Silence Remains After All Human Commotion Drops Away

"Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. But the silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion."
Thomas Merton
Photo: Avalanche-damaged Subalpine Fir, with the spires above Emerald Lake looming in the distance, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, December 11, 2015. "Fatuous" means "silly and pointless."
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