Between human beings there may be no silence as loud as the silence of death.. . . The breath goes out and does not come in again. No one knows it was the last until it is gone, and the silence that follows it is like no other sound in the world. (pp. 36-37)
Some of the most effective language in the world leads you up to the brink of Silence and leaves you there, with the soft surf of the unsayable lapping at your feet. (p. 113)
~ Barbara Brown Taylor, When God is Silent
In that time, there is no possibility of thinking, of explanations, resolutions. I can't remember much sense of panic, much feeling about the agony going on a couple hundred yards away. . . It was an empty space. I don't want to forget that, as feeling returns in various ways. We don't know what goes on when, in the middle of terror or pain, this emptiness and anaesthesia set in (it happens in plenty of contexts.) But somehow the emptiness 'resources' us. Not to run too fast to explore the feelings and recover the words seems important.
Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void.
~ Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (p. 10)
The hand of a victim is seen among jumbled concrete sea barriers in Toyoma, northern Japan | AP
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