Adventures in Silence

by Herbert W. Collingwood

“I am darn sorry. My brother cured his’n with skunk oil.”

Then he drove off singing, glad in his heart that he had offered consolation to an afflicted brother.

My children have been interpreters for me from the time they were able to write. They can go with me on business trips and get the message which others frequently cannot deliver on paper. At first they found this hard and irksome, but it has proved remarkably good drill for them in English. They have come to be excellent reporters, with the ability to put the pith of long sentences and whole lectures into a few exact words. This exercise of giving the deaf man an accurate and brief account of the great volume of an ordinary conversation has really developed their powers of expression.

We of the silence know that but few words are needed to grasp the really essential things of life, and we often wonder why others lose so much time in the useless approach to a subject when we can often see through it by intuition. Probably one of the compensations of our affliction is that we actually come to consider that these talkative, emotional people who surround us are abnormal. Two men with good ears meet for a business deal. They must go through the formula of discussing the weather, crops, or politics before they start at the real subject. The whole discussion is useless and irrelevant, yet they both feel that in some way it is necessary, and even when they reach the point at issue, they seem to prolong the debate with useless formal details. The deaf man cannot do it that way. He must fully understand his side of the case beforehand, forego all preliminaries, and plunge right into the heart of the subject with as few words as possible. Is this entirely a disadvantage? I think the man with perfect hearing might well learn from the deaf man whom he pities in this respect to cut out useless conversation and spend the extra time in thinking out his project. The most forceful and dependable men you know are not long talkers and elaborators. Their words are few and strong.

While a philosopher may perhaps summon this sort of reasoning to his aid in the matter of conversation, he cannot apply it to music. Here the deaf are quite hopeless. I have little knowledge of music, and could never fairly distinguish one note from another. I have often wondered whether a real musician who has lost his hearing can obtain any comfort from reading music as we read poetry or history for consolation. Can a man hum over to himself some of the noble operas and obtain the satisfaction which comes to me from “Paradise Lost” or Shakespeare? No one seems to be able to tell of this; but of all the sorrowful people of the silent world, the saddest are the musicians, for sound was more than life to them. I read that Beethoven could muster no consolation when the silence finally fell upon him. Life had turned dark, with no hope of light.

I often sit with people who tell me that they are listening to delightful harmony of sound—music. My children grow up and learn to play and sing, but I do not hear them. When my boy plays his violin I get no more pleasure from it than I do from his sawing of a stick of wood—not so much, in fact, for I know that the wood will build up my fire and give me the light and heat which I can appreciate. It is absurd, and I smile to myself, but sometimes when others sit beside me with invisible fingers playing over their heart-strings at the wailing of the violin and the calm tones of the piano, my mind goes back to Lump, the white cat.

There is a general belief that white cats are deaf. I know that some of them cannot hear, and Lump was one of the afflicted. I am bound to say that Lump endured his loss with great equanimity; he was more of a success than I ever was. He has given me more points on living happily in the silence than I ever obtained from any human being. He forgot the drawbacks and enlarged the advantages. Lump was never strikingly popular with my wife. She would not have cats in the house, and, her hearing being good, she could not appreciate the philosophy of this particular specimen. The proper place for cats, in her mind, was the barn, where they may perform their life duty of demolishing rats and mice. There are some humans who, like Lump, are forced into ignoble service when they are really capable of giving instruction in psychology.

Long before my time men have been forced to meet their boon companions under cover of darkness, or they have had to make private arrangements for a rendezvous with the “guide, philosopher and friend.” So, sometimes at night, after the rest of the family had retired, I would open the back door. There always was Lump, curled on the mat, ready to share my fire. Many a time as I let him in I have taken down a familiar old book from its shelf and read Thackeray’s poem:

“So each shall mourn, in life’s advance,

Dear hopes dear friends untimely killed;