Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly. There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses. .Anonymous
About This Quote
The passage describes a scene in which someone is walking through the woods and is constantly reminded of and constantly falls into and constantly goes back into silence. The phrase "muttering" helps us to envision this, as it implies that the character is quiet and that we hear what this quiet character is saying. The process of walking through the woods reminds him that he is not alone. He becomes aware that there are other entities in the forest, other trees.
There are other things to look at. Eventually, he comes upon a cave entrance, which he sees as a place where he can go to be quiet, away from everything else, away from everything that reminds him of his solitude. He enters the cave but finds this not to be what he expected at all.
His heart pounds with fear because inside the cave there's an "implacable, definitive silence." He feels trapped because of the silence. Later on, he becomes aware that the entire world is silent too. This realization frightens him to no end since all of life is frozen still in this final moment of silence before death.
Source: A Philosophy Of Walking
Some Similar Quotes
- Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
- Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grassthe world is too full to talk about.
- When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
- When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without...
- If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that's a problem. Peace and love are eternal.