In the abundant silence we proceed into ourselves

This morning, I was reading Kevin Brockmeir's short story, The Year of Silence in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and I found these lines interesting.

The silence siphoned out of the city and into our ears, spilling from there into our dreams and beliefs, our memories and expectations. In the wake of each fresh episode a new feeling flowed through us, full of warmth and a lazy equanimity. It took us a while to recognize the feeling for what it was: contentment.

Aah...so, methinks my verbosity & prolificity at my blog, on facebook, and lately on Twitter, is perhaps merely a sign of discontentment? The year of my discontentment. (It's been more than a season; else I'd have put the title as "the winter of our discontent" ;))

And unlike the silence of the story, this one is not "plain and rich and deep."

The silence was plain and rich and deep. It seemed infinitely delicate, yet strangely irresistible, as though any one of us could have broken it with a single word if we had not been so enraptured.

And so it goes.... to paraphrase from another line from the story: "In the abundant silence we proceed into ourselves." (The line in the story is exactly the same except it uses "proceeded")

Update: Just finished the story. Lovely! The last paragraph of the story reads:

Every day the silence that had engulfed the city receded further into the past. It was plain that in time we would forget it had ever happened. The year that had gone by would leave only a few scattered signs behidn, like the imprints of vanished shells in the curst of a dried lake bed: the exemplary hush of our elevators, the tangles of useless wire in our walls, and the advanced design of our subway lines, fading slowly into antiquation.

Some day, hopefully all this discontent also recedes "further into the past" and "fades slowly into antiquation"!

--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - last line of The Great Gatsby nu F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the greatest American novel ever written!