Meditation Upon Silence
According to the Style and Manner of the Hon. Jonathan Swift's Meditation
This silence, so often missed and yet easily forgotten, was once filled with sound. It rang with the voices of millions, the jubilation of thousands; yet now it occupies this lonely house, empty, devoid of the expressions it once held so fleetingly. I could not help but note that, though silence is deprived of sound, it nevertheless fills a space, greedily sucking up every sound given to it until no more exist. What better metaphor for mankind, I thought while ruminating, than silence? For when man comes into this world he is but a vessel, empty of the pleasantries of sound, an insatiable creature with a jealous yearning for all the sounds of the world. But man fails to fill his void with noise of his own, creations of his own right; instead, he fills himself with the sound of others, swallowing them in an attempt to make them his own, to no avail. For these sounds are simply echoes, faded emotions and ideas without substance, sounds the silence cannot retain. Still, the silence remains ignorant of its plight, and retains its voracious appetite for the happiness of others, until no more sounds are procurable. There it remains, an empty presence that is the carrier of loneliness, deaf to the whispers of its own sounds. Yet silence is quick to ridicule others for their emptiness, ignorant of its own pretenses!
Then of course, silence is not often considered a tangible entity; thus man may be the same, a fleeting idea in the mind of a god, putting on unnatural airs, and giving himself more importance than that of an empty silence. Still, though he is a meaningless volume, he demands a presence, presses upon those near him, until he has stolen away all of their sound. In his search for essence he drains the spirit of those around him, until his presence becomes too much, and they forego sharing their sounds. No matter how many times he is driven out, he returns, a vacuity hungry for more. And, when there are no sounds left, he is all that remains; at some point another silence will come to replace him, and he will be forgotten, for he never spoke a word of his own.