Silence and the Sabre-Toothed Tiger
By STRIX 7111E dictionary's definition ('abstinence from 1 speech or noise') suggests that our forebears regarded silence as a man-made commodity, a preserve which the individual could carve out for himself in the wilderness of human intercourse, a discipline which he might hope to impose on his family or companions.
Less lapidary sources confirm this cocoon-type conception. In fiction 'the' silence is always being broken : by an agonised scream, by the coughing roar of a lion, by the bark of a Luger, by the creak of rowlocks, by the hum of approaching aircraft, by the sound of a key turning stealthily in a lock. But is there any longer such a thing as silence? If there is, when were you last aware of it?
* The total absence of noise—a dismal universal hush—is not within the command of homo sapiens. On other planets the form may be differ- ent; but on even the most desolate parts of ours the wind is liable to howl, the redshank to pipe, the cataract to roar, the owl to hoot, the swell to ruminate the pebbles, the Abominable Snowman to belch. A state of complete silence, in which a man's ears hold only a watching brief, is rare, and if prolonged would prove uncongenial.
But silence played a part in our lives until a short time ago, and it seems odd that its liquida- tion should have passed without comment. I can remember, as a very small boy, seeing a thick layer of straw covering the width of the street in front of a London building (it may have been a hospital but I think it was a private house) and being told it meant that somebody inside was seriously ill; the straw was there to protect their ears from the intolerable clatter of the traffic which, since most of it was still horse-drawn, could be partially muffled in this way. The idea of such a noise-trap being laid today is ludicrous.
The institution of the Two Minutes Silence as an act of commemoration shows that forty years ago silence was regarded as not merely seemly but attainable on a national scale. if this method of homage had not been devised in 1919, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone would have proposed its adoption in 1945. With coaches thundering down the roads and aircraft droning or whining over- head, it is only in remote and fortunate parishes that this part of the Remembrance Day Service can be fitly observed. 1 can remember my elders inveighing against the telephone on the grounds that it made an in- fernal din. Yet this telephone was a single instru- ment, tucked away in a corner of an enormous house, outside the butler's pantry. In a modern house there are extensions all over the place; but it would hardly occur to the crustiest curmudgeon to describe as an 'infernal din' a summbns which, though shrill, often goes unanswered because it is blotted out by the daedal utterance of the tele- vision set.
1 suppose it is the continuity of the noises among which we live which prevents us from noticing that there is any noise at all. I work in a remote corner of an isolated house in the country; I am immune from the sounds made by traffic, pile- drivers, news-vendors, office-boys, tea-trolleys and bank-robbers which harass the urban worker. Yet since I started writing these words the noise has been incessant.
The plaintive whine of the vacuum cleaner gave way, at length, to the fainter, more pleasing strains of the cook's wireless. These were soon drowned by the gardener's mowing machine. On the more spacious lawns of childhood the mower was pulled by an old pony wearing football boots, or some- thing like them, and emitted a delightful, soporific whir; but the modern machine is motorised and, even if one were not subconsciously waiting for it to break down, does not beguile the ear. When it did break down silence might have been said to reign were it not for the apparatus which makes the water hot; this gives forth at intervals a muffled, stertorous clank, so that, if one kept one's eyes shut and did not know better, one might sup- pose oneself on board a very old ship groping her way through a dense fog.
It is much the same out of doors. The mechani- sation of agriculture has driven silence off the fields, and the mechanisation of forestry has pur- sued it into the woods. The ring of a distant axe, although it was a noise, was one of those noises— like partridges calling at dusk—which are almost an, appendage of silence, which set it off and en- hance its value : as a fish rising in a still pool sets off the glassiness of the surface which it briefly dimples. But the portable mechanised saw, which now finds favour with many woodmen, makes a harsh, petulant, protracted rasp; it is a sound that becomes the woodlands ill.
Is some clever fellow measuring the effects upon man of the increasing volume of noise to which he subjects himself? I imagine we are steadily losing, through lack of practice, the last vestiges of that power to see in the dark without which homo sapiens Mk. I. could scarcely have survived in a hostile world. Is our ability to hear small sounds being atrophied by a similar process? Are our voices getting louder? Will the day come when we shall all need to plug our ears with not-hearing aids?
I do not know. Perhaps this all-pervasive din is character-building. Perhaps we have grown out of silence, as children grow out of their toys. Per- haps silence, like the sabre-toothed tiger, is some- thing that man was fated to destroy. Although it was for so long part of the furniture of our lives, we do not seem to have found it particularly commodious; otherwise, surely, its virtual dis- appearance would before now have attracted comment from some weightier pen than mine.
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