There is something garish about our garrulous society. Everything can be talked about, and everything is. No experience is so private, so personal, so serious, or so sacred that it cannot be endlessly dissected, vivisected, violated, and exposed. This strikes me as a distinctly ugly and unseemly way to live. Better and more beautiful was the attitude of the ancients, well described by Pierre Hadot on page 174 of his Selected Writings:
Generally speaking, from the fact that the ancients spoke little, or at least with great sobriety, about certain experiences that we moderns describe with such emphasis and abundance, we must not conclude that they did not live these experiences, or that they experienced them only in a vague and imperfect manner. On the contrary, it is this half-silence which betrays the importance that such experiences had for them. There was in ancient culture a tendency to remain silent about what was essential.
Someone will quote Wittgenstein: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent." Yet there is a vast distance between his "cannot" and the "should not" of the ancients.
Talk cheapens.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)