"Fools," said I, "You do not know."

Responsibility (though I know this does not represent all of silence in my life...) has been silent for years. Something I've found to be proven true is that God does not abandon His children for long, if we perceive loneliness at all. Over the years I can see in hindsight how God has shaped me through my errors and sins and disobedience to be a guide to my brother and mother, to model Christ's obedience as a pillar upon which my house can finally stumble to its feet once again. God sent my grandparents to remain within fleeing range, to hear the wholesale cries and groans of my house. God has sent good friends to comfort and counsel me. But one of the major ways God has shaped me recently was through the last two summers' mission trips to Prague in the Czech Republic, where He awakened in me a sort of burning empathy that mourns the rejection of the gospel like David mourned the failure of his predecessor, King Saul, to be faithful to the LORD.

This song eerily captures that feeling.

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Hello, darkness, my old friend;/ I've come to talk with you again/
because a vision softly creeping/ left its seeds while I was sleeping/
and the vision that was planted in my brain/ still remains/ within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone/ narrow streets of cobblestone/
'neath the halo of a street lamp/ I turned my collar to the cold and damp/
when my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light/ that split the night/ and touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw/ ten thousand people, maybe more;/
people talking without speaking;/ people hearing without listening/
people writing songs that voices never share/ and no one dared/ disturb the sound of silence.

"Fools," said I, "You do not know/ silence like a cancer grows./
Hear my words that I might teach you;/ take my arms that I might reach you."/
But my words like silent raindrops fell/ and echoed/ in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed/ to the neon god they made/
and the sign flashed out its warning/ in the words that it was forming./
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls/ and tenement halls."/
Whispered the sounds of silence.

"The Sound of Silence," Simon & Garfunkel

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I interpret this song as having the unspoken words of the people in the 3rd verse being the gospel of hope in Jesus's resurrection. The "naked light" that "stabbed [his] eyes" and "split the night," which "touched the sound of silence" is Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, where he is confronted with the risen LORD, and cannot avoid the truth that we hide in silence. No one dares disturb this silence (After all, it is common knowledge one does not talk about religion or politics at a dinner party), but this man with a mission proclaims that this silent and willful ignorance grows "like a cancer," and calls such ignorance foolish. This man's plead is the same as the compassionate Christ's (Luke 13:34, etc.), and his words fall "like silent raindrops... and echoed in the wells of silence," just as Moses's did in his poetic farewell oath against the Israelites (Deuteronomy 32). The song ends with a final warning that states that the signs are there, with the "words of the prophets...written on the subway walls and tenement halls," saying that the masses see them daily on commutes and in their homes, which I interpret to be a line from Paul's statement against idolatry in Romans 1:18-22, which is the same warning of this last verse of "Silence," which warns against idolatry.

The only problem with this song is that the one the singer goes to for counsel on his vision is the darkness, when the God we pray to is eternal Light.