Follow Up on Sound and Fury

For anyone who cares all too much, this is the essay I ended up writing for English. I don't like it that much; I'm suffering a sever case of writers block tonight. Oh well. Enjoy if you can:

Leroy Brownlow once said, “There are times when silence has the loudest voice”. But what is silence? Is it something that we must live with, or something we could not live without? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines silence as forbearance from speech or noise, absence of sound, or absence of mention. Silence is nothing more than a concept, an idea subjective to each individual person’s definition.
Noise is the opposite of silence, and noise is all around us. Noise can be beautiful just as easily as it can be revolting. People talk but say nothing; shouting, sirens, horns, alarms, arguing, contention; all derive mainly from noise. There is a reason many monks live in silence. Their lifestyle reflects their desire to find the things and hear the sounds that are missed when we are too busy talking to listen. Mankind could learn from them. We live in a world where kids and adults alike seem to only be able to thrive in a noisy world. They hear only from the earphones tamped in their ears and would not even hear it if all the books in the world burned. I too have felt the addiction to noise tear at me as I sit in a quiet classroom attempting to work, unable to focus my thoughts. But as I grow more accustomed to silence, I learn to feel its beauty; to recognize what I had been missing when all I heard was what I put directly in my ear. Psychologists have analyzed that those same people who feel a need to hear music and noise constantly, are those who are too afraid to be alone with their own thoughts.
Consider the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. They live in relative silence, but only because a part of their body does not receive the sound, not because the world is void of sound waves. To them, silence is normal, and often if a noise is to be heard at all, it must be so loud and at such a frequency as to further damage the ears, and is often physically painful. Imagine living in a world where a person does not even hear thoughts in their head, but instead feels the concept. Without ever knowing the sound of a word, it could not be ‘heard’ in their head. A word could be seen as it is to be spelled, and what it represents, but that word would have no sounds that went along with it.
Anatomically, when a person speaks, they can mainly hear only themselves because they hear both their voice in waves, as well as the vibrations through their bones. My teachers always told me if I wanted to be a better listener, I needed to be less of a talker. They were right. Must we spend a year in silence to better understand the sound of a whisper? Probably not, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea every now and then to turn off the sound and just listen to what is there. One may find that silence is not as empty as they first believed. When a grand orchestra finishes a song, and everyone has stopped playing, a patron may hear the literally loud silence that happens after the last note and before the applause, because the resonance still rings in the air. Even silent movies had background music. Silence is a conduit of thought through which a person may truly find themselves, because even in silence, there never really seems to be any absence of sound, noise, or thought.
Though beautiful, silence can at times be painful. There is a reason we use the ‘silent treatment’ as children, and even sometimes as adults. The silence is meant to not only keep the upset from speaking something they may regret, but to spurn the recipient into sorrow, remorse, and maybe even pain at the realization of how they hurt the dealer of the silence. Silence is a shield and a dagger, used to preserve and to pierce. An unknown author depicted it perfectly: “Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.”
So what is silence? Is it the absence of sound, noise, and speech as the dictionary says, or is it simply an absence of needless loud distractions? Silence can be harming, demeaning, derogatory, disgraceful, ignorant, and rude, or it may be peaceful, pleasing, relaxing, settling, and full of wisdom. What we say rings out long after we have stopped speaking. What we do rings out long after we have stopped acting. Silent defiance speaks volumes, when used in the right way. Silent acceptance sings sonnets when used in the correct context. Sometimes we need to get angry. Sometimes we need to be heard. Sometimes we need to speak up for what we know is right. Other times, we need to stay silent. When the world is throwing its accusations every which way, speaking in haste and anger would only be confirming its allegations. Abraham Lincoln said, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt". Just because something can make less sound then a whisper does not make it any less powerful than a double-edged sword.