Imagining a vacuum and silence is so difficult that we place it all in the category of the unknown. But the charm of this extraordinary emotion cannot be abandoned, and so we project it onto our objects. The ability to attribute the quality of silence to objects means to make them live in a special and unique context, removed from the banality of the everyday, the known and the conventional. It means to restore consciousness to a condition of purity and perfection. It means to recognise the distance between absolute and relative, between understandable and mysterious, between known and unknown, between tangible and abstract, between definable and indefinable.

Whatever we do to give such attributes to objects is superfluous, albeit necessary for us, and we’ll continue to do it regardless. In any case, all objects have their own personalities, which are sometimes rich and profound, sometimes paltry and superficial, sometimes magnificent, eccentric and noisy, or reserved, modest and silent. They have personalities because they communicate, and we humans are used to communicating.

Silence is empty because in a vacuum no sound propagates – just as the Big Bang took place in the most total of silences. In the midst of an atmosphere, sound communication was born. And its existence immediately makes us regret the passing of the primordial condition of non-existence, of total absence. That state which brings us back to the non-place, the non-time.