#max picard

[edwordsmyth]

"Speech must remain in relationship with the silence from which it raised itself up. It belongs to human nature that speech should turn back to silence, for it belongs to human nature to return to the place whence it has come.

Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive. Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence. This repudiation of silence is a factor of human guilt, and the melancholy in the world is the outward expression of that guilt. Language is surrounded by the dark rim of melancholy, no longer by the rim of silence.

By taking it away from silence we have made language an orphan. The tongue we speak today is no longer a mother-tongue but rather an orphaned tongue. It sometimes seems as though man were ashamed of the language he has separated from its parent: man hardly feels he can dare to communicate his words to another. He talks more to himself and into himself."

-Max Picard

[prayersfromlilacveins]

Picard felt strongly that one of the things lacking in modern life is the true encounter—people see and talk to each other but do not really encounter one another; the one gives nothing of himself to the other. To have met Max Picard was an encounter, and to meet him in his work is just as much so. He gave generously of himself; his heart is in his work, and if his reader meets him only part way, he will take with him something that will make him a more nearly complete and a better person.

[elizabethanism]

"The streets are like pipes into which men are sucked up."

― Max Picard, 'The World of Silence'

[oyulib]

“True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.”

- E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“We have said there is more silence than language in love. The fullness of silence that is in love reaches to the silence that is in death: love and death belong together...the miracle of love is that where death might be, the beloved appears.”

-Max Picard, The World of Silence

[letters4somebody]

“Man lives between the world of silence from which he comes and the world of the other silence to which he goes - the world of death. Human language also lives between these two worlds of silence and is upheld by them. That is why language has a double echo: from the place whence it came and from the place of death.

Language receives innocence, simplicity, and originality from the silence whence it came, but its short duration, its fragility, and the fact that language never entirely corresponds to the things it is describing, come from the second silence, death.”

—Max Picard (trans. Stanley Godwin),

The World of Silence

[mothwood]

Every object has a hidden fund of reality that comes from a deeper source than the word that designates the object. Man can meet this hidden fund of reality only with silence... with his silence, man comes into relationship with the reality in the object which is there before ever language gives it a name. Silence is his tribute of honour... this hidden fund of reality cannot be taken up into human language...through this literally unspeakable fund of reality man is brought into relationship with the original state of things before the advent of language... this ... is a sign that things are not created and not combined by man himself. If things were due to man's creation, he would know them absolutely in language.

...  a thing is related more with silence than with other things. It stands on its own, belongs to itself more than in the world without silence where things are interconnected but no longer in relation to the silence... the word that comes out of silence embraces the object with the original power that it receives from silence... when the word has lost its original relationship with silence it becomes pure sound and can touch only the surface of the object; it merely adds a label to the object. These word-sounds and word-labels then lead a life of their own amongst themselves as though the things they purport to describe did not exist at all. The things also lead a life of their own, thing with thing, for, when the word has been destroyed by separation from silence, it is no longer able to contain the thing it describes, and the thing becomes detached from the word.

— Max Picard (trans. Stanley Godwin), The World of Silence 

[mothwood]

Man lives between the world of silence from which he comes and the world of the other silence to which he goes - the world of death. Human language also lives between these two worlds of silence and is upheld by them. That is why language has a double echo: from the place whence it came and from the place of death. Language receives innocence, simplicity, and originality from the silence whence it came, but its short duration, its fragility, and the fact that language never entirely corresponds to the things it is describing, come from the second silence, death.

Max Picard (trans. Stanley Godwin), The World of Silence

[rhewtawel]

Silence gives to things inside something of the power of its own autonomous being. The autonomous being in things is strengthened in silence. That which is developable and exploitable in things vanishes when they are in silence.

- Max Picard, “The World of Silence”