Life & Wisdom Quote by Rafael Cadenas

Silence, for Rafael Cadenas, isn’t a spa-day vibe or a productivity hack; it’s an ethical discipline. The line insists that listening is not something we do on top of ourselves, but something we do by subtracting ourselves. That repetition - "only in the silence of oneself" - works like a mantra with teeth: it narrows the conditions of genuine encounter until the reader feels the claustrophobia of their own mental noise. Cadenas isn’t romanticizing quiet so much as indicting the constant interior monologue that turns every conversation into a mirror.

The intent is almost countercultural in an age of self-display. "Silence of oneself" suggests a specific kind of muting: ego, reflex, opinion-as-identity. The subtext is that most failures of understanding aren’t about lacking information; they’re about being too crowded inside to make room for another person’s reality. Even the phrasing "hear the other" and then "understand the other" traces a moral sequence: perception before interpretation, presence before judgment. The final shift - "can we be with the other" - raises the stakes from communication to companionship. It’s not about winning an argument; it’s about becoming capable of relation.

Context matters: Cadenas, writing out of Venezuela’s political turbulence and the broader Latin American tradition of introspective, spiritually alert poetry, treats interior life as a public responsibility. Silence becomes a form of resistance: against propaganda, against the performance of certainty, against the busy violence of always having a take.