The View from Silence

When I was a kid, I found myself one night in a cabin deep in the heart of Tanzania at 2 o’clock in the morning. I will never forget awakening to the deafening sound of . . . silence. It was a silence so acute that you couldn’t even call it silence: it was the utter absence of sound. One felt suddenly rendered deaf. It made me very nervous, as if a vengeful god had plucked the drums from my ears.

But what was infinitely, horribly worse, was the darkness. It was so dark in that room that I felt as though I had suddenly had my eyes removed. I just wanted to go to the bathroom, but the thought of getting up from the bed and feeling my way through the thick, indifferently silent miasma of inkiness was extremely unnerving. None of the lights worked. It was a safari camp — everything was switched off at 11.

“Geoff,” I pleaded in a drawn whisper to my older brother who lay in the bed next to mine, “Wake up!” But he wouldn’t.

I thought I was losing my mind until my ears and eyes finally registered something: a hiss and some lights through a window. It was the camp owner’s jeep, making a routine patrol through the camp. Buoyed that I was not an ocularly-challenged deaf person, I somehow made it to the bathroom.

Now, here, I sit on a futon in semi-rural Japan at 4 o'clock in the morning, a few hours after having spent 20-odd hours on planes, trains and automobiles. Coming from a place ten minutes by bus from Guy and St. Catherine, the silence here is awesome, mind-bending. In Montreal, there is never the absence of sound. It is a deep hum that continues, day in, day out, all day, all night. The rush of a truck three miles away, the quiet eternal roar of Decarie Expressway.

And even in the wee hours, the sky is ablaze. An apocalyptically orange pall casts its light over everything. Even having dark curtains never prevents this baleful glow from seeping in through every crack.

Here, although I type on a black laptop keyboard, I can see it in the dim light of the ubiquitous fluorescent ceiling lamp that I’ve dimmed to its lowest setting. And the silence, while deafening, is tangible. There is the calm, inexorable hiss of the hard drive. If I strain, there are tiny noises from around the neighborhood, occasionally, as if to reassure me that I still have ears.

But I am reminded, in this suddenness of suppressed senses, of that Tanzanian night, and I wonder if somehow, in the presence of light and sound, I’m missing something.