Sound of Silence

Warning: Reading this post may result in never being able to have a moment of silence again.

Excerpts from John Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings

• Pg 8: "There is no such thing as empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, and the low one my blood circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death."
  
  
• p. 22 "What happens, for instance, to silence? Tha is, how does the mind's perception of it change? Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, useful towards a variety of ends... Where none of these or other goals is present, silence becomes something else-- not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds. The nature of these is unpredictable and changing."
  
  
• P. 23 "These sounds (which are called silence only because they do not form part of a musical intention) may be depended upon to exist. The world teems with them, and is in fact, at no point free of them."