Skip to main content

Ten Voices, One Silence


There were ten of them — though at times they spoke as one murmuring voice, and at others, like ten distinct silences, each fractured differently by the strain of being.

They were not chosen as idols for a shelf, nor as exhibits in some canonical museum. Rather, they happened to me — each arriving, unbidden, during the long, luminous solitude of study. They were not so much read as endured, not so much admired as absorbed. What they gave me was not knowledge, but permission — to question, to unravel, to dwell within the unsayable.

Sophocles carved fate into stone. He gave suffering a chorus and lent blindness a voice. In his tragedies, destiny is not an event but a law — impersonal, inescapable. His characters do not fall because they err, but because they exist. He was the architect of inevitability. Through him, I grasped that form can contain anguish without flinching.

Dante Alighieri descended, and rose again. His Divine Comedy traced the arc of the soul with a pilgrim’s clarity. He made theology pulse. His tercets held not only judgement but yearning — for order, for beauty, for Beatrice. He traversed hell to reach a single word: love. Dante showed me that reason and rapture may coexist within a single line.

William Shakespeare walked with mud on his boots and stars in his ink. He gave voice to ghosts, let fools speak truths that kings dared not. He jested with the weight of the world balanced lightly in his metre. His language did not explain — it became. From him I learnt the sacred mischief of rhythm, ambiguity, and dramatic grace.

Luís Vaz de Camões looked outward. His verse unfurled like sails. He lashed meaning to the wind and launched it across oceans. Empire may have been his backdrop, but love — blind, broken, exiled — was his true compass. He wrote not from a desk, but from shipwreck and salt. He taught me that the grandeur of a nation could be spoken in the cadence of a wound.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote with trembling hands and a soul split by contradiction. His novels are not texts but cathedrals of doubt. His characters are not figures but battlegrounds. He is not read — he is survived. The abyss stared into him, and he answered with ferocious clarity. In Dostoevsky I found permission to let darkness speak.

Machado de Assis sat quietly in the corner of the mind, where thoughts are startled by their own reflection. His irony was poised, precise, devastating. He deconstructed the sentence before it could settle. He did not raise his voice — he merely adjusted the mirror. Through Machado, I discovered the cool majesty of restraint.

Virginia Woolf was the sea transcribed. She charted time as it moved through the mind — ebbing, overlapping, dissolving. Her prose was neither plot nor stream, but sensation made visible. She did not describe thought — she gave it space. From her, I learnt that the inward is a landscape in its own right.

Fernando Pessoa was a multitude. He dispersed himself across names and selves, philosophies and styles. At times he was Álvaro de Campos, shouting at the machine; at others, Alberto Caeiro, watching the grass grow. He lived in parentheses and died in ellipsis. Pessoa taught me that to write is not always to arrive — sometimes it is to fracture beautifully.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade stood between the street and the abyss. He chronicled Brazil with both affection and disquiet, gathering contradictions like pebbles in his coat. His melancholy was disciplined, his irony disarming. His poems opened quiet windows onto difficult truths. He showed me that tenderness and critique may inhabit the same line.

Clarice Lispector was a breathing enigma. She did not describe life — she peeled it. Her language did not follow thought, it became thought, raw and luminous. She wrote as if standing on the threshold of revelation. Clarice did not influence me — she undid me. And then taught me how to begin again.

They never met — not in time. But somewhere beyond chronology and ink, they sit at the same silent table. One chisels fate, another ascends through fire, the third dramatises the soul, the fourth sets verse to sail, the fifth dives into the abyss, the sixth dissects the mind, the seventh renders time in waves, the eighth dissolves identity, the ninth arranges contradictions into quiet grace, and the tenth whispers behind the veil.

Together, they form what cannot be said — only endured, only felt. The full, relentless weight of being impossibly, magnificently alive. And to me — once merely a reader in the half-light of study — they were not just authors. They were initiators. Into literature. Into thought. Into the silence beneath the word.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What Winter Asks

Lately, I’ve found myself anticipating winter — not because it is here, but because its presence has begun to register. A shift in tone. A quiet deviation from the familiar. We are still within autumn, yes, but the pattern is clear: a cooling, a thinning of light, a withdrawal. Winter does not arrive with grandeur. It infiltrates. It operates in intervals — a guest that does not overstay, yet rearranges the room all the same. It brings with it not only the chill, but a quiet audit of our habits. Our homes, designed for air and openness, falter in the face of this visitor. We adjust. Coats reappear. Blankets are retrieved from high places. Improvisation becomes method: Havaianas with woollen socks. Soup, made not only to nourish but to ground. This is where hygge emerges — not as aesthetic, but as principle. The deliberate act of creating warmth within transience. A structured comfort, built from attentiveness. Outside, clouds obscure the light. Inside, a countermeasure: sof...

On slowing time: multivitamins, acupuncture, and the art of ageing well

A major randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, recently published, has demonstrated that daily multivitamin supplementation may decelerate biological ageing, as assessed by epigenetic markers. Conducted by researchers at Columbia University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the study followed over 2,200 participants aged sixty and above for a period of two years, evaluating the long-term effects of daily micronutrient intake. Epigenetic age — distinct from chronological age — was estimated via DNA methylation, a biomarker increasingly recognised for its accuracy in gauging biological ageing. The results revealed a marked slowing of this process among those receiving the multivitamin: on average, participants exhibited approximately two years less biological ageing when compared with their counterparts in the placebo group. These findings lend weight to the hypothesis that subtle yet chronic micronutrient deficiencies may hasten the ageing process, even in the a...

The Navel and the Whole

In the course of daily life, concepts such as knowledge, self-knowledge, and the practice of goodness ought never to be forgotten. Yet not only are they neglected — they are actively abandoned, especially when they stand at odds with the ambitions of humankind. And therein lies the blind spot of human pride: the self — the ever-contemplated navel. I see it manifest in the most absurd of circumstances, where there is no sincere interest in understanding the other. The affluent denigrate the poor; the poor resent the affluent. But where, I ask, is our shared humanity? Where is the recognition that the destiny of one is bound to the destiny of all? That recognition remains — dimmed, tucked away in some forgotten recess — awaiting the rekindling of light. When I welcome a homosexual patient, I see someone in search of that very light, navigating life in a conservative, restrictive city that offers little room to breathe. When I receive someone ensnared in substance use, I encou...