Summer/August

The Unquiet World

I write this letter in the early hours of a still and unawakened Sunday morning and for no other reason than to keep my writing hand in practice--should it atrophy, I would be lost--and to allow my mind to alight on a page or so of blank paper where it might find some refuge from the frazzling effects of daily routine and human disorder.

I write of a still and unawakened Sunday morning, but, of course, the natural world is anything but quiet during the daytime hours or at night. This evening, I pause while writing and hear above the dinning silence the alternating cadences of crickets bowing with their legs like so many acrobatic cellists their rasping monotones under a summer moon--members of the only class of insects endowed with a sense of hearing. Apart from the evanescent sounds I make--breathing, moving about, scratching with pen on paper pad--there are thousands of unheard sounds emitting from above and below the soil level. A resting mocking bird releases in the night a few untimely chirps from the top of a pine; frogs continually croak the only note they have ever learned in lonely unison from some nearby pond; a moth, searching for some enduring light, crashes against a screen and stunned, flutters audibly to the ground. And then there are the insects, not sleeping as you or I, but rustling, digging, boring, chewing, climbing; reshaping the earth with undetected sounds, potentially audible to us, as our scientific instruments seem to prove, if only our blunted sense of sound were sharp enough to hear them.

It is worth quoting in the matter of our senses, physical or moral, some perceptive lines from George Eliot in Middlemarch. "If we had a keener vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence."