Silence and the limits of language

I have found that an interest in silence and its meanings transcends the divide between clincal/”medical” interest and wider concerns. The auld philosophy of silence bit will take a bit longer to tease out… if ever.

Séamus Sweeney

“That for which we find words in something already dead in our hearts. There always is a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

– Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

Some popular sayings about education and mastery reflect a intuition that what is remembered is not always the full truth, or even the essential. There is the saw that “education is what remains when you have forgotten what you learned in school”, one of those quotes ascribed to multiple authors from Einstein to Lord Halifax. There is near-taunt that, on topic X, “I have forgotten more than you will ever know”.

The Nietzsche aphorism above is the epigraph of Harold Bloom’s “Shakespeare the Invention of the Human”. In another translation, the full paragraph is as follows:

We no longer have sufficiently high esteem for ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not at all…

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