thejaymo:

For all that Picard has to say about silence, he is also quite insistent that language has primacy over silence so far as human beings are concerned.
“[Silence] is creative, as language is creative,” Picard writes. “And it is formative of human beings as language is formative,” he adds, “but not in the same degree.” In his view, “It is language and not silence that makes man truly human. The word has supremacy over silence.”
But he immediately warns that “language becomes emaciated if it loses its connection with silence.” 

The Thing That Is Silence

I read “ The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise” by Cardinal Robert Sarah the other year. Now I really want to read The Thing That Is Silence by Picard