The Sound of Silence

Talking without speaking, hearing without listening: read these words aloud in your mind silently. I still haven't been able to completely wrap my brain around the fact that this is even possible. Isn't sound, and our perception of it, a purely physical phenomenon? Physical waves have to physically excite certain internal parts of our ears which would then translate to the sensation of hearing. How can we possibly perceive sound without this activity, then? Especially when I can actually even say it softly or loudly with varying pitch and intensity - but all of it internally, without really making any audible noise. (And thus the reverse paradox: when you say things aloud in your mind, do you make a sound?) I mean, what does sound even mean if it's not a result of molecular disturbances in the ear cavity? What makes it more strange is that I am unable to recreate this with the other four senses (six, if one includes motion and balance). I can certainly remember a face, but I cannot actually see it with my eyes closed; I can bring up the memory of a touch or a taste or a smell, but cannot voluntarily recreate the specific feeling in the absence of the actual physical stimulus. So what makes sound different? How is it that I can actually recreate the neural pathways in the brain that produces hearing (if that is really what is going on) when the actual source is absent? Going even further, when we read a word, are we necessarily always making the sound in our brains? Do we ever just read, or are we always reading aloud silently without being conscious of it? What do congenitally deaf people feel when they read? Can we isolate the sound of the letter A from the letter itself and perceive them separately? No, I don't have the answers; all I can do is silently wonder, turn, and toss.

Oh, and for those of you already bored out of minds by this entry (you know who you are), here is a hilarious parody of the Simon & Garfunkel classic that inspired the title.

Novel Ideas

In November 2006, in honor of National Novel Writing Month, NPR asked fiction writers to explain the essence of creating a novel, from how they write to their approach to writer's block. For me though, the most entertaining part of each interview was when the author was asked to contribute a favorite sentence. Here are some of the delightful responses.

They were in one of the 'I' states when Zeke told Isaac he had to ride in the trunk for a little while. (Laura Lippman)

Ice is the past tense of water. (Rita Mae Brown)

All parents keep secrets from their children. (Scott Turow)

The sun broke golden on the surface of the pool, a thousand floating coins. (Lewis Buzbee)

Lyle is aware that he isn't right, and sometimes he feels his jaw, his face, making sure it isn’t becoming elongated in a cruel caricature of a sad man. (Kaui Hart Hemmings)

She stood, the water up to her ankles, and turned toward the sandy beach, toward the green sea grass and colorful umbrellas and blue smoke swirling from a beach fire and a boy selling cups of lemonade with ice chips, a woman in a purple bathing suit, and turned back to the blue water and pine trees on the far side of the lake, and behind that the green hills and white clouds against blue sky, the contrast a singular beauty; and now, somewhere behind her, a man was singing a song. (Nina Schuyler)

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. (M. T. Anderson)

Petra loved the stories filed neatly into the flow of train windows –- she had seen arguments in profile, mouths open with laughter or horror, noses squashed against glass. (Blue Balliett)

Ross Wakeman succeeded the first time he killed himself, but not the second or the third. (Jodi Picoult)

By now she knew that this life, despite all its pain, could be lived, that one must travel through it slowly; passing from the sunset to the penetrating odor of the stalks; from the infinite calm of the plain to the singing of a bird lost in the sky; yes, going from the sky to that deep reflection of it that she felt within her own breast, as an alert and living presence. (Geraldine Brooks)

And wasn't sorrow a kind of slow death anyway? (Gail Tsukiyama)

It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches. (Jess Walters)

In the end, the survivor gets to tell the story. (Nancy Werlin)

To Jane's surprise, a grilled cheese sandwich with chocolate milk was exactly what she wanted right then. (Jeanne Birdsall)

In 1954, the summer before I entered third grade, my grandmother mistook Andrew Imhof for a girl. (Curtis Sittenfeld)

Leaves of Grass saved my ass. (Gayle Brandeis)

The boy had probably been praying to a distinctly conceived God not to lose courage; he must have been simultaneously aware of the rush of time transporting him to the explosive instant; the patrons were sprinting along the lines of their own thoughts and personal dramas, their love affairs, their work conflicts, their sporting enthusiasms; the youth probably found his field of vision tightly narrowing once he made it past the guard into the pizzeria; inside they must have known immediately why a youth dressed as an Orthodox Jew would be rushing past the guard; he shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" reported the wounded, failed, severely questioned guard; they didn't see him press the trigger; the boy pressed the trigger (in his pocket, beneath his black coat?); this was followed by an ultima of total clarity in which the bomber and his victims saw every detail of every aspect of their environment crystallized into that minute and second of that day in the month of August in the year 2002. (Ken Kalfus)

Fall in love whenever you can. (Alice Hoffman)

The Shadowy Path

In A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri, Sandeep, an only child living in a Bombay high-rise, spends a summer visiting his Uncle's house in Calcutta with his mother. On Sundays, his uncle sings aloud to himself during his leisurely preluncheon bath, the notes echoing in the enclosed space of the bathroom 'like rays of trapped light darting this way and that in a crystal'.

He usually sang old, half-remembered compositions that had been popular thirty of forty years ago in a Bengal where the radio and the windup gramophone were still new and incredible machines breaking the millennial silence of the towns and villages:

Godhulir chhaya pathe
Je gelo chini go tare.

Knocking on the bathroom door, Sandeep made a pest of himself by asking: " Chhotomama, what does godhuli mean?"

Lost in the general well-being of cleansing himself, his uncle replied patiently: "The word go means 'cow',and the word dhuli means 'dust'. In the villages, evening's the time the cowherds bring the cattle home. The herd returns, raising clouds from the road. Godhuli is that hour of cow dust. So it means 'dusk' or 'evening'."

As Chhotomama explained, his voice emerging from behind the steady sound of water, Sandeep saw it in his mind like a film being shown from a projector - the slow-moving, indolent cows, their nostrils and their shining eyes, the faint white outline of the cowherd, the sense of the expectant village (a group of scattered huts), and the dust, yes the dust, rising unwillingly from the cows' hooves and blurring everything. The mental picture was set in the greyish-red colour of twilight. It was strange how one word could contain a world within it.

Strange indeed! What is a word but a seemingly random arrangement of letters of the alphabet (which themselves are seemingly random shapes), or a seemingly random modulated sound? And yet, one single word can encompass whole Universes and more. The word godhuli does not just indicate a time of day, but conjures up a complete way of life.

Understanding words and phrases and the concepts they encapsulate brings us a long way toward understanding the people, and societies and cultures, who employ them. It's just amazing how, long after the dusk has given way to night, the dust from the cows' hooves has settled, and even the village itself has crumbled to dust, this word will remain, yielding its secrets to the deserving.

The Temperature of Attraction

Earlier this week, I was thinking about how whimsical our language can often be: notice how both the words hot and cool mean almost exactly the same thing when used in a social or cultural context ('Wow, he is hot!' or 'Isn't that cool!'). However, what is even more interesting to me is that we pick only these two words, and not any of their other synonyms, for such usage. 'Cool' may be hot, but 'cold' is not; 'Hot' is cool, but no such luck for 'warm'. In a somewhat unrelated aside, I remember reading some place that in cold countries, warmth is commonly associated with positive feelings ('warm welcome'); and in hot climates, like where I come from, it is not uncommon for one to compare the company of one's beloved to the rains or a cool breeze.