Silent not silent

Vilhelm Hammershøi - A Room in the Artist's Home in Strandgade, Copenhagen, with the Artist's Wife

In ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, the first essay from her 1969 collection Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag wrote about how silence is the artist’s way of freeing themselves “from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work”. I am absolutely not an artist. But in an environment that seems to demand a performative presence in which we have an opinion on absolutely everything all of the time, I have of late found enormous power and liberation in freeing myself from the obligations of which Sontag wrote. Then again, she also wrote that “discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that”. So while I might not be full of opinion, I am at least full of shit.