I woke up this morning, thinking of the book West with the Night by Beryl Markham that my American Friend Blake recommended to me last year. There is so many things I love about the book and its author: The fact that she was a racehorse trainer in Kenya and the first person to fly solo and non-stop across the Atlantic from the UK to America. Her memoir is so well written that Hemingway once said that he was completely ashamed of himself as a writer after reading it.
Here is one of my favorite passages from the Book:
“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.” ― Beryl Markham, West with the Night
