on the great stone face

Buster Keaton and modern-day silence

It was not as if Buster Keaton was dying to make “talkies”. He had, for years, trusted the world to understand his heartbreak in the tilt of a hat or the collapsing of a house around him. There was no need to speak when the body could break so beautifully. When it could fall, and get up, and fall again.

There are cities inside us we don’t speak of because they crumble when named. There are mornings I do not speak aloud, but still feel the pulse of something enormous moving through me—like the hush before a storm, or the pause before a dancer lands. To be quiet is not to be empty. It is to make room.

It is something we can all take from Keaton, the “Great Stone Face” who never needed a word. Stillness can be an offering. Grief and wonder both arrive like ghosts—wordless, whole, waiting to be noticed. For “silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.” And the gods, when they came, did not explain themselves. They arrived in wind, in light, in a face looking out from a black-and-white frame, unblinking, unspoken, and somehow eternal.