I grew up with the colors of war -- the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it. I grew up with the sounds of war -- the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens. These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable silence. "War," a friend of mine said, "is not about sound at all. It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity."

I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.

I’m still drawing now. Drawing in a safe place like Switzerland is good, you have total freedom. But you lose the sense of danger, the challenge. For me I did my best drawings under the bombs. I lost a big part of my power when I left Syria, but I still have the power of memory.

In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard 'the full sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under the kingdom in Europe to its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris. 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion burst.

From the point where the bomb happens, the whole nature of the movie changes. In the first half of the movie, I hope, you have a very full soundtrack. You have all the soundtrack of TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts, the sound of birdsong in the country, the sound of musical things happening, the sound of traffic and city noises. And from the moment that the bomb drops you don't have anything. You don't even have the teletype, all these things, they just type out in silence, and all you hear is wind. [...] You hear voices of people screaming, coughing or whatever. You hear wind, you hear no birds. [...] It's gone. That world is gone.

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.”

It was the sound of death, the ultimate irreversible.

What sound was that?

I turn away, into the shaking room.
What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
To turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?

It was the breath we took when we first met.

Listen. It is here.

They say something about being safe in the bunker, and how it's almost fun to hear the explosions when they know the bangs can't hurt them. Suddenly there is the sound of a shot, so loud, so close that we all fall silent. It echoes on through all the rooms. "That was a direct hit," cried Helmut [Goebbels] with no idea how right he is. The Fuhrer is dead now.

It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.

The other morning, I woke up. I was frightened – I’m always frightened in the morning, I don’t know where I am. But I heard this beautiful reassuring sound, it sounded like my childhood. I thought, what’s that? Is it? Church bells behind the hill? Or, no – it’s an ice cream van, in the rain. It was me, BREATHING!

It's only now that I remember the racket that went on. At the time you become immune to the sounds around you because you're so busy concentrating on where you must go, what you must do to stay alive. There's no room in your head for anything else except your survival. But the roar of guns, the screaming, the din catches up with you eventually.
Also the sights that you see affect you more at a later stage than they do at the time. I won't forget men in a row. I won't forget men on fire. I won't forget a tin hat rolling, spinning across the embankment with the head of a man inside.
Sounds and sights wait inside you, along with the stink of smoke, gunpowder, mud and rot and burning flesh. They invade your waking hours as well as your dreams.

"The Sound Of Silence"

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 streetlamp
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
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
And whispered in the sounds of silence."

Paul Simon, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM (1964)

What do the rules say? <br/k> At the moment, anyway, no one seemed concerned one way or another: not the doctors, not the family, and not Cummings, who stood at the same spot he'd stood at as he watched Crow die, watching once again. […] The glass had been part of an apartment that no longer existed, in a section of Baghdad where the sounds that night were the sounds of mourning. <br/k> But here on the FOB, the sounds were of a mother whose home was ruined kissing her daughter's face, and a father whose home was ruined kissing his daughter's hand, and a little girl whose home was ruined saying something in Arabic that caused her family to smile, and Cummings saying quietly in English, "Man, I haven't felt this good since I got to this hellhole."