Silence
These days, Christmas is imagined as a series of songs sung in fancy churches in Europe and America that know war only from superhero films. Recordings of Silent Night are played incessantly in shopping malls. No one cares about calm—and people are merry.
Goenawan Mohamad
January 3, 2022
SILENCE is never alone. It is always linked to us, me, the world. When on Christmas Eve 1818 in a small village church in Austria people were entranced to hear Stille nacht, heilige nacht for the first time in history, they probably imagined themselves in a lonely Palestinian landscape before Jesus—as lonely as that night in the small town of Oberndorf, north of Salzburg. The snow lay thick. The cold was biting. The sky was dark.
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