The Sound of Silence

The original Sumerian story that led to the biblical one of Noah’s Ark shows how much the ancient gods valued silence. That story, complete with an ark, had a different ending, and a different reason for the great flood. There were a lot of gods and no concept of good and evil. The sun god, Enlil, decreed a flood to wash everything away. The river god warned a human couple through a dream. When Enlil discovered that there were survivors, they were commanded to present themselves. Nervously, the couple did, and the sun god passed judgement on them, cursing or blessing them, depending on how you see it, with immortal life. After understanding the judgement, they asked why the gods flooded the whole world and drowned all the creatures?

Why? answered the sun god, why? Because humans were making too much noise.

We’re getting noisy again.

Simon and Garfunkel visited an old friend, Darkness, in their song The Sounds of Silence. Both Darkness and Silence are among our lifelong companions, chased away too often in our modern world. Darkness scared me as a child, but soon became my friend too. Silence became a companion later. My first really powerful recognition of that companion came in January 1960.

Grieving has lots of elements that cannot be foreseen. In December 1959, my father died, leaving my mother with six children, from 16 to under one year old. I was ten, in the middle. Death was surreal, inconceivable to me in many ways, conceivable though in its brutal finality. My mother was the one carrying the burden – not just of grieving, but of the unforeseeable stresses that accompany it. She moved us out of the city to a small house on Aimé and Lucia Viau’s farm in Val Morin. It was there that she dealt with every possible childhood illness, mumps, measles, and chicken pox that each of us succumbed to in turn. Coupled with the emotional stress, the house was not designed for so many of us, and we boys were obliged to make the trek through the back door to not overwhelm the septic system. That was where I discovered my new companion, Silence, dwelling in the snow-covered fields and distant trees. Maybe my memory contrasted the soundscape with my experience in the city, but in deep winter I do not remember hearing so much as a bird.

I had lived at the corner of a busy street in the city and could not have conceived of such silence. I came to treasure the silence of the countryside and was happy that we did not return to the city. Later, for three years in the early 1970s, I became a hermit and lived in the silence of the remote woods of Ste. Lucie. Troubled by a distant mechanical noise that reverberated through the forest, I traced it down. The noise would start off as two beats, thrums, that travelled right into my head, and then the noise would continue, gathering speed until the spaces between were impossibly small. I imagined a machine pulverising something to dust in a shop far away. I resented the human-made interference carrying through the forest and cursed industrial noise.

I had been surprised numerous times, flushing a ruffed grouse, a bird that could explode out from under the snow as I approached, making a loud wind-beating noise in its escape. I never guessed that this amazing creature was the source of my perception of industrial interference in the woodlands. The ruffed grouse produces this beating noise as a part of a mating-territorial call. The thrumming carries for long distances through the woods, the loudest noise in the forest that somehow emphasized the silence.

Fifty years on, and the sound has been only heard rarely for decades. I think it has been overwhelmed.

My mistaking it for an industrial noise was ominous. Something was on its way, something that would produce the industrial noise. Now, from the same location that I once heard the ruffed grouse, I can hear a crusher, creating crushed stone. I can hear gravel being sifted and tires rolling endlessly along rough asphalt roads. I can also hear jets flying far overhead, smearing the blue sky with streaks, and in the summer season, private planes and helicopters showing no consideration for anyone’s pleasure but their own.

I was distraught. In those early days, it was possible, with very little detective work, to find the owners of the machinery that caused the noise. That led me to finding the owner of the crusher and, when its noise woke me well before six A.M., I took to calling the poor man at home, waking him up and telling him as pleasantly as I could that his machinery had started up. I never lost my cool but presented myself as a friendly so-and-so who just wanted to let him know that, at some ungodly hour of the morning, his equipment had woken the neighbourhood on schedule. I was pretty good at that pat American line, too, of telling him to “have a good day” once I was sure he was thoroughly awake and doing his best to keep his cool.

I was not alone with my discouragement and soon the towns started enforcing rules about sound barriers and times of day that equipment could run. Of course, that did not reduce the ever-increasing road noise as traffic grew and tires widened, improving road security, and all the other noises just increased. If you live in a city, you just have to learn how to shut the noise out and stay inside.

Then the pandemic began.

The skies turned blue again. The noise rate dropped in every direction. Even the roads were quieter. I began to wonder if the pandemic was the sun god asking us to be more considerate. I wonder how many warnings that couple got so long ago.

Do you think, if we listen, we will hear a few more warnings – or have they all been sounded already?