Tim Lott thinks we're afraid of silence ...
I'm a big fan of silence. A connoisseur you might say. People have taken to telling me that this is the product of ageing, but I've always been inclined the same way. At a Sex Pistols concert, I politely asked the sound engineer to turn it down a little bit. I really didn't make much of a teenager.
My favourite kind of silence is that which fills the rooom when I am alone with someone I love. This kind of silence is very intimate. It takes a particular quality of closeness to sit within a few feet of someone else feeling no need to speak. Because speaking is so often not so much a method of effecting communication, as a strategy for avoiding it. I just cannot sit in silence with my closest male friend. It's just too embarrassing. Lads, like nature, abhor a vacuum.
In an intimate relationship, the silences will sooner or later begin to shade into differently shaped creatures. Silences are not always neutral or pleasant. They can be as painful as a cosh. Take the following conversation. Man: What's the matter. Woman: Nothing. Man: Something's the matter. Woman: No, I'm fine. Man: Great. That's OK then. Woman: Silence.
Men can be silent too, but for them it is usually because they are too stupid to realise that something needs to be said. It is a different way of being cruel. Women do it with the rapier, men by falling over and landing on top of you, painfully crushing your softest parts.
Although silence can be a cudgel, by and large, we don't get enough of it. In fact there's a conspiracy against it. Get in a lift, and there is faint, piped pseudo-music glupping through a grid in the ceiling - the same cod classical ooze assailed me at Heathrow Airport until I could have run amok with a duty free claw hammer and smashed every speaker in the place. All this background noise is not about entertainment, but about conspiring to limit thought. And most people's thoughts are limited enough as it is.
