Silence Produces Words

       Colm Toibin's comments in my post on May 30th from the documentary The 50 Year Argument:  "Reading and writing are done in silence" connected up with my three readings from Martin Luther King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail."

       The depth and profundity of King's "letter" were no doubt conditioned partly by the words being produced in the silence and isolation of a prison cell.  But, just as Toibin's remarks made clear that words rendered in silence, to be vibrant, must have hovering about them the writer's palpable sense of community, so King in his "deprived" state had a crystal clear sense of the black community he was writing both for and out of as well as the fellow clergy he was addressing and responding to.  They were totally present in that cell with him.

        Regarding "silence," in the same connection, I'm minded of the book I'm currently reading Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids edited by Meghan Daum.  Since all are writers, many of them are acutely aware of the increased freedom and ability they have to write without children to bring up.  As Sigrid Nunez, put it:

     
       "No young woman aspiring to a literary career could ignore the fact that the women writers of highest achievement, women like Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, did not have children."