Sounds of Silence

The winter sun outside is all poised to set, setting the west ablaze in its flash of brilliance. The fading lights fill me with melancholy – a sense of beautiful sadness, hints of the passing time and of a life that will never return. For now it’s just me nestled comfortably in the darkness of my room that has been my home for well over two years. I raise the volume and let the music consume me; a veil spreads over the existence of the world outside.

Music evokes longing; its melody linked to memories. And as the song unfolds, it brings back days; some flash-by while some others seem to freeze, each and every moment yearning to be relived. Some whir like an old film roll complete with statics and blurs as they pass. And then there are some that have remained unchanged through the eons that have passed. Asserting their presence ever so silently, most treasured, most longed for. Like a portal in time they open to associations in the past – people, places and the moments shared between the two. And of the two, it’s the folks that are sorely missed and remembered, for the better or worse. Some I pine for, when it would have been a lot easier to simply blame them for their absence and move on. And in the dark, lonely walks as the gentle rain-drops fall, I still miss them….

The serenity of a rainy evening as the rain-drops fall like a whisper, or the silence that shrouds a winter night, when a lone soul walks unseen amidst a world that sleeps. It is at times like these that the sounds of silence manifest themselves most strongly. But often at times like these, concealed in the obscurity of a cold room, one’s dark thoughts return to haunt them. Specters of regret, stabs of indignant injury…. Wounds of past festering inside the cold recesses of heart break anew. My room is no longer the bastion it once was. There is nowhere to turn to but the rain-drops and the gentle breeze that steer them, spraying them over my upturned face, as I stand outside hoping for salvation.

The sky has acquired a lovely afterglow and it’s only a matter of precious little time before the lights in the hostel corridors are turned on; blinding me to the beauty that pervades… lingering loveliness that holds promises of those numerous joys I have now forgotten; waiting to be rediscovered. And as I reminisce, I am reminded of these lines:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more…

— Lord Byron

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Cold is the absolute truth (as is the Absolute Zero, as a matter of fact!). Beautiful. I love winters and all most things cold, even an occasional frigid gaze from a lovely someone. Right. Now, without any further digression… the Title is a very famous poem from Robert Frost and remains the most loved piece of poetry I have come across. Incidentally, it is one of the first compositions that I could understand well without the usual profound thinking required for their comprehension (discounting the nursery rhymes ofcourse!). The meaning came easy, almost naturally. And I am not sure even now, whether it is the ‘Frost’ in his name or the setting of  the narrative, probably both, but the poem brings in me the same sense as Winter. Simple, solitary, lovely and calm.

The beauty lies in the winter chill: its frigid reality that turns even something as inconspicuous as breath into a tangible haze. It is in the sparkling snowfields that transform the harsh reality surrounding us into a surreal, pure white out of some children’s fairy tale; every snow-flake that descends from the heaven – so unsure whether to fall or to keep flight, before finally alighting upon the earth ever so softly, almost a whisper – infinitely more beautiful in its crystallized bizarreness. It is the loveliness of the cold morning dew unsullied yet by the pale winter sun. Beauty lies bounded in ice – ethereal – pristine and harsh. Smooth, transparent exteriors belying a concealed heart; pretending to bare all and yet reflecting away every gaze. Scattering away the occasional audacious ray that pierces through – a desperate attempt to reveal its essence – into an explosion of radiance.

Cold is the frosty breath that sweeps amidst the winter trees – devoid of foliage and pretensions, and freezing are the depths of the vast ocean, dark and mysterious…. Nature so beautiful in a perverted way! Lovely winter nights… a chill that permeates the very soul, leaving one bare and yet hiding them in their folds of fog simultaneously. Cold – it manifests itself  in the far reaches of space and even beyond in the dark voids, where none exist and all else vanish.

Life is warmth; cold is the Death. Terrible in all its glory; its very finality – beautiful yet merciless. Warm is my heart that beats within, yearning forever for the cold pervading outside… a lone fire in the glacial winter mist, inherently conflicting with the other, yet thankful of the latter’s icy presence …the very reason of its being.