Silence

The theater was dark and comfortable. The quartet had just lulled us into a state of relaxed bliss with a Mendelssohn medley and was now shuffling through pages to begin their next piece by a modern composer whose name I didn’t recognize.

The youngest member of the group, the violinist, rose to address us. “When we first began to learn this next piece, I wasn’t sure I would ever like it,” he confessed. “It was dissonant and disjointed, and the silences were jarring. I couldn’t make sense of it until I realized that the silences and the tension were the keys to the whole piece.”

He lifted his eyes to us earnestly, “Each of the seven movements is its own quest in a larger journey—there is a movement about falling in love and losing love, and a movement about coming to the edge of a ravine and leaving behind belief and unbelief and dogma of every kind, in order to become. It is a remarkable piece, and I hope you will settle into these seven quests and into your own journey ahead.”

The violinist sat and tossed his hair, raising his instrument—it melded to the top of his shoulder like another part of his body, and he was instantly more at ease. The four made eye contact and raised their bows. They breathed in together. The concertmaster tipped his chin slightly, and they began.

He was right—it was shattering.

The cello, viola, and violins wove artfully and drew us in—then, as he had promised, the bottom fell out, and we were plunged into silence. The musicians froze, alert eyes trained on their leader—waiting. Again and again, the music stopped. Then he would nod, and the silence would be ventured into haltingly as if it were ice that might be too thin to support the weight of what was being expressed.

The silence undid me.

It was the kind of pregnant silence that fills the room before a last goodbye, the pause before a diagnosis that would change everything to follow, the heavy wordlessness of a folded flag. All grief and angst were held in these silences, and there was nowhere to run. They were the space after the exhale, where the lungs must decide for the millionth time that day to expand again and carry on.

After all, that was the real question that threaded through all the silences—could we keep on going, knowing what we know now?

For twenty minutes, we traveled this poignant journey together, past the voids, past the countless decisions about whether or not to continue, and past the doubts about whether we could. It was a quest that would be carried out through love, loss, death, and grief.

Finally, in the seventh movement, rays of resolution filtered through, slowly settling into acceptance of what had been and what remained. A strange beauty began to surface, and the tension eased. The journey ended quietly, without chaos or fanfare or climax, just a simple drawing together of all the notes of the story as the instruments found each other in one long unison, and the disjointed pieces were again joined with the greater consciousness.

We sighed out the breath we had been holding and rose together to applaud. It was a courageous thing to live, as the composer recognized, and as we cheered shoulder-to-shoulder, I saw not a few tears in the eyes of those around me and wondered how many there were in the midst of their own unfathomable silences.

Friend, there is a journey ahead. So breathe in. The path will be exquisitely beautiful, full of wonder and pain, and at times, it will take every ounce of courage you possess and more to find your way and to keep moving. But walk on through the silence, and you will discover that shoulder to shoulder, we are all walking with you.