“We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters
and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and
destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners
mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid… We have been
socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and
definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of
fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

— Audre Lorde, quoted in Loving to Survive

Are You Listening? Hear What Uninterrupted Silence Sounds Like

In 2005, when Hempton founded One Square Inch of Silence, he
designated a spot, a few miles up the Hoh River Trail into the rain
forest, the quietest place in the U.S. and marked it with a small, red
stone.

“Even though protecting 1 square inch seems like a very small,
insignificant amount of space,” he explains, “due to the nature of sound
and silence, it’s preserving this whole ecosystem.”

If that inch stays quiet, that means that the entire valley, and
miles around it, will be similarly intact and free of intrusive noise.
Hempton defines a naturally quiet place as one where there are 15
minutes of non-human-made sound. He estimates that there are fewer than
10 such places in the U.S.

“Silence is the mark of hysteria. The great hysterics
have lost speech, they are aphonic, and at times they have lost more
than speech. They are pushed to the point of choking, nothing gets
through.”

— Hélène Cixous

“The liar lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even
desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to
another person means for her the loss of control. The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.”

But the pathology of lying, she argues, doesn’t merely alienate us
from others — it engenders the greatest loneliness of all, by cutting us
off from ourselves:

“The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the
unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but
blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to
those who want something else more than truth.”

Adrienne Rich “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even in our own lives.

An honourable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

It isn’t that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

The possibility of life between us.

Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” On Lies, Secrets and Silence