An image has been coming to me repeatedly of late: falling snow seen through a window, an image I associate with my New England childhood when snow often fell in great enough quantities to keep us home from school for a day—or more.  The exciting freedom of such a day which included sleeping late, reading non-school books, tobogganing, hot cocoa. These associations will never go away, but my current thoughts about falling snow are less attached to the excitement than to the peace of it, the way snow can fall at a furious pace and still be silent. All that activity and no noise. We are so accustomed to activity producing sound that it seems counterintuitive. Of course if our ears were calibrated differently maybe we would hear snow falling, but unless it’s coming down with ice, the sound is currently beyond the range of human hearing. It’s the silence that mesmerizes me. If it came down noisily as rain does, its beauty, I think, would be diminished. It might not seem as magical.

I was awake for a period last night, and I got up and walked around the house waiting for sleep to grab me again. I found the cat asleep on one of his favorite chairs and was surprised he didn’t awaken. Then I noticed the full moon through the dining room window, framed by two stately evergreens. It hung there with no audience but me and the sleeping cat, content to be itself on its nightly orbit. I knew it was moving1, but its movement was undetectable. Like the snow, that moon was riveting, in part because of its silence, its apparent contentment. It was similar to the shadow I watch every morning as I awaken that’s formed by the sun sending its rising light past a row of pear trees, casting the tree shadows across the lawn. Every day this shadow assumes a slightly different shape for reasons I can’t clearly discern. It holds my attention, like the falling snow and the orbiting moon, for its silence.

I’ve been obsessed with silence for a while now (long before I began losing my voice to ALS). Perhaps more accurately, I have been obsessed with how noisy the world is: traffic, construction, jets, jackhammers, omnipresent music. A few months ago, I stopped at a gas station that had a TV blaring from each island, lest people should get bored pumping their gas. Even a walk in the woods can be filled with intrusive sounds: clearcutting, overhead aircraft, the voices and devices of other hikers. A truly quiet place isn’t easy to find.

There are two anechoic chambers in the U.S., soundproof rooms that block 99.9% of all sound. These chambers are used for various scientific purposes (to train NASA astronauts for space, for example) as well as for product testing, and I have written about them in my forthcoming novel Sinking Islands. What interests me about these highly soundproof places, is that most human beings can tolerate them only for a very limited period time (the longest anyone has stayed in one is 45 minutes and most people can endure far less). When there is no external sound for the ears to receive, the hearing apparatus listens to the body itself, the roar of breath and blood, the churning of internal organs, the creaking of bones and tendons, hair rustling over the scalp. Who knew the human body produced so much noise? Apparently, we humans are comfortable with hearing “some” noise at all times, though not necessarily the noises of our own bodies.  

Most of us recognize a need for silence, even if not consciously. Some find silence in daily meditation or church, others go to the wilderness, still others seek out museums and libraries. When I was a child, I went to a Quaker camp and fell in love with our daily meetings in which no one spoke unless moved to speak. Mostly those half hour meetings, full of campers and counselors, were silent. It had never before occurred to me that life could be lived without continuous talking.

I’m thinking of these things because I’ve been taking stock of the things I truly love about the world. And also because, in losing the ability to speak coherently, I have already moved into a world of greater silence. I still make lots of efforts to communicate with others, using the limited speaking capability I still have, along with my high-tech devices, but the effort of speaking has made me appreciate the time I spend alone. And in groups I’m trying to grant myself the permission to remain silent. I have always loved solitude so that is not difficult, but being silent in a group is challenging. It requires me, in the midst of heated conversation, to be okay with letting my opinions remain unvoiced. It requires me to accept not being able to guide the conversation and accept not being able to crack jokes casually. I am having to develop an entirely different social persona.

It’s been helpful, when I’m losing my way, to think of the quietly changing morning shadow, or of the full moon in its silent orbit, or of the tranquil beauty of the soundlessly falling snow.