Robert Kowal

I find my self today on the shores of Lake Quin­ault. The two dozen writ­ers con­vened here dis­play an intrigu­ing range of coun­te­nances (and no doubt tal­ent – but I have no basis for com­men­tary), but in this serene and pre­his­tor­i­cally quiet set­ting, I was hop­ing to encounter voices. I must be patient, for it takes days to habit­u­ate to one’s sonic envi­ron­ment, to hear anew.

We are scopocen­tric crea­tures and we live in a cul­ture where the image is supreme but hear­ing is our pri­mary sense. Being omni­di­rec­tional and bin­au­ral, our ears ori­ent and locate us. Our eyes may indi­cate a des­ti­na­tion or fix the object of our desire but our ears inform us of where we are. This is often impos­si­ble to appre­ci­ate in the mod­ern world because our envi­ron­ment is sat­u­rated with irrel­e­vant and unwanted sound – noise. It is inescapable. As nat­u­ral­ist writer Bill McK­ibben and audio ecol­o­gist Gor­don Hemp­ton^[1] have writ­ten, the nat­ural world no longer exists because there is no place (per­haps a hand­ful if one is gen­er­ous) human activ­ity, man-made noise, or our envi­ron­men­tal dis­rup­tion has not penetrated.

Con­sider then our domes­tic envi­ron­ment; hum­ming refrig­er­a­tor com­pres­sors, whirling com­puter fans, rum­bling fur­naces, dron­ing air con­di­tion­ers, and scream­ing flu­o­res­cent fix­tures inun­dates us. These are but the pas­sive noises of our home. To this we vol­un­tar­ily add the blar­ing chat­ter of the tele­vi­sion or the sedat­ing acoustic salve of banal back­ground music. From the exte­rior intrudes the end­less ebb and flow of traf­fic noise whether it be deliv­ery trucks tak­ing a short­cut down your street or the roar­ing white noise of the Inter­state a few miles off.

We can close our eyes but our ears, being pri­mary, are always on duty. They con­stantly col­lect the spu­ri­ous sounds of our world which our brains must process and then dis­card; an evo­lu­tion­ary relic of the days when we had to worry about preda­tors rustling in the nearby brush. But this chore takes its toll. Our minds spend con­sid­er­able energy in the work of sort­ing the noise from the few gen­uine sig­nals in our mod­ern environment.

On the rare occa­sions when one can find a truly quiet place, the ear and the mind slowly read­just. By ‘quiet’ I do not mean the silence of an ana­choic cham­ber or a sound­proof room; no, so long as one is alive there is sound. Find a spot quiet enough and one can hear the var­i­ous trick­les and groans of the gas­troin­testi­nal tract, the grind­ing fric­tion of bone against car­ti­lage as one moves, the rush of blood through one’s cir­cu­la­tory extrem­i­ties, the click of your eye­lids, the beat­ing of your own heart. Absolute dark­ness, though unusual, can be found in caves and other nat­ural set­tings, but there is no absolute silence. Thus quiet is not the absence of sound, it is the absence of noise. It is the “heal­ing silence” cited fre­quently by Thomas Merton; a location/condition where intro­spec­tion and con­tem­pla­tion are pos­si­ble.^[2]

Tomor­row, I plan to visit the One Square Inch of Silence in the Hoh National For­est.Visit OSIOS.org I have been for­tu­nate enough to visit a few quiet places in my life – the inte­rior high­lands of Ice­land, the Kalau­papa penin­sula of Molokai – and on each occa­sion I found that, with suf­fi­cient time, my appre­ci­a­tion of the human voice reemerged. I could hear again the mel­liflu­ous musi­cal­ity of speech; the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of tone and the com­plex rhythms of con­ver­sa­tion. I could again rel­ish the exquis­ite per­son­al­ity of gen­uine laugh­ter, as indi­vid­ual as our fin­ger­prints. All of this we miss in the noisy world, or rather; we for­sake it in favor of our con­ve­nient devices and addic­tive dis­trac­tions. I hope to reclaim a frag­ment of this tomor­row to carry with me back to my noisy home, per­haps to sus­tain me for some span.

1. ^[1] Bill McK­ibben The End of Nature, Gor­don Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence ↩
2. ^[2] Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe God’s air. Work, if you can, under His sky.
   But if you have to live in a city and work among the machines and ride the sub­ways and eat in place where the radio makes you deaf with spu­ri­ous news and where the food destroys your life and the sen­ti­ments of those around you poi­son your heart with bore­dom, do not be upset, but accept it as the love of God and as the seed of soli­tude planted in your soul, and be glad of this suf­fer­ing: for it will keep you alive to the next oppor­tu­nity to escape from them and be alone in the heal­ing silence of rec­ol­lec­tions and in the untrou­bled pres­ence of God.

   Thomas Mer­ton, New Seeds of Con­tem­pla­tion, 1961 ↩