One morning towards the end of last April I awoke to the sound of an absence. In fact it was noise from the street I heard. This was the end of the first lockdown (some hoped of the pandemic). However, the cars and drills, loud as they were, themselves constituted a palpable absence: that of auditory sensations experienced since the departure of similar street noises weeks earlier. And now this interim absence of noise, or presence of other sounds, was itself absent. What I was missing was the quiet allowed by the grounding of fleets of aircraft and overnight disappearance of other automated means of travel and transportation.
Into another lockdown, I hear that double absence outside my window again: absence of noise (not entirely convincing today), and absence of the noiselessness which that noise replaced. But how much of this complicated scenario is actually outside rather than 'inside'. The absence of noise and silence is a product of experience: an absence of sensations we have known and now remember. "What we have no access to through experience," wrote Nietzsche, "we have no ear for".
I sometimes think English grammar lacks the facility to accommodate satisfactorily these quasi-paradoxical spatial and temporal relations. Perhaps another language has more subtle arrangements for describing phenomena whose complexities might warrant the use not only of the present, but also of an absent tense. Some absences may not seem substantial enough to require much more than the mere negation of 'be', but the absences I am referring to are essential. We know the absence of noise under lockdown to be the sound of persons supporting life, in their own interest, but reciprocally to protect others.
