There’s a short story by Heinrich Böll that I like, titled “Murke’s Collected Silences.” Set in postwar Germany, it follows a radio editor named Dr. Murke, whose job is to sift through hours of audio tracks and trim them before broadcast. It’s a subtly satirical read: the radio station’s director has a religious awakening at one point, and Murke is tasked with editing out each mention of the word “God” and replacing it with “that higher Being Whom we revere.” What strikes me most about the piece, though, is a scene near the end. Murke reveals he has collected snippets of silence out of the radio broadcasts—“places where the speakers sometimes pause for a moment, or sigh, or take a breath, or there is absolute silence”—and has spliced them together into a three-minute cassette. He plays the noiseless tape at home after long days of work.