The Joy of Silence

Perhaps we dont imagine the pleasure of silence enjoyed by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw who in his Back to Methuselah puts it like this: At end of this tetralogy, there are two races in the far future, in the year 31820 AD, the first race is that of the short-livers and the other one of the long-livers who live up to many centuries. On the face of it, these ancients dont look to have something to occupy or fulfil their existence, but one of them explains to a questioning short-liver, "Infant, one moment of the ecstasy of life as we live it, would strike you dead." Beckett himself said something to this effect: Our allotted time on earth is not long enough to be used for anything other than ourselves. In The Koran, silence is a component of paradise