Silence is coming. Silence is coming. Over the steppes of Africa, right now over wild seas, across the pampas of Argentina. If you are in Atlanta, if you are in Berlin, Toronto, Montreal, alas, a silence is coming. I don’t know what it is. It may be a wind without substance — but it is full of the cries of dead birds, full of the cry of the natives and it is moving up through the prairies of America. It is sinking in everywhere — a silence of buffalo, a silence of bison and whale. One day soon the silence will move over us and we will not at first notice it — at home in the vast-ness of the silence, but then it will continue for an hour and each of us, as though in a dream, beyond the reach of sound or speech, will gesture in horror at the soundless reverberation of our axes, the silent working of our machinery. The jets will go by and there will be no shrill sound. The radio will glow but there will be no static and no cry from the crushed animals who will stare up from their pain at us, the stabbed man’s cry lost in the silence, the raped woman’s scream absorbed in the silence, and infants born into a soundless world — a world where the dog’s bark goes unheeded, where the bugles blow without warning and where even the clocks lack for an hour their steady and unstoppable ticking.