It is. The clean silence that may be accompanied with presence of mankind. The low roar of the air conditioner. The faint rumble of traffic of a busy street and a motorcycle swimming by late at night. I love this kind of quiet.

What’s odd is that I have never appreciated the silence of the nature. A few years ago, I slept in the country. In a Western style house of course, but the things that I heard was the rush of the wind against the trees, dogs’ barking and their feet scamping on the deck and the roof. The owls and all the animals to make its nocturnal life. That kind of silence, I would say, is what silence is supposed to be. The desire for man to be with nature.

But the silence is the manmade one. The machines humming and the gentle grumble of life. It makes me feel secure that people are still living. I am living in a crowd of anonymity, I would say. But what I also crave in the silence is the soft padding of the keys. The keyboard that invites input and the thoughts that run through the circuitry into a digital scroll. Thoughts gathered slowly together.

In another century, it would be the slow scratches of pen to paper. But here, it’s the flowing thoughts quickly touching something. In and out. In and out. In and out.