My Year With Proust - Day 210

   "It has been said that silence is strength; in a quite different sense it is a terrible strength in the hands of those who are loved.  It increases the anxiety of the one who waits.  Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence?  It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell.  But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person who loves! . . . Besides, more cruel than the silence of prisons, that kind of silence is in itself a prison.  It is an intangible enclosure, true, but an impenetrable one, that interposed slice of empty atmosphere through which nevertheless the visual rays of the abandoned lover cannot pass.  Is there a more terrible form of lighting than that of silence, which shows us not absent love but a thousand, and shows us each of them in the act of indulging in some new betrayal?"

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 122

These words hit home with me, and in a very painful fashion.  I've been in too many relationships where the person I loved would use terrible, frozen silence as a weapon.  It was one of those things which in the short term work because I don't like confrontation, not simply because it's unpleasant but also because I don't handle it well, so I would inevitably do whatever was necessary to smooth the waters and end the silence, even if it wasn't necessarily my fault or I had to make unconscious compromises to do so.  In the end, however, we both lost because I just found myself withdrawing into my own silent world.  I've promised myself that in future relationships I would fight more, rage against the silence, although I still have a tendency to disappear.  We always have the sense that a cutting remark from a lover is terribly cruel, but there are far worse things, the most obvious being silence.  There is a reason why most civilized nations (not the US, obviously) view isolation as cruel and unusual punishment.  So why do we do this to each other?  I suspect it is a curious combination of cowardice and cruelty.