Customer Reviews

The World of Silence

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4 star:		(1)
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I read this book as part of a course on Philosophy at the University of St. Francis in Stubbenville. That was many years ago. I still take this book off the shelf for so many reasons. It allows me to enter into a world which is far more true than this one, and limitlessly beautiful. I have never bothered to take the time to review a book. But this book is so dear to me, I had to proclaim it's fine value. I pray I get a chance to meet Max Picard in the next life. Even having nothing to say to each other would be a highlight! I would ask to be buried with this book, I love it so much, but it would be better if someone rescued it from my casket and read it!

Tim Woods

Max Picard was one of those --very few-- outstanding men of faith of the XXth century who clearly saw, already in the 1930's, the kind of predicament we were in. That conditions seem to have worsened some 80 years later may be an optical illusion, since at bottom they remain the same.

Picard's main contention, that we are cut-off from the source of true Silence, and that the true human word can only exist in that connection, was shared among others by Ferdinand Ebner, Martin Buber and Romano Guardini. All of them, in spite of their confessional differences, were true men of dialogue --perhaps because rooted in that Silence from which the true human word can blossom.

This wonderful little book is one of those very few you certainly won't forget --and lovingly written as a poem, so much that you'll feel you are reading real poetry at its best.

Get it by all means, even if you have to copy it by hand from the only available copy in your local library...

Daniel Quinn mentions this book in his "Providence." Speaking about his life as a Trappist in KY he says, "Merton lent me a copy of Max Picard's The World of Silence, a wonderful book, a whole book on silence, and nothing I could say in praise of silence could begin to equal it."

As with one of the other reviewers, I have to rank this as one of the greatest books I have ever read. I know a number of people whose lives have been changed by reading it, mine included. It is, among other things, exquisitely written (translated!). Every page is like listening to a stone dropped into a deep well of thought.

It would be the perfect companion to reading John Cage's Silence!

This book is classic. Like fine, aged wine, the depth of Picard's observations on silence only deepen with time. He explores silence in its multi-faceted forms, finding it everywhere around us, nudging us to turn off the noise and go deep within.