The Wit’s Guide to Silence
Or, a hush with greatness
He that shutteth his lips is esteemed as a man of understanding. So sayeth the Book of Proverbs with the muted ring of truth. The Trappist monks who choose not to speak do so because it helps them commune and focus. How fitting, then, that their concentration produces the world’s finest beers and all the yapping that they unleash. Banter cannot be created or destroyed, though it can be bottle conditioned.
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
— Samuel Beckett
“On the other hand, he SAID it.”
— Art Spiegelman
It’s clear that some silences are better than others, but is there a definitive list of the qualities of quietude? There is the pregnant pause, which is about to birth some noise. There is the awkward silence, which pleads to be ended. There is noble silence, which is how the Buddha fielded unanswerable questions. In user experience testing, there is effort silence and failure silence. And the problem is that they all sound about the same.
“Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.”
— Aldous Huxley
As Michelangelo famously didn’t say, to carve David all he had to do was chip away all the parts of the marble block that weren’t David. To extend the apocryphal metaphor to oratory, to say something brilliant one must merely negate the silence that isn’t brilliant.
“A painter paints his picture on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.”
— Leopold Stokowski
Full kudos to the beloved jazz record label ECM, which uses the unofficial motto “The most beautiful sound next to silence.” And as adroit critic Ted Gioia notes, they begin every album with five seconds of nothingness. Because a true music lover appreciates nothing, and appreciates nothing more than when everyone just shutteths the hell up already.
“That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.”
— Thomas Hardy
The composer John Cage is famous for his musicless composition 4:33, but it’s exactly the opposite of silence. The Cage has bars; the coughs, rustles, seat shifts, and candy wrapper crinkles of the audience are the piece.
“In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot,” the composer explained in 1957. Even when he entered an anechoic chamber, ostensibly the quietest place on the planet, he still heard two noises. “When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.”
“To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.”
— Marcel Marceau
In the history of blank tracks that have followed Cage — which includes a 1980 novelty album called The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan and The Ten Coolest Things About New Jersey by The Bloodhound Gang — the coolest has certainly been Sleepify by Vulfpeck, a band of irreverent funkateers (per Billboard) who gamed the Spotify algorithm in 2014 by encouraging their fans to listen to tracks like Z, Zz, and Zzzz whilst they dozed so that the band could put the many fractions of pennies they earned towards a whole tour of free shows.
Spotify shut them down after about $20K and is currently using fake “ghost music” to avoid paying royalties to musicians. Vulfpeck remains awesome, which is why I’ve used their eponymous typeface in the rebranding of this newsletter!
Back in the days of journalism, newspapers were continually working on massive redesigns that their readers would inevitably hate. Look, they’d announce in big editor’s notes, we’ve got a new typeface and icons and we’ve adjusted our photo credit style and our restaurant critic will now review lunch spots! And the readers would say thanks, we hate it! This font is too small and I preferred reading Drabble where it was! And then they’d backtrack on all of it, because Marshall McLuhan was right: Reading a newspaper was like slipping into a warm bath, and redesigning a newspaper is like switching up the bathwater for a new and improved liquid that nobody wants to soak in.
All of which is my way of introducing Magnus the Magpie, the new mascot of this newsletter. The magpie has long been the perfect avatar for wit, often ingenious, occasionally irritating, and ever intelligent. I’m constantly rifling through quotation collections, looking for gems to pilfer, which is why he’s stolen the dot off the i of Quick above. You can review his CV here:
The font is Vulf Mono, the official font of the only band with an official font. I bought Vulfpeck’s typeface from the Oh No Type Co and can recommend the origin story of the collab, which is full of lines like “great rhythm is great spacing—harmonious whitespaces from which positive shapes are formed.” Also: “We had the luxury of going wide with the minuscules, allowing the majuscules to be more normal.” That might just be my mantra for 2025.
Riposte Cards, for those just joining us, are honest-to-goodness real-life printed postcards on which brilliant illustrators contracted by your truly illustrate great quips. When you upgrade to a paid subscription, I use those frogskins to pay artists, print cards, and mail them to you. It’s a fun thing!
“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
— George Eliot
Oh, but I have so much to say! Provided you tell me the topic!
That was Issue No. 287 of Get Wit Quick, only a stain on silence if you’ve just read it aloud. Which is allowed! This newsletter grew out of my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, which is golden. A gentle tap of the ❤️ below makes the anechoic seem anarchic.
Love the new font, mascot, and the back story.
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