Is it possible to comprehend the varied geography of human silence? At times it may feel intimately familiar; at other times, as unfathomable as a wild cat's stare. “The music is not in the notes,” insisted Mozart, “but in the silence between.” Or perhaps the music is in the inextricable relationship of one to the other. Our thoughts shift so in the stillness of silence. What grows within can be fragile. Its comforts, held too long, might become unconsoling, and there you are, ferried over to silence's dissonant side: the riverbank where the strength of the withheld thrives; where unease accumulates; where we regret the unsaid. “The silent treatment,” they say, is so powerful, it affects the part of our brain that recognizes pain. Then, the hard work of return.

I imagine that the silences in my own life compose a landscape shaped by weather and currents: As some sift away, others wash in and accrete. A few solidly persist against the onslaught of wind and rain, though even then their color changes with the hour. If I trace them all back to the Massachusetts farm of my childhood, I most often recall an out-of-time silence. By the 1960s, any small farm, its tireless figures sowing seeds and staking tomatoes in the heat of a June day, was already soaked in nostalgia. Our 40 acres were surrounded by woodland, and although one ear might have been turned to the dense and shaded silence of the white pines towering above us at the edge of the fields, the other was cocked toward the rush of commuting cars on the state road. The suburbs and cities weren't far away.

By the time I was born, my mother was already in her midthirties, my father in his midforties—I would come to realize they were much older than the parents of most of my friends. Both were first-generation Americans, their childhoods echoing with the scratch of fountain pens, the clattering of hooves, the thud of wooden boxes. In photographs, my ancestors patiently stare out at me from that world. Nothing moves, not even a soft breeze off the Mediterranean. I think sometimes that my love of old things has to do with their muteness, for don't we, the living, animate them as we imagine them? It's not that they speak to us; rather, their silence allows us to speak—not necessarily for them, but so as to make our own lives coherent.

Silence, as I remember it, spread through our house, which surely had its sounds. Didn't we four children madden the place with our games and arguments? And didn't our father talk about the weather, the crops, the work to be done? Even so, what I carry with me now is the silence surrounding my mother. At first tang, it feels as safe from disarray as an old Dutch interior: the equanimity of that light on a white pitcher, on a bowl of lemons and oranges. But now I think she must have been holding her tongue—not deliberately so much as hesitantly, as if she were waiting to speak.

Was it so? Or is it that I can't help but add hers to centuries of accumulated obedience and compliance, the centuries in which the refusal to be silent fostered pub names like The Silent Woman—“Silent because her head was off!”—and forged the contraption called the scold's bridle: an iron cage to be placed over a woman's head if ever she talked too much. The cage was fitted with an iron slab, sometimes spiked, meant to hold down her tongue.

I remember that as I grew older, I became less patient with my mother's silence, in part because I'd grown impatient with my own. I had been a fairly quiet child, having spent so many years under the cover of those pines, part hiding place, part fostering world. But by the time I'd become a teenager, the late 1960s and early 1970s were swirling around me. There was a lot at stake then, and silence did have its gestures: black armbands and moratoriums, vigils and marches, gestures inextricable from the sound of antiwar protests, the women's movement, the civil rights movement. “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter,” Martin Luther King Jr. had said. His words seemed all that much stronger for being part of a century that had to question the enormous consenting silence at its heart: Never forget.