I’m reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski tonight and came across two passages about echos that I liked:

“Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness inherent in any echo. Delay and fragmented repetition creates a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.”

and

“Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate.
And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love.
There is only silence.”