My father did not teach me to be silent. He taught me what silence was for. There is a difference, and it took me forty years to find it.
He was a man who spoke rarely and listened with his whole body. When you said something, he would turn toward you slightly, as if tuning a radio to a frequency that was almost, but not quite, within reach. It was unnerving when I was young. It is the quality I miss most now.
Silence, he believed, was not the absence of speech. It was speech's most honest form — the thing a sentence reaches for when words are insufficient. He quoted Tagore on this, though I suspect he had come to the idea himself and simply found it confirmed there.
What I have learned from silence: that it is not empty. That it is, in fact, very full — of the things that matter too much to say carelessly.
I think of him when I am in a classroom and a student suddenly understands something. There is a moment before they speak — a small, complete silence — that contains the entire miracle. He would have known what to do with that moment. I have been trying to learn it from him for fifty years.