A short time ago I was watching television. At home in Ottawa. With my wife. Suddenly she sneezed. "Bless you!" A split second later came a second sneeze, just as loud as the first. It came, as I later discovered, from the television set. A spectator attending a golf match in Japan had sneezed, and the sound was carried many thousands of miles into our living room.

The Canadian sneeze and the Japanese sneeze were so coincidental to each other that instinctively I said "Bless you" a second time.

"That wasn't me!"

Of course it wasn't, but time and distance had been so eclipsed that my reaction was understandable. After all, one sneeze sounds much like another, except for those truly shattering eruptions emitted when grains of pepper are accidentally sniffed into the proboscis, triggering gargantuan explosions and causing fellow diners to recoil in fear.

Those two sneezes are a measurement of civilization's technological advance, from 1902 to 2002. There was no way someone sneezing in Japan in 1902 could be heard in Korea, much less Canada, away way way across the Pacific Ocean. To even think of the possibility was outlandish. Some might even have said it was insane. True, there might have been the odd clairvoyant or futurist who dreamt of wonders still to come. But did anyone envision simple things like the sound of sneezes being transmitted from continent to continent?

And, of course, there were few, if any, golf matches played in Japan in 1902.

That same day I had watched part of a soccer match played in England, and in the evening a hockey game in Canada.

I had seen massive explosions caused by bombs being dropped, or, more accurately, aimed by United States war planes over Afghanistan. Although I could hear the sounds made by spectators at the golf, soccer, and hockey events, held on three continents, no sound was recorded as the explosions blasted large areas of landscape high into the sky in Afghanistan. They were filmed in silence and watched in silence. Antiseptically silent, trailing white quantrails across a blue sky, the planes carried out their mission in silence.

No doubt the planes and the explosions created noise, lots of noise. But not even a sneeze broke the silence of the televised scene. It was unreal.

Sight without sound. The reality of what was taking place didn't register. It was as if the days of the silent movies had returned, a TV announcer taking over the role of the piano player.

A silent war, a silent plane, a silent bomb.

That silence spoke volumes.