To say that silence is golden is to say too much. To say more or even to imagine more is more than enough. It clutters the blank corners of the mind, filling them with the opposite of rest and recreation.
It's not easy to concentrate on not concentrating. Which is why mantras are devised and why they don't work. Because they require words, words, words. And man's ever restless febrile mind insists on supplying them in such unquenchable profusion. Like a little dynamo, the mind is intent on flitting back to whirling, churning, and ever turning, turning out more futile production.
Once upon a time in a small frame shop, the ever obliging man who ran it had all the sharp edges of the frames arrayed against a central yawning space. They cut into it like a shark's great open maw. Man the Voyager is also Man the Voyeur, looking for vast new spaces to see and conquer when he has yet to conquer himself.
Yes, the voyage is supposed to be the point of the whole endeavor, but why undertake it at all? It is man's nature, it is said, but why bother? Aren't there enough useless scraps to pile up in our verbal attics?
Of course the vast emptiness of outer space has always attracted us, and at the same time distracted and dismayed us. The exhaustive expanses, the imagined nothingnesses out there are so frightening, yet so attractive. We are filled with a vast longing and an even vaster fear for what is supposed to be out there. To be so alone, especially by ourselves, is indeed a fearsome prospect.
Brendan Gill's meditation on Charles Lindbergh is titled Lindbergh Alone. But Lindbergh wasn't as he recorded his feat--flying nonstop across the expansive Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris solo. It was the solo part that riveted imaginations around the world.
Columbus not only had a crew but three shiploads of them aboard the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. Vasco de Gama had plenty of company as he rounded the Cape of Good Hope and headed to what was then thought of as the Pacific Ocean. Magellan never made it home, slain by natives, but the remnant of his crew did.
Cervantes and Shakespeare, those literary giants, somehow dealt in words, words, words. And how. They were both deeply engaged in their times and all times, highly social beings they were. But to envision them now is as impossible to envision as an airless world, which is what Einstein pictured on what he called the happiest day of his life.
Of course outer space has always fascinated us. The imagined emptinesses out there have at the same time attracted and repelled us. We are filled with a longing as vast as the universe and as pointless. Perhaps this is what used to be called the last frontier as puny little man chatters on out there only to himself but without purpose.
It is considered a labor of love lost--to fashion words out of nothing. But why? Soon it becomes only an unbreakable habit, a form of pointless drudgery, less dynamic and more didactic. If we can't find anyone else to bore, very well, we shall have to bore ourselves, for this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 09/25/2016