On a Phrase by Jane Greer

“. . . I pounce on quiet when I find it.” 

Do you hear that sound? A low vibrato in the distance? Sometimes it swells and the windows seem to rattle. It’s a pedal point reminiscent of hornets in a jar, but less reassuring. It’s the collective drone of chatter, of casually improvident talk. Some are blessed with the absence of the gift of gab. We try to speak only when we have something worthwhile to say, which we know is seldom. This means speech, of course, spoken language, but also applies to written words spewed out as Tweets, etc. Thriftiness in money and words seems no longer fashionable.

 

I encountered the phrase above in Jane Greer’s poem “Motherhood on the One Quiet Night,” reread on Mother’s Day. She first published it in Plough in 2022 and collected it in The World as We Know it is Falling Away (Lambing Press, 2022). I try to weigh the worth of what I have to say before I say it. Not every provocation calls for a response. You’d almost think people were afraid of silence.

 

As Montaigne recounts in his essay “Apology for Raymond Sebond”: “An ambassador of the city of Abdera, after speaking at length to King Agis of Sparta, asked him: ‘Well, Sire, what answer do you wish me to take back to our citizens?’ ‘That I allowed you to say all you wanted, and as much as you wanted, without ever saying a word.’ Wasn’t that an eloquent and thoroughly intelligible silence?”

 

How elegant and rare: “an eloquent and thoroughly intelligible silence.”

 

[The Montaigne passage can be found in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]