Listen to the stillest hour and it is not still — the room keeps sounding, and so, faintly, do you. What we call silence is a sound pitched too low, or too near, to name: the timbers easing, the slow tide under the ribs — proof, if you lie still and listen, that the dark is never empty — and neither, yet, are you. listen Looking for silence in the quietest room ever built, John Cage heard two sounds — the high, they told him, his nerves; the low, his blood. 1951. nocturne · edition XI · room tone the line never quite settles; tomorrow it traces something else