the stillness

"I miss the stillness. It is an antique in this shrill, intruding life, an all-but-forgotten thing of no real value, like ink wells. It is as if we have tried to fill up what stillness there is with all the mindless claptrap we can conjure, as if a little quiet or a patch of peaceful dark is a bug that has to be stomped before it gets away.

In restaurants, I am forced to eat my meatloaf with the television tuned to two mental giants ranting about a topic they manufactured that morning, apparently from mud and straw. In a doctor's waiting room, a televangelist told me I was going to hell, then Rachel Ray made me a tuna melt. 

It is enough to wish for a lightning storm. There's that moment when the lightning flashes and thunder shakes the house. The power flickers and dies, and a dark stillness falls. And you're swallowed up by a pure, old-fashioned silence, free of the hum of the refrigerator or the air conditioner, free from all the man-made background noise that makes you feel less human." - Rick Bragg