When I asked the old man if he believed in the healing power of music, he laughed at first, and then suddenly grew serious. "I forget everything when I play. All my heart goes into the music. If I don't concentrate, the music changes, so it's best to forget all distractions and just play."
Silence receives too little appreciation, silence being a higher, rarer thing than sound. Silence implies inner riches, and a savouring of impressions. Babies value this too. They lie silent, and one can suppose them asleep but look closer, and with eyes wide open they are sparkling like jewels in the dark. Silence is beyond many of us, and hardly taken into account as one of life's favours. It can be sacred. Its implications are unstatable. It has a superiority that makes the interruption of the spoken word crude, rendering small what was infinite.