notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, screen capture from The Gleaners and I [Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse], 2000, directed by Agnès Varda. Via. Bottom, photograph by Karen Knorr, from the series Musée Carnavalet, 2004-2007. Via. More.

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At last! I am alone! Nothing can be heard but the rumbling of a few belated and weary cabs. For a few hours at least silence will be ours, if not sleep. At last! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and now there will be no one but myself to make me suffer.

Charles Baudelaire, excerpt from One O’Clock in the Morning [À une heure du matin]. In Paris Spleen [Le Spleen de Paris], 1869. Via.

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So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric.” Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

Susan Sontag, excerpt from The Aesthetics of Silence. In Aspen 5+6, Fall-Winter 1967. Via.