Silence

The other day’s reading was a reread of an essay by Carl Phillips, included in his writing memoir, My Trade Is Mystery. It’s really a lovely book, and very useful for me as a writer. There are a couple of segments in it that I use for my composition classes, so I was reviewing the segment titled “Silence“ before presenting it to my 102 students.

In it, Phillips isn’t actually talking about silence as in the absence of audible sound. He makes the point that actual silence is nearly impossible to achieve in these United States. My students, who are largely residents of urban St. Louis, agreed that there is always some kind of ambient sound around them. We practiced listening for just a moment, and we could hear the Spanish professor across the hall demonstrating pronunciation of various verbs, the construction workers finishing off their work at the science building across the parking lot, the passing cars on the interstate, even the hum of the fluorescent lights.

Even in my relatively quiet small town on the other side of the river, there is rarely complete silence. We are close to a major road — for my town, for my students it would be a teeny path — that sees cars on a regular basis. My neighbor mows his lawn like three times a week in the summer, and in the winter we might hear the scratch-patter of the squirrels leaping around the branches or skittering over my roof. (On any given day, my home might see deer, squirrels, rabbits, cardinals, skunks and once a large turkey sitting on my car. It’s like living in a Disney movie except they don’t clean my house.)