Stuck In A Pinter Moment

I was watching Dawson's Creek the other night, and an interesting phrase caught my attention. The characters were apparently having a 'pinter moment'. Now, i love little phrases like this, so i rewound it to listen to what it actually was...

Apparently, it's a moment in which everything is said in silence, because the emotion behind what we really want to say is just to overwhelming to actually verbalise. It goes on to say that silence is an aquired taste, and that the more complicated life becomes, the better it is to learn to say nothing.

Personally, i don't agree with that exactly. The definition is fine, but i don't think that a complicted situation is fixed by keeping silent about your emotions (eventually, the characters figured this out too). That said, i do know the feeling that they're talking about, where you can just feel the huge undercurrents of emotion flowing through the silence. I don't like silence, i feel very awkward - it could have something to do with the fact that i often percieve thoughts and emotions in silences that aren't actually there. Whatever the reason, i generally fill them with random chatter. There are maybe three people in the world with whom i can sit in silence and not feel awkward, and those wouldn't be the people that you'd expect.

Some of those awkward moments are actually not that bad. In fact, they can be nice, when no one says a word, but everything can be understood in the silence of the moment. In those situations it seems like the time actually stops and the only things in the world are you and the other person. But sometimes it just feels terrible, deeply confusing, like if everything was ok at the moment, but in the inside we know that something isn't right, like a mixture of admiration, hope, happiness, frustration, mmm.. and something really strange and hard to describe...

It's an interesting concept. I've worked the phrase into regular rotation now. So at least when you hear me throwing it about, you'll know what i'm talking about!