Think Before You Speak
Soon I Will Have Something to Say
The marble floor of the library was cool beneath the sandals of Sophia, who stood patiently between a man hunched over a blank sheet of paper and another polishing a monocle. The air itself seemed to wait, thick with the weight of unspoken thoughts.
"Samuel," Sophia began, her voice a low resonance that seemed to respect the surrounding stillness. "You seem to suggest that to speak at all is a kind of transgression—a spoiling of a perfect quietude. A true statement, in your eyes, is a kind of wound."
Samuel, without lifting his gaze from the pristine page, sighed, a sound that seemed to prove his own point. "A wound, yes. Or perhaps, worse, a futility. The world, this moment, is already complete in its emptiness, its silence. Every sound, every precisely placed adjective, only serves to introduce a false complication. What is there, truly, to add?"
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
— Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Sophia turned her attention to the second man, the one cleaning his eyeglass with fastidious care. "And yet, in that vast, unblemished silence you admire, one must still live, must still struggle to make a path, Jean-Paul. Your philosophy centers on that very struggle—the necessity of defining oneself through action, or even through the act of choosing what to say."
Jean-Paul paused his polishing, holding the gleaming lens up to the light. "The silence is indeed tempting, Sophia. It is the ultimate freedom from judgment. But to choose that silence is still a choice, and therefore, an action. We are condemned to meaning. Every man who stands here, even the one who refuses to write a single letter," he gestured towards Samuel, "is crafting his being with every breath. If a thought is conceived, to withhold it entirely is simply to choose a different kind of utterance."
"So, the stain on silence is inevitable," Sophia mused, looking from one to the other. "Samuel sees speech as a mark of the absurd, a desperate and messy attempt to fill a void that should be honored. Jean-Paul sees silence itself as a form of expression, a failure to assert one's being into the world."
Samuel finally looked up, his expression weary. "The most profound statement, perhaps, is the one that is forever on the verge of being made. The word that is perfectly formed, but never released. Because once it is released, it is already less than it was."
Jean-Paul nodded slowly, agreeing with the structure of the thought, if not the conclusion. "And yet, my friend, that perpetually 'unsaid' sentence is a lie. It's a wish for an impossible perfection. The only statement we have is the one we manage to launch into the chaos. The meaning we forge through imperfect words, in spite of the silence, is the only truth we can claim."
Sophia smiled, a slow, knowing expression. "Then the moment of having something to say—the title that binds us—is not a future event, but a constant, living tension. It is the space between perfection and participation. The yearning for the unstained truth, and the inescapable duty to speak an imperfect one."
What do you think is a modern example of a 'stain on silence'—something said or written that feels completely unnecessary?
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