Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka Read Free Book Online Page A

quaintly, referring to the space—the silence—requisite for contemplation, or, more quaintly, the forming of a self. A century and a half later, aural text covers the psychic page, spills over; the margin is gone. Walking to work, we pass over rumbling pipes and humming cables, beneath airplane flight corridors and satellite broadcasts, through radio and television transmissions whose sounds, reconstituted from binary code, mix and mingle, overlap and crash, and everywhere drifts the aural refuse of our age.
    Thus may the stuff between the discordant notes of our lives require—and I’m not unaware of the irony here—a few words in its defense. Begin anywhere. The cottage in which I spend my summers is silent yet full of sound: the rainy hush of wind in the oaks, the scrabble of a hickory nut rolling down the roof, the slurp of the dog in the next room, interminably licking himself… I’ve never known perfect silence. I hope to avoid making its acquaintance for some time to come, yet I court it daily.
    My ambivalence toward silence is natural enough: the grave, the scythe, the frozen clock, all the piled symbols of death, reinforce an essential truth, a primal fear: beneath the sloping hood, death is voiceless. Silence spits us out and engulfs us again, one and all, and all the noisemakers on Bourbon Street, all the clattering figurines in Cuernavaca can’t undo the unpleasant fact that
el día,
properly understood, always ends in
la muerte,
that quiet, like a pair of giant parentheses around a dependent clause, closes off our days. Sorry.
    But if it’s true that all symphonies end in silence, it’s equally true that they begin there as well. Silence, after all, both buries and births us, and just as life without the counterweight of mortality would mean nothing, so silence alone, by offering itself as the eternal Other, makes our music possible. The image of Beethoven composing against the growing void, like all clichés, illuminates a common truth: fear forces our hand, inspires us, makes visible the things we love.
    But wait. Does this mean that all is well? That the pendulum swings, the chorus turns in stately strophe and antistrophe, the buds of May routinely answer winter’s dark? Not quite. We are right to be afraid of silence, to resist that sucking vacuum—however much we depend on it—to claw and scratch against oblivion. The battle is in deadly earnest. And therein lies the joke. Resistance is one thing, victory another.
    Left partially deaf by a childhood inflammation of the mastoid bones, Thomas Edison throughout his life embraced the world of silence, reveled in its space, allowed it to empower him; as much as any man, perhaps, he recognized silence as the territory of inspiration and cultivated its gifts. Deafness, his biographers agree, acted like an auditory veil, separating him from the world’s distractions, allowing him to attend to what he called his business: thinking.
    I mention these facts, however, not for the small and obvious irony—that a man so indebted to silence should do more than any other to fill the world with noise—but to set the context for a scene I find strangely compelling. In June 1911, hard at work on what would eventually become the disk phonograph, Edison hired a pianist to play for him (as loudly as possible) the world’s entire repertoire of waltzes. And there, in the salon at Glenmont, either out of frustration at not being able to hear the music to his satisfaction or, as I’d like to believe, out of sudden desperate love for the thing he’d missed (as charged as any of love’s first fumblings), the sixty-four-year-old Edison got on his hands and knees and bit into the piano’s wood, the better to hear its vibrations. Will Edison’s fate be our own? Afloat in the river of sound loosed upon the world by Edison’s inventions, having drunk from it until our ears ring, we now risk a similar thirst.
    Tacked to the wall above my desk, staring out from a page