On Ghosts and Silence
Some people can live alone in silence. They can sit in a room without distraction, without noise, without company. Others cannot. For them, silence is unbearable. It presses in on them like an accusation.
The difference is often framed as conscience: those who have wrestled with themselves — who have asked what part was mine? in every conflict, every failure — can live with silence. They have already faced their ghosts. They may not be innocent, but they are not evasive. Even their mistakes have been interrogated, turned over like stones in the hand.
By contrast, those who avoid reflection may flee into noise, into relationships, into endless diversions. Not always because they are lively, but because stillness threatens them. Silence is dangerous when it might summon voices long suppressed.
Yet the reality is not so simple, not a binary of reflective versus evasive. Many live along a spectrum: they may confront some truths but not others, or manage to carry part of their burden while repressing another.
And not all ghosts are born of guilt. Some rise from unprocessed grief, profound loss, or the dread of mortality itself. Others are shaped by trauma, by restless minds, by neurodiverse wiring that makes stillness intolerable for reasons that have nothing to do with moral fault.
What remains constant, however, is that silence reveals. To some it is a mirror; to others, a torment.
Philosophy — in its deepest sense, the art of turning toward the truth rather than away — is not an intellectual luxury but a survival skill. Those who practice it may still tremble in the haunted house, but they can at least invite the ghosts to speak.
Those who cannot bear silence remain condemned to chase distraction after distraction — never quite knowing whether what hunts them is guilt, grief, or the inevitability of death.