I’ll never forget the time I spent hours trying to find the right words to confront someone. I confided in my friends, ran the words by nearly everyone, and finally built up the courage to say it directly to the culprit. As I fired off words like bullets, I began to notice that the target wasn’t even loading her ammunition. Finishing off my tirade, I expected her to outburst. But her response was nothing but a deadly glare. And it was absolutely chilling.
Though spoken words are extremely instrumental in expressing emotion, silence can be catastrophic. When silence spreads across a room, it’s a discomfort I can’t even fathom. You are forced to actually think about the situation with the other person directly in front of you—and it completely humanizes the conflict. I compare it to surrendering to exhaustion when falling asleep at night. You may be reading a book, watching Netflix, or scrolling through an app on your phone when your eyes start to feel heavy. So you shut off the light, turn to one side, and drift into sleep. Except sometimes sleep doesn’t come as quickly as you’d hope for, and during those minutes before losing complete consciousness your mind flashes a slideshow of all your buried feelings from the day—feelings you had no plans of addressing.
Silence forces you to confront yourself. And who actually wants to confront themselves? Remember the book “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, the one you most likely Sparknoted in high school? The book centers on a future dystopian society that burns books, watches way too much television, and avoids any type of reflection. Published in 1953, the technology in the book disturbingly mirrors some of the technology that consumes us today in 2016. The seashells, for instance, are earbuds that many of the characters wear to listen to the radio—think of walking down Com Ave with your own headphones slipped in your ears. Mildred, the wife of the protagonist, almost always wears her seashells, she even wears them while sleeping. In addition, she spends most of her days watching television and not speaking to her husband. Mildred, like many of the characters in the book, attempts suicide. Bradbury voices a powerful statement and warning to his readers: reflection is vital to life’s happiness—and ignorance may not always be bliss. This message remains relevant today and 100 years from now.
It may be easier short-term to avoid reflection at all costs, but long-term it can have a devastating impact. I think we as college students have our own special way of avoiding reflection each weekend: we drink absurd amount of liquor, sleep until the afternoon, and wake up with hazy minds and no orientation of what day it is. Then comes the after, when we remember who or what drove us to this moment. We lay in our beds, stare at the wall, and douse ourselves in a smothering silence where, ironically, a horrifying reflection overcomes us all.
