In 1964 the American music duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released the song ‘The sound of silence’. Garfunkel would later say that the song was about ‘the inability of people to communicate with each other’. It includes the words, ‘people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening…’
If the words are less well known today, the tune is still memorable. Hum it to yourself now, and it will remind you that good music is as much about the silences – sometimes known as ‘rests’ – as it is about the notes that are played. Take away those rests, and the entire flow and beauty of the piece is destroyed.
I write these words on the eve of Remembrance Sunday 2023, when the nation will fall silent for two minutes. Those two minutes always feel so much longer than that, perhaps because we are not used to silence.
The Preacher reminds us (Ecclesiastes 3:7, ESV) that there is ‘a time to keep silence, and a time to speak’. Wisdom instructs us in how to discriminate between the time for silence and the time for speech.
