reveals itself in the blank spaces where words come to a halt.
Words are sometimes merely the shell of our thoughts, while the essence is often held within silence.
Think about a time when someone was in deep sorrow.
Don't you recall when a profound silence—just sitting by their side and quietly offering a shoulder—brought more comfort than clumsy advice or a cliché like "Cheer up"?
The silence in those moments is not an 'absence of words,' but an 'eloquence of the heart' far deeper than language.
Wittgenstein concludes his book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with these words:
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
This sentence doesn't simply mean to keep our mouths shut.
In the face of monumental themes like the mystery of life, profound love, or death, human language is so inadequate that this feels like a call to preserve their dignity through silence.
Our conversations also need pauses.
Without rests in a musical score, music would become mere noise.
What makes music beautiful is the silence between the notes. Isn't it the same with relationships? A relationship where you can feel at ease in the silence between words is truly a comfortable one.
Do you have the patience to listen to someone's words to the very end without interrupting?
Or is your inner self steadfast enough not to grow anxious when silence falls?
There are things we can finally hear only when we stop speaking.
The sound of rain outside the window, the breathing of another person, and the words I truly wanted to say.
How about closing our lips and opening our ears today?
I hope you can experience the aesthetics of an ellipsis, which carries a deeper resonance than a full stop.
With a silence deeper than a hundred words, I send my support for your night.
This was Ditto.
(This content was created using generative AI, with partial edits and reviews by the administrator.)