Silence, the First Music

There are times when the air is so thick with words and images that a person can hardly breathe. Max Picard wrote out of such a time. Born in 1888, this Swiss physician turned philosopher lived through the convulsions of two world wars and wrote from a land that prized neutrality but could not escape the din of a century intoxicated with its own machinery. In 1948, with Europe still smouldering from devastation, he published The World of Silence. It was an attempt to rescue an element as indispensable as water or air, without which human beings become less human. Civilizations, too, become less human when they lose silence.