The second before the curtain

In a theatre in Tunis, a few minutes before the play begins, the room is loud.

It does not take much. Two friends catching up in the third row, a child asking a question, someone unwrapping something in the dark. A handful of people is enough to fill a hall with sound, and nobody else has to agree to it.

Then the lights go down, and something harder happens. The whole room goes quiet.

That silence is not the work of a few. It needs every one of several hundred strangers to choose the same thing at the same moment. One phone, one cough held too long, one person who has not noticed, and it is gone.

This is true of most groups, not only audiences. Noise is cheap. Any small faction can produce it, in a family, a neighbourhood, a crowd at a match. It tells you very little about what the group wants, only that a few people want to be heard.

Silence is expensive. It only exists when everyone is, for a moment, in step. So when a whole group falls quiet together, at a funeral, at the end of a long day, in the second before a curtain rises, it says more about what they share than any amount of noise could.

It is easy to mistake the loudest few for the room. The room is better measured by what it can be quiet about together.