Museum of Silence
“The Museum of Silence has many exhibits, all different kinds of quietude…”
If you ever visit the Museum of Silence—and by all means, you should—the first thing you will notice is it’s made of nothing different from any other building. It is low and fits neatly on the horizon. It doesn’t traverse sharp angles. There are grassy terraces that need no tending. There are reflecting pools that resist rippling in the wind. It is an out-of-place place, a place out of time. It carries its own kind of solitude just by being where it is.
When you enter, there is a lobby, but no one is there. You take a card to note your admission, but it is blank. The floors are polished, cream-colored marble that reflect your footsteps, but your body is blurred above the feet. Your shoes make a slight sound at first, but as you go farther, it seems to fade—whether because you walk softer or because of the building’s nature, it's hard to tell for sure. You’ll turn a corner while hushing a whisper: “which way should we go?” And by the time you’ve finished the sentence, trailing off before the last word… one hallway out of the others will present itself.
The Museum of Silence has many exhibits, all different kinds of quietude. It is not aggressively silent, not like a soundproofed studio. It’s made almost entirely of polished stone, which you'd think should cause an echo—but it never does. The halls have a way of twisting back in on themselves, of capturing not just sound, but presence. They recede without end, escaping the senses. Making a sound seems so out of place that one suppresses any attempt. The place needs no ushers, no security officers; anything other than what it presents in itself seems… not offensive, just acutely undesirable, like coughing in a cathedral. You may hear, at most, a fly’s wings buzz in one direction, halt, then head in the opposite direction.
There are barefoot dancers who move so slowly they seem to be sculptures. There is a living garden of hummingbirds. There is a man—they say the only caretaker—who is always in a boat on the reflecting pools, standing with his rowing rod as if he were on a gondola in Venice. But the boat barely moves. He floats along in one pool, then appears in another without having traversed a canal in between.
The Museum treats silence not as emptiness, but as an experience to be captured and presented. And it presents it with taste and color—but like a clear sky at noon, it’s always in a crisp shade of blue.
When you exit the Museum, thoughts are loud at first, but clear in your head. It’s as if your perception was cleaned, and you can observe yourself perceiving. Your mind is a spyglass, a telescope. You can feel it bending light as it passes through you. Somewhere, along the way, the caretaker had taken your telescope; he dipped it in one of those reflecting pools and handed it back to you, without ever taking it from you, touching you, or saying a word.