from: In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of Stories (Bauhan Publishing, 2023)
from: Chapter 1: CHILDREN LISTENING
A Rush of Memories
In the course of gathering material for my book, I asked many people to describe their early memories of sound. My friend Meg Fisher wasn’t sure, at first, that she had anything to tell. Most of her childhood memories were visual ones. But then she recalled the silver bell on her tricycle. “I can really distinctly remember the sound that metal bell made. Tring-tring! It made that nice satisfying little tring! every time you pressed it.” Suddenly she could see the twisted handle of the bell and feel her thumb on it, see the handlebar to which it was attached, and the way that handlebar connected to the trike’s front wheel. The white cement of the sidewalk, the rather rough, parched lawn — all those details were released by her clear memory of the bell.
“They had been locked away, inaccessible, until the sound freed them.”
Gradually she came up with a long catalogue of childhood sounds, from the squeak of her sneakers shinnying up a metal pole to the whomp! and hiss of her mother’s steam-iron, and the flapping of fresh sheets on the line. She was too small to help, but she remembered her mother pinning up the sheets, and the sun and shadows moving through them. “And there was a sound — the sound of those big sheets in the wind.”
There is a strange delight in keeping track of such things, brightening and enlivening each passing day, while also reaching back deep into the past.Where adults tend to focus almost exclusively on the human voice (whether internal or external, sung or spoken), children make no distinction between what is and is not worth listening to. Everything talks, from the spit and crackle of a new-laid fire to the kiss and slurp of raindrops on a distant roof. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens describes his hero, Pip, lying awake in bed, listening to “those extraordinary voices with which silence teems… The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.”
Acknowledging this is more than an act of pleasurable nostalgia. It also serves to ground us in the present, encouraging us to pause for a moment — stop and listen! — and remind us of an openness and receptivity that are still possible, even now. There are sounds that energize and nourish us, that catch our ears and open up our hearts, sounds that return us to ourselves again. “It makes me so happy,” someone said to a good friend of mine, “just to listen to you breathe.”
You can buy a copy of In Praise of Listening direct from me:
Let me know where to send it, and if you’d like it signed.
(See too my full list of publications, including World Enough & Time:
On Creativity and Slowing Down.)
You can also get it from my publisher: www.bauhanpublishing.com
or from your friendly local bookstore. My own favorite is Broadside Books in Northampton, MA, www.broadsidebooks.com.
On May 24, 2024, Christian was interviewed by Loan Tran for Awakin.