Silence And Speech

"Words may be deeds." ~ Aesop


I was reading the Talmud, and one said he'd grown up among the wise and lived among the wise his whole life, and he believed there is nothing better than silence. He says "If silence is good for the wise, how much better is it for the foolish?" But I say silence is the wisdom of the foolish and folly of the wise.

These teachers who praise silence and deeds at the expense of words and teachings -- I don't agree with them. I cannot. Words are stones, to me, and I am a builder of cathedrals, hospitals, and statues; out of joy, and for the purpose of evoking the noblest states and aspirations. Words are grains, and I am baking spiritual bread with which to feed the people. Hypocrites; how can they speak to disrespect speech?

Censure of speech is speech, and praise of action is action. Even to censure speech is to admit its power. And if righteous words were not also righteous works, then neither would vain words be works of vanity.

Not all speech is vain, but there is vain speech, which seeks to impress with emptiness; to dazzle and bewilder us with the shallowest splash of shimmering surface-light.

Too many writers, and far too many readers, have taken hold of a strange notion: that good writing must be obscure to the point of meaninglessness; that sincerity and substance are small change to pay for an inexhaustible novelty of expression.

Yet no style has been so consistently elaborated, while edifying so little, than this method of writing which relies on parading before the mind's eye one scantily glimpsed, invariably askew, object after another, with no conceivable relation between them, -- rather, with only the self-indulgent caprice of the writer, in his efforts to eschew coherence and replace it with the purest randomness and confusion.

The result is a "stream of consciousness" colorfully polluted with every curious image at the writer's disposal. No object, no suggestion, no word, is too insignificant or lacking in relevance -- for, as we've seen, the absence of relevance is precisely what these writers appear to find most charming, even going so far as to regard it the cutting edge in the crowning jewel of literary exploration.

Needless to say, I refuse to consider this post-apocalyptic wasteland the frontier of modern prose.

Has it become such a bore, to have a point? Has everything been said, and said again? And if so, must we revel in saying nothing? I know I would rather be a broken-record, repeating the loftiest sentiments we have heard since time immemorial, than a tinkling symbol, delighting in the slightness of the slightest.

But to keep silent is a choice I could never make.