hello darkness, my old friend

I just read Lauren Winner's book Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis and am particularly struck by her recognition and discussion of the presence and importance of middles. She mentions the middle voice in other languages in which the subject both acts and is acted upon. She discusses a middle tone in painting which is everything but the striking and noticeable lights and darks; it is everything that plays a supporting role in the painting (but without which the painting, as itself, couldn't exist).

The middle of a hole is empty space. The middle of a hole makes sense, is understood as necessary to and characteristic of a hole, only when the edges are secure and sensible. Otherwise there would be no hole, only uncontained emptiness.

Middles are where silence lives. All that escapes notice, defies voice, and resists definition participates in silence. Bernard Dauenhauer writes about the intervening silences that punctuate language and music by creating rhythm: silence as the empty middle space between sound that gives the sound sense and beauty. In art, silence is in the vacuum of surprise that precedes an altered consciousness.

If middles are where silence is, then God must be there, too. This makes sense to me conceptually, and I like the sound of it; I can't say any further than that.