I’ve been thinking a lot about silence lately.

Of course, as John Cage taught us, absolute silence does not exist so perhaps I need to define my terms, but silence as we commonly understand it, extreme quietness perhaps, seems to be something that most people appear anxious to avoid, almost as if they were afraid of it and feel the need to keep it at bay with empty talk, banalities that blanket the sound of time’s wing’d chariot. Restaurants – even the finest Michelin-starred establishments – play background music, train journeys are accompanied by the modern scourge of music from phones (I’ve even seen people doing that on country walks). On a recent trip to London one woman talked at (not to) her companion for three hours straight (and how did her friend feel about that?).

What is it that people are so afraid of? Their own thoughts? Do they equate, if only subconsciously, silence with emptiness? The void? The silence of the grave?

I love silence, quietness at least, though I appreciate that this does nothing for my social life, and I am certainly no fun at parties. But silence gives space to reflect and consider, and it’s no surprise that most religious traditions recognise the value of time spent in silence. I love the way it comes in different guises, quite different from each other: the silence of late at night is the sound of the day’s energy dissipating, while the quiet of dawn – depending on the amount of birdsong! – is pregnant with possibilities. The silence of the new, the day as yet untarnished, not yet spoilt by the inanities of modern life.

It was Debussy who said that the music lies in the space between the notes. An elusive comment for sure, much like his music, but consider the tension that rests in the air between the final chords of Sibelius 5 – and the fact that they are irregularly spaced only adds to the effect – or countless examples where composers leave brief pauses. Think of a piece as well-known as the slow movement from Dvorak 9. Don’t simply listen for the famous tune, listen for the silences that are coloured by the notes that come before and after. The silence is never empty, but is shaped by what surrounds it. It is a positive absence of notes that makes it musical material in its own right.

Silence in literature is an even more complex – and paradoxical – issue than it is in music. Silence on the stage is a standard effect – Pinter being only the most famous – but how do we talk about silence in novels? Characters may be silent, and silence (hesitations, ellipses) can be a key part of writing good dialogue – and what a character doesn’t say is often more important than what they do – but can fiction itself be silent, and not merely quiet as in understated? The French writer Pascal Quignard says that “The book is a piece of silence in the hands of the reader.” I like that. I also like Graham Swift’s echo of Debussy when he wrote that “the spaces between and around words can have their unspoken resonances”. I feel sure I’m going to come back to this.

So, a plea for more silence – or at least quiet – in the world. Enjoy the aesthetic qualities of silence itself and how it is shaped by and shapes in return the world around it.

And remember Wittgenstein: whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.