A WORLD WITHOUT SOUND
" Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something " Jorge Luis Borges, "The Wall and the Books" Buenos Aires, 1950 🕯 Preface Perhaps this story only came to me in a dream, but if so, then let dreams sometimes surpass us. They say that in ancient India, there lived a poet who heard the music of flowers, and in China, a sage claimed that all that exists is merely the vibration of words that no one has ever spoken. Both, as the chronicles assert, went blind at the end of their lives—perhaps from an excess of sound. This is a story about a man who could hear in a world where no one knew what hearing was. But, unlike the prophets, he did not begin to speak. He called for no followers, no gods, no revolution. He did only one thing—he left behind a structure in which sound became light, and silence...