Maybe there's the rub, as Bill Shakespeare said. It's a funhouse in here.ETA: But maybe I should see what I come up with looking for more positive quiet moments...just to see what floats up.

Also, with the big cathedrals - if I can be there when there aren't a bazillion tourists (I always go to Notre Dame and light a candle to celebrate the Liberation of Paris, when I'm there), I just bask in the quiet.

Our "chapel" at my college was big, and stone, and gothic, and I used to go hide in there sometimes when I'd had my fill of people. I always felt a twinge of guilt about it--I mean, it's not like I went in there to pray--but the silence was incredibly refreshing, yes. I love churches like that. (Westminster Cathedral was a great disappointment, I'm afraid. No silence there.)

Katie, do you mean the Abbey? Agreed. The atmosphere would be amazing, if it wasn't for the seven zillion chattering tourists every day.

Chartres, Rouen, Notre Dame, all have a sense of silence to them. Sacre Couer, alas, does not.

Oooh, silence. I love it so. I rarely turn on music, much less the TV, when I am home alone. I'm happy hearing the wind through the trees, and the soundtrack in my head. The soundtrack is a delightful phenomenon much different from the annoying earworm. I don't even know what all of it is or if I've ever heard it before. There's times when DH has been watching TV for hours on end, and I walk down the hallway into the bedroom and enter a blessed zone of peace, cool with the dappled light under the apricot tree, and oh, it's as if my cares unravel a notch or two right then and there.

I have a freeway near and am in a descent path for the Oakland Airport, and have become accustomed to pausing the Tivo until the roar of the plane passes and I can hear the TV again. I'm glad I no longer live right on Haight Street to be awakened by bar patrons at last call.

On edit: Deb, what about Grace Cathedral? It's not quite to medieval European scale, but it seemed lovely to me.

Katie, do you mean the Abbey? Agreed. The atmosphere would be amazing, if it wasn't for the seven zillion chattering tourists every day.

Whoops. Yes, I meant the Abbey. It was worse than London Tower, even.

Grace is very lovely indeed, in the old European tradition. Really, though, what I love about it is the labrynth. It's just pure quiet energy.

I was expecting St. Patrick's in New York to be wretchedly touristy, but it wasn't. Maybe because it was the Saturday before Easter and even the tourists got the point when they had to make their way past all the people lined up for confession. I sat there for an hour, I think, just staring at everything, listening to people shuffle along and whisper. There are shamrocks in the capitals of the pillars.

Has anyone here been to the Washington Cathedral?

I have been to Washington Cathedral, but there were docents and tourists, and it wasn't silent. Lovely, but not silent.

Hearing the ocean doesn't count as silence to me -- it's good noise, background noise, but still sound. Anyway, here's a bad-silence drabble:

It’s quiet. I’m waiting for the phone to ring, but it’s quiet. I lie in bed, reading. Not waiting, reading. Lying, with my cat. Lying, to myself. I’m waiting. The phone doesn’t ring. I read and I wait and the phone doesn’t ring. I tell myself I don’t need it. I’m fine by myself. Call or no call, I am fine. I am a strong woman, can take care of myself, am fine on my own. I tell myself this, but why haven’t I turned off the light yet? The phone doesn’t ring. I read my book, waiting. It’s quiet.

My best shot at positive silence...
The night is mine. My little reading lamp feels like a campfire in the almost silent house. I flip pages and it sounds like wind through tiny leaves. One of my few private moments. I let myself get drawn in to the story and let it take me away, even as I am still here. A dog moves down the hall and her collar jingles...but she knows the drill by now and leaves me to it without barking, for once. I feel like I can almost hear my brain working, like it is another quiet hum, underneath the sound of the refrigerator.

I've been woefully behind in this thread and haven't written a silence drabble yet. These are all good. ita's always make me shiver. Love the skylark, Deb. Erika, I like that one a lot, especially that last line.