In a well-known anecdote, the composer John Cage tells that he entered a anechoic chamber in the hope of listening to absolute silence. He had been locked up for a short time when he heard two sounds, one high and one low. The engineer in charge of the camera explained to him that the sharp one was the noise of his nervous system and the serious one, the one of his circulating blood. "Actually," Cage concluded, "as much as we try to make a silence, we can't." We cannot, in effect, access that total silence but we can reflect, imagine and try to represent its complexity and intensity. In these essays Marcela Labraña goes through and compares some of her intonations in different times and cultures: the journey of the Harpocratic gesture from its hermetic origins to today, an empty map by Lewis Carroll, an impossible shot by Juan Luis Martínez, the monochrome drawings by Yves Klein , the curious pages of Laurence Sterne, an erotic poem by Octavio Paz. These and other examples analyzed in this book —ecphrasis, visual poems, emblems, illustrations, catalogs, cartographies, and paintings— are located at the crossroads between literature and visual art, and therefore resist a strictly disciplinary study. Thus, the heterogeneous nature of silence unfolds, operating as a sign of respect for the divine mysteries, political strategy or symptom of an expressive difficulty, but also as a sign of irony, existential absurdity or fullness.