The notebook · August 22, 2026

The silence I’m good at

I pray in the evening by saying nothing. It started for lack of time, years ago, and it turned into a method: I sit on the edge of the bed, I say nothing, I stay there as long as it takes. If anyone asked me to describe my prayer, that is what I would describe, and I would do it with a certain satisfaction.

Psalm 4 puts things in an order that does not suit me. “Search your own heart on your bed, and be still” (Psalm 4:4, World English Bible). Stillness is in second position. It is what comes after. And I have been doing the second half for years without ever having done the first. The French Bible I grew up with says speak where this one says search, which does not let me off: whichever verb it is, it happens before.

I tried on Tuesday. Going through the whole thing, inwardly, before falling silent. What came up had nothing to do with prayer: a business about a meeting, someone who took up an idea without saying where it came from, and a sentence I repeated to myself three times in increasingly final versions. After two minutes I stopped. Not because I had finished. Because I did not like listening to myself.

That is where I see something and do not know what to do with it. My evening silence may not have been trust. It may have been a way of not finding out what there was to say. Falling silent straight away looks exactly like falling silent afterwards, it looks the same from outside, and it costs infinitely less.

I sleep well, incidentally. I have always slept well, and I counted that on the good side, as the sign that things had been handed over. This week I no longer know whether I sleep because I gave my affairs to someone or because I never took them out of the cupboard.

What bothers me most is that the long version seems worse. Saying everything, every evening, in the unfair terms of the moment, looks like a permission I would not give myself. The psalm gives it. It does not ask for any of it to be presentable. It asks only that it be said first.

I have settled nothing. I have only stopped finding my silence so successful, and I will try again tomorrow evening without knowing whether it is better.

In Manna, tonight, there will be a few words I did not have to find myself.