If there were anywhere but desert

"It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak." Edmond Jabes (silence speaks and bougainvilla grows)

negative capability via Keats (being nothing to be all), Lavish Absence (the female form of Waldrop), or Christ in the desert fasting for forty days.