He lifts himself from bed without remark to meet the worn, repeated tasks at hand. No record marks the ground on which he strains— no witness, no laurel, no acclaim. His strength lies not in storied deed but labor plain: a hearth kept warm, a family fed, life sustained. No tale is told, no stone inscribed or raised— the ordinary man, in toil, is born.
The meaning lies in being, not in praise; in beauty glimpsed, not possessed though understood. No crowns he needs nor feast days held for him; his worth is in the craft, the nail, the wood. He does not seek to master, nor to flee, but walks the field, or mends a gate, or tends a tree. In passing light, in gesture undesigned, a truth is touched, not grasped, yet binds.
The purpose is in others—in shared bread, the coat repaired, the cup placed in the hand; in love soft-spoken, faithful in its giving, not in the vow proclaimed, but in the deed. His days are stitched with care that shows no seam, his name unsung, his work by others’ need. Though he may pass unnamed when he is gone, he will have sown the path that others walk upon.
Rembrandt, “Philosopher in Contemplation” (1632). A quiet spiral of thought, descending into the hush between certainties.
“The soul speaks most clearly when the tongue is still.”
There are days now, more frequent than before, when I find myself recoiling—not from people, exactly, but from a certain tone, a cast of mind. It is the literalists who unsettle me. Those who cling to the concrete as though it were the last raft afloat. The older I grow, with my silvered hair, the more their certainties feel not reassuring but menacing. It is not their knowledge I fear—it is their refusal to admit the unknown, the unspoken, the not-yet-understood.
And yet, I do not mean to dismiss the literal out of hand. I was trained in it. I lived among it. I applied law to facts with the solemn responsibility of rendering findings in civil rights complaints—decisions that shaped lives, guided by precedent, statute, regulation, policy, and the weight of written word. The literal is necessary. It is the groundwork. The shared foundation upon which meaning may be built. One must know the noise, the surface of things, before any deeper hearing is possible. Literalism is not, in itself, a failing. But to dwell in it wholly, to build a temple upon it without windows or doors—that is a failure of imagination and perhaps of courage.
There is something holy, or at least essential, in the gaps. The hush between words. The pause before reply. The silence that says more than any explanation could. It may be peace. It may be sorrow. It may be nothing at all—and that nothing may yet be everything.
The paradox thickens with age. I cannot dismiss the concrete—it is how we meet one another—but I also cannot abide those who live only by its rule. The world is not built entirely of clarity, nor is it meant to be. There is a path somewhere between the clamor and the silence, and perhaps I am only now beginning to find it.
The literal is our first tongue. It is how the child learns: this is a stone; that is a tree. Language builds the world we inhabit. And in that naming, in that first apprenticeship to the visible and the graspable, we are equipped with the tools to navigate life’s surfaces. We learn to classify, to divide, to act. It is a necessary scaffolding, even beautiful in its clarity.
But what follows—what truly shapes the soul—is what one does once that scaffolding has served its purpose. It is in the gaps, the silences, the places where the scaffolding falls away, that something more begins.
The darkness between the stars, or perhaps the light that filters through cracks in ancient stone, draws us to pause. It is not the substance, but the space between the substance, that calls us to deeper thought. The hush in a conversation—not the words, but the breath that precedes or follows them—can speak more profoundly than the speech itself. The crevice between certainties is where wonder slips in.
In these spaces we do not necessarily find answers. Sometimes we find transformative questions. Sometimes only presence. And sometimes only ourselves, which may be enough.
There is a wisdom in the void that no amount of noise can manufacture. Not the nihilism of meaninglessness, but the reverent recognition that meaning, like light, often travels best through emptiness.
To live entirely in the measured and known is to dwell in a museum of certainties—tidy, lifeless, unmoved. But to discard all that for a world of formless suggestion is to risk disappearance. The task is to dwell attentively in both: to know the stone as stone, and then sit long enough beside it to feel what it is not.
There are those who seek certainty in everything—in people, in relationships, in experiences, in outcomes. They crave contracts over conversation, definitions over dialogue. To them, ambiguity is a flaw, unpredictability a failure. But in securing themselves against uncertainty, they forfeit something essential. They miss the quickening of the heart in a half-spoken promise, the richness of a glance misunderstood, the poetry of a thing only half-comprehended but wholly felt.
To insist that the world always yield its meaning—immediately, exhaustively—is to mistake life for a mechanism. To live without risk, without the possibility of being undone or remade, is to refuse the privilege of being human.
And yet, those who flee entirely into mystery—who refuse form, who reject grounding—are no better served. Obscurity for its own sake is not wisdom but evasion. To veil oneself in metaphor to avoid responsibility is no more noble than to cling to literalism out of fear.
We are not machines. Nor are we vapor. We are, maddeningly and gloriously, both. We are flesh and thought, bone and breath, anchored and floating. And it is precisely in that stretch between—the literal and the allusive, the known and the unknown—that we are most fully human.
To demand certainty is to deny the thrill of becoming. To refuse structure is to forgo the beauty of its breaking. Somewhere in that middle space, between what can be said and what must be felt, is where the soul begins to sing.
And so we return to the hush. That space which is not absence but presence unspoken. The unanswered breath, suspended between question and reply, is not a failure of speech but its fulfillment. There, in that breath, we are closest to the truth—not because we grasp it, but because we cease grasping.
It is silence that answers most deeply. Not the silence of indifference, nor of ignorance, but the silence of presence—unadorned, uninsistent, abiding. The kind of silence that rests beside you like a companion who has nothing to prove. A silence that allows space for your own self to rise up, or dissolve, or simply be.
There are things that cannot be said, and yet are spoken in the pauses between words. There are truths that cannot be held, but are felt in the stillness between certainties. And perhaps the deepest form of knowledge is not in knowing, but in listening long enough to no longer need to.
The literal gives us form, but the silence between the forms gives us meaning. The prose of the world teaches us its names, but it is the poetry of its silences that teaches us our own.
I do not know if this is wisdom, or simply age. But I have come to suspect that the truest things—love, sorrow, grace, wonder—do not arrive in declarations. They appear instead in the gaps, in the long glances, in the word left unspoken. They arrive in silence. And in that silence—between noise and silence—we are not alone.
Northcoast Antiquarian 