I am visiting with my children out in California, specifically at an Airbnb near San Rafael, about a 30-minute drive north of San Francisco, depending on traffic. It's a place where people literally live on top of one another, the vaguely modern boxes scaling the steep slopes in a hodge-podge of styles, orientations, and precarious perches on the soil. A short walk from the house brought me to a trailhead and an easy hike into the upper hills.

From there, it is easy to see why the native people thought the Bay Area was a sacred place. I had a view of the bay, surrounded by lushly forested hills wet-mopped by fog and peppered with the mossed-over gnarled trunks of trees which looked like olives to my ignorant eye and most likely were not.

What prevented a full indulgence in my romantic speculation of the past was not so much the oil tanker in the bay, its red hull an exposed slash in the otherwise green and blue panorama, nor the uninspired houses which commanded views I could only imagine. More than these, it was the noise: the insistent drone of traffic on 101 (or, THE 101 in Cal-Speak), torn on regular occasion by the desperate shouts of accelerating cars and trucks. It was the chainsaws, and the tractor grinding into a hillside, with its Tonka-truck beep in reverse. It was, simply put, the everpresent sound of human-made machines, companions which have become so ubiquitous and ordinary that their intrusion into the world goes largely unnoticed.

A photographic image, of course, erases all that. Images are silent, or as Quakers might say, they invite Silence, a state of being within which That of God can be experienced. Or maybe even God - it's been a while since I hung out with Quakers. Silence, in this view, is a gateway drug to the harder stuff of full-on spirituality. If you care to go there.

Looking at an image, we are stripped of all senses save one (or two, depending on how they are named), and we can spend a lot of our experience in an analysis of the image, judging the color scheme, the composition, whether or not it tells a story. When, on occasion, we engage our other senses, it's almost always in an imaginary way: we imagine what the scene sounds like, or how the texture might feel.

But images can also invite us to a time when silence was our norm. Imagine a full day without radio or television or the computer, the refrigerator's hum, the car's rattle, the lawnmower from three blocks over or even the white noise of a small desk fan. Imagine outlawing leaf-blowers. Imagine Silence.

Look at an image. Listen to the quiet it emanates. It offers no scent, no taste, no texture. (Don't touch the photo! Even if it's printed on yummy bamboo or heavy rag paper, we don't touch the photo! - Just kidding; you're likely looking at it on a screen anyway.) If we can be aware of these kinds of sensory deprivations, and allow ourselves to wallow in them, our minds can settle and perhaps, just maybe, we can experience something extraordinary.

To put it simply (thank goodness!): silence is beneficial to us in many ways, and we've grown accustomed to its absence. Since still images are inherently mute, viewing a photograph is one way, among many, to reclaim it. As we view photography, we can, in addition to everything else we do during that experience, appreciate that we are doing so in silence. it's a small and important way to reclaim an essential part of our humanity, lost to the gods of convenience, commerce, and cacophony.