This is rather a kind of phenomenology of silence, a description of the different forms of silence and, in particular, how it is experienced by people. And if this booklet teaches something, then it is that those experiences are extremely versatile, highly diversified (religious-romantic) and also filled in in very different ways (sometimes with concrete techniques, such as the meditation exercises of the Jesuits, that seemed like an early form of mindfulness). But Corbin limits himself mainly to literary quotes, and then almost exclusively from French literature (the classic French myopia, you know). This booklet is a succession of quotes, some of which are nice, but you wonder what this says about the evolution of how we experience and seek silence. Inevitably we come to the opposite definition: “silence as absence of noise”, and the most interesting passage of this booklet - to me - was his brief outline of how noise evolved in western cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Corbin says in his introduction, that this is no more than a pioneer study, a tentative start. And it is. ( )