It is precisely backward, and it is backward in a way that is dangerous to the people who read it wrong.

Because loudness is very often the opposite of power — it is the noise a person makes to convince others, and themselves, of a strength they are not sure they have.

The genuinely powerful rarely need the volume, because they are not trying to convince anyone; they simply know what they can do, and they do it, quietly, when it is time.

Luca was loud because Luca was, underneath, weak — a man with no real accomplishment of his own, propped up entirely on mine, who needed the constant noise of asserted ownership to drown out the quiet fact that he had built nothing.