Amid great historical moments we find ourselves abruptly situated and filled with an urge to record the momentous moments. We should be careful not to overlook the virtue of doing nothing, and the value of silence while surrounded by the cacophony of the Covid-19 crisis. 

Cities are deserted.  Flight-paths are quiet.  The roads are virtually empty.  One of the new experiences that the global lockdown has given us is greater silence or, more accurately, a greater range of silences.  Now, you might think of silence as a cheap commodity.  Virtually everyone can access it and there’s an inexhaustible supply of the stuff.  After all, isn’t silence just what is left when there’s nothing more interesting going on?  But, as I’ve learned since I began writing a literary history of silence in 2018, there are rich intellectual traditions informing the act of not saying anything.  Certain silences have enormous significance, and two of them are of particular relevance to our strange new lives in the lockdown: the silence that comes from living in momentous times and the silence of not doing very much at all.