"The Humanities Institute at Scripps College provides lectures, films, exhibits and discussion groups every year on a rich and multi-faceted theme. The theme this semester was silence. We adopted this theme for the Scripps College Press book project in order to investigate how we experience silence through our senses. Naturally, we discussed the fact that total silence is impossible to experience, since it only occurs in a vacuum. The students proceeded to tease out those aspects of silence that we can experience physically or metaphorically."--Introduction by Professor Kitty Maryatt.