Everybody is avoiding something. The news, the lack of news, the
rain, the pain, the silence. We speak to destroy the silences
we come across; we speak out of fear, out of longing for our
words to mean something, to prevent our thoughts from

drifting away like wisps of clouds on a windy day. Many of us
make the most severe mistake, the grand avoidance: the
avoidance of life. The reluctance to fully exist, as though the
fullness of it will make it shorter. We’ll take long suffering over short

fulfillment: what choice do we have? It’s the lesser of two evils:
beauty and silence. If silence is unquietable, we can at least
have quite a lot of it. That’s the joke: the two women at
the resort, the food that is both terrible and served in frustratingly

small portions. It’s adolescent to think about this: we ought to
accept life’s quietness and quiet down. Attune ourselves to its silent
rhythms. You cannot be an anarchist in the face of an inhuman
anarchy imposed on the inhabitants of a quiet universe.