# On Silence: A Correspondence

> Virgil Caine responds to Igor's essay.

Source: https://joinmensacademy.com/essays/on-silence-a-correspondence
Published: 30 October 2026
Author: Virgil Caine
Topics: Silence, Introspection, Men

My brother Igor, 

I have read your most recent essay distributed by the Academy and find myself hard pressed to find any disagreement on my end. I found myself desiring to respond to some of the themes which you spoke of. At least those which struck me most immediately upon my first reading. Those matters being leisure, wealth, and culture.

I was most pleased to see you speak of leisure in the proper manner of respect which it has earned. Leisure and unstructured time have been done a great disservice in modernity, which views any hour which is not spent in materially productive pursuits as almost a theft or a moral delinquency of some sort.

How unfortunate. The Latin word for sacred rest and a withdrawal from the world to enrich the mind and spirt is Otium. Its opposite is Negotium, or business, work, politics, the public duty. Defined as "the absence of leisure." Which is the fitting arrangement between the two. Work is defined by the absence of leisure. Leisure is not defined as the absence of work. Work exists in part to support leisure in its highest forms. Those leisurely pursuits which virtuously expand a man's mind, spirit, and body.


It is in the silence and the withdrawal from the world as well where a man can truly contemplate the divine order of creation. Where he can turn his mind with reason and reception to matters great and small. On matters of personal evolution, I feel confident in saying that most great leaps in consciousness occur in the silence and not in the noise. 

Yet the consumerism of the day and the culture which we find ourselves besieged by stands directly opposed to us on nearly every front. Time is the very thing which life is made of, yet we are taught to squander it. We will sell an hour of leisure in the flower of our youth for Ceasar's coins now and shadow of a few more hours in our old age. 

The age worships money and material things. When the culture promotes ceaseless striving and vanity or measures quality and taste by cost, then a vapidness in all things is sure to follow. The loudness of the world outside are the shouts and clamoring of the masses in their worship. 

Where does this leave us with silence? Which was the word which I was drawn to when first reading your essay. Silence can only be found in the leisure. In the times of otium. In the silence we do the work which refines us as men. 

That silence requires of us time and money. Culture tells us it is good and proper to sell time for money in that order. Consumerism tells us that the time was not the valuable thing to begin with. Money becomes the aim rather than wealth. 

Silence becomes something to escape. A frightening place where one must face their own thoughts. A tomb. When in all actuality, it is the very void from which the Word first spoke, and God may be found in the silence between notes.