Silence and Silences
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A meditation on the infinite search for meanings in silence, from Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, the author of The Other Side of the Tiber and Mother Tongue.
We need quiet to feel nothing, to hear silence that brings back proportion and the beauty of not knowing except for the outlines of what we live every day. Something inner settles. The right to silence unmediated by social judgment. Sitting at a table in an empty kitchen, peeling an apple, I wait for its next transformation. For a few seconds, the red, mottled, dangling skin unwinds what happened to it on earth.
Wallis Wilde-Menozzi set out to touch silence for brief experiences of what is real. In images, dreams, and actions, the challenge leads to her heart as a writer. The pages of Silence and Silences form a vast tapestry of meanings shaped by many forces outside personal circumstance. Moving closer, the reader notices intricacies that shift when touched. As the writer steps aside, there is cosmic joy, biological truth, historical injustice. The reader finds women’s voices and women’s silences, sees Agnes Martin’s thin, fine lines and D. H. Lawrence’s artful letters, and becomes a part of Wilde-Menozzi’s examination of the ever-changing self. COVID-19 thrusts itself into the unbounded narrative, and isolation brings with it a new kind of stillness.
As Wilde-Menozzi writes, “Reading a book is a way of withdrawing into silence. It is a way of seeing and listening, of pulling back from what is happening at that very moment.” The author has created a record of how we tell ourselves stories, how we think and how we know. Above all, she has made silence a presence as rich as time on the page and given readers space to discover what that means to a life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Literature, nature, human rights, and much else are haphazardly touched upon in this labyrinthine meditation from poet and essayist Wilde-Menozzi (Mother Tongue). She presents a free-associative ramble over topics that are more or less connected to the concept of silence, broadly and blurrily construed: "Putting that dimension of silence into words is a contradiction: it is the silence beyond all silences, the dark and light of transcendence." Recurring motifs include her own partial deafness; the herons poised silently in rivers near her home in Parma, Italy, and New York, where she teaches; the suffering that Nigerian refugees reveal in her writing classes; the deaths of family and friends; the addictive speed and ephemerality of internet communications; the exaltation of language by Dante and the corruption of language by Donald Trump. Together these musings feel like a 400-page prose poem that unfolds through covert allusion and lyrical evocation rather than argument and analysis. There are aesthetic riches to be found, including a recreation of Wisconsin snowstorms in Wilde-Menozzi's childhood, with their "marvelous sensation of quiet and disappearance and the delight of new shapes, cars as rounded bunkers, and drifts like sea waves rising." More often, unfortunately, the result is muddled pensées that make much of this a baffling slog. There's a lot said, but little communicated.
