Some thoughts on silence. Allegedly it is golden. Carlyle quotes the Swiss inscription that reads Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden, which he prefers to gloss as Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity. Carlyle evidently did not take on board Blaise Pascal’s remark which suggests that eternal silence is scary rather than golden: “Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.”

Moreover there are circumstances in which silence plays a role that is far from golden, as when, for instance, information is deliberately withheld for the purposes of misleading or deceiving. Silence is perhaps the most economical way of being economical with the truth, a useful tool in the locker of those who for whatever reason would prefer not to tell it as it is. Better, indeed, to say nothing than to say something which one might later regret. This is a thought that had evidently occurred to General Franco, the Spanish dictator, who had a great many things to keep quiet about. According to Giles Tremlett, in the chapter entitled “Looking for the Generalissimo” in his book Ghosts of Spain (2006), “the Caudillo was… an expert at silence. ‘One is the master of what one does not say, and the slave of what one does’, he once warned his self designated successor-to-be, the then prince Juan Carlos. This was the opposite of another, much older, Spanish theory on silence. Alonso de Ercilla, in a heroic sixteenth-century depiction of the Chilean natives’ resistance to the Spanish conquistadores, La Araucana, noted the tactical usefulness of silence but added: ‘There is nothing more difficult, if you look closely, than discovering a necio, a fool, if he keeps his quiet.’

It’s not clear to me that these observations are opposed, though the perspectives admittedly are: Franco is advocating silence as policy, whereas Alonso de Ercilla is considering the matter from the point of view of what the silence might signify. And, regrettably, what silence sometimes signifies is that matters are not up for discussion, and that things are not as they should be. The openness and accountability that are supposedly valued in democratic societies are more compatible with speech than silence.

Having said that, there are, and especially for those who participated in them, painful areas of human experience, which it is probably best to be silent about. Are we really honouring Daddy when we ask him to tell us what he did in the war, for instance? What those in authority required – and indeed require him – to do was more than likely some variation of what Ambrose Bierce described as beating out another gentleman’s brains with the butt of his rifle. Admittedly Bierce did not keep silent about the things he had witnessed, and it is not incumbent on the reader to be silent either, after he has gotten over the shock of reading “What I Saw of Shiloh”.

“This humble edifice, centrally situated in the heart of a solitude, and conveniently accessible to the supersylvan crow, had been christened Shiloh Chapel, whence the name of the battle. The fact of a Christian church - assuming it to have been a Christian church – giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated the moral interest that would otherwise attach to it.”