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.

Yup, that last line there, that's a purty one, Miss Erika.

"NO! No, no no!"

The baton carved a savage downstroke, and the orchestra stumbled to a halt.

"Millicent!" he swung round on the first violin. "Play this line!"

She played, letting the last note vibrate away. "No! It does not say 'let the note die.' It calls for a caesura!" He rounded on the orchestra at large again. "Where did you all study, in some cave?"

Another musician laid bow against strings and drew slow, aching notes from the depths of the cello. And at the end of the line, for just the space of a breath, there was silence.

Thanks. Don't tell me I'm the only one that ever felt that(of course somebody called my brain sexy and may well have turned my head forevah, but...)

Another drabble from one of the many embryonic novels gestating somewhere in the back of my brain:

She couldn’t think what made this place so different. There were hills, and green grass, and trees—not quite a forest, but a sufficiency of trees. It was not unlike Georgia, nor even completely unlike the dimly remembered Oxfordshire of her childhood. It was a good place. And yet it unnerved her.

When Joseph had secured the horses and the milk cow, he joined her and took her hand.

“It’s so silent here,” she said.

“It won’t always be.”

“Is that a promise or a regret?”

“Both. Neither. We are what we are, and we carry noise inside us.”