companionable silence

companionable silence is perhaps one of the most beautiful, warm things.  when the moment has rested itself; and there is no need to fill anything with words.  (you are just there across) i, here on the couch, under the reading light.  the dogs napping just beside.

it is not with everyone we can have companionable silence with.  more often is that sense of need to find comfort in words, holding on to them like life buoys for safety, like security blankets we wrap ourselves with.  like scaffolds we use to support moments.  

perhaps it is the fear of silence.  or the fear of thoughts--the other's or our own.
perhaps it is the fear of distance from the other.  or the fear of alienation, that dawning so often ignored how the beloved other is really, in essence, a stranger.

companionable silence feels to me as this comfort without such fears, even as this comfort knows, harboring no illusions, that the other will always remain other.

it is almost like faith.


 tonight is one of those nights of companionable silence.  it is after dinner.  i have already walked with the dogs.  you are at the table, working on the laptop; i am on the reading couch, finishing the book, "The Portland Vase," stopping briefly at times to read you the most interesting parts.  not too long ago, it was "The Root of Wild Madder", something about the natural red dye and the handmade Persian carpets.  i do not tell you how i miss being so voracious a reader as when i was younger; you already know this.  i do not tell you how at times i think there is so much to read but so little time.  we both know how it is to be adults.

already it is late night, past midnight.  i have a chapter and an epilogue left.  there are a couple of papers to review for tomorrow; maybe i'll stay up awhile longer.  

beside the bed, a few more books that i do not read cover to cover.  only when i feel like it--a page or two or so--before turning off the lamplight, or after waking up and not wanting to get up just yet.  roland barthes' "A Lover's Discourse", in spite of its seemingly romantic and/or casual title, is not, after all, a light reading.  it being the rumination of nuance.  nuance being the Intractable.  i particularly like the book because, as koestenbaum so aptly describes it in the introduction, it "is an attempt to get rid of 'love'--its roles, its attitudes--in order to find the luster that
remains when the stereotypes  have been sent packing."

Of course, expectedly a kind of reading that would need one to mull over thoughts after reading a fragment-chapter.  much like milan kundera's
"The Curtain", which, for some time, i tried to read at the airport and aboard the plane.

there is, too, wislawa's book, from where some poems i read for you on mornings.