You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

Silence fills space with different resonances. As you know, if you've made a radio program

and have been asked to keep quiet for a few minutes after the interview, so that the ambient

stillness can be

recorded. It is called Atmos in the trade. Atmos has various timbers and strangely carries mood

and meaning. There are silences induced by fear, silences that exude menace, and silences that are peaceful, friendly.

When giving a lecture, these differences are material.

At the start of my teaching, when I first suggested an exercise to a room full of creative writing students,

something on the lines of, we've been reading Elizabeth Bowen,

now think of a house where you were once happy, but you no longer lived there, write it.

And they all bent their heads down over their paper and began writing, I couldn't believe it.

When students are tackling such a task, the ensuing silence has a particular character.

You can feel the whir and hum of thought as if they were a chamber orchestra tuning up.

That sustained quiet is a real pleasure. It feels woven of reciprocity, willing, ambition,

the impulse towards translating fugitive thoughts into communication

with others. It can happen with an audience at a concert, with readers in a library, and with

visitors looking at pictures in a gallery. In the recent long, overlong documentary about the

National Gallery by the austere filmmaker Fred Wis wiseman the camera watched as people looked at the paintings on the walls a mysterious communion one especially eloquent sequence showed a session for the blind the visually impaired seeing feelingly but you can't tell what these spectators are feeling or thinking,

but that they are tending, that they lost to themselves in that act of looking

with their eyes or with their fingers, and that this was something that did not cause

pain or anxiety, but something that is the contrary of discontent was undeniable.

This scene of interaction as one living, unique mind contemplates and responds to an artifact

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