The Sounds of Silence

This is my first vacation day this summer, and it is starting peaceful, quiet – silent. I have relished my mornings for as far back as I can remember; languishing in the peace and quiet and solitude of my own company; my own aloneness. Even in my marriage, I always appreciated each morning I could wake and have the house to myself and my own devices for just a short while, knowing there was someone who would wake and help me balance that need-to-be-alone trait inside of me . Silence is one of my personal treasures in life. One would assume I chose to be a librarian because of this appreciation in me, but it’s not an easy blanket statement these days. Libraries, once revered for their tomb like silence; books languishing in their peaceful presence lorded over by shushing royalty. Tomes valued and esteemed; treasured and respected for the knowledge to be discovered within their leaves. Libraries with their very existence are a part of American culture and have contributed to the minds of so many great thinkers, inventors, citizens. Knowledge gleamed, comfort derived, cherished for the multitude of what they had to offer inside those nearly sacred, scholarly walls.

Silence is not what libraries are about these days. Today’s libraries have felt the need to change along with society. They are now social gathering spots, a place for teens to meet, for tutors to instruct children on lessons outside of school, to have knitting clubs, astronomy clubs, makerspace for budding young scientists to explore robotics or building things; 3D printing to help them create even more plastic in our already over-plasticized world. Libraries are hubs of the community; they are places where homeless seek shelter for a few hours, for persons from all walks of life come to use computers and free Internet, since nearly every job application, unemployment, social security, home improvement, or other (imaginable or) unimaginable need can be discovered through the world wide web of information. Many libraries have taken a page from retail bookstores and offer coffee shops and book sales. As a whole, libraries are not about quiet and silence, or really even about seeking knowledge in the traditional sense. So, no, I did not become a librarian for the silent factor. I do miss that in the library. In my (not really distant) past I spent hours on end searching the bookshelves (before I even knew they were called “stacks”) for any book that caught my eye. I could pull it off the shelf, skim a few pages, decide to read further, or re-shelve it and start my quest again. Now libraries and librarians have to “weed” books to make more room on already empty shelves. They weed out books that might be old; which can make a little sense for non-fiction based topics. But they also weed fiction that might be sitting on a shelf waiting for discovery – because it has not been checked out in too long a period. We are such a disposable society. There are books in museums that are hundreds of years old – valuable beyond measure. Someone took time centuries ago to treasure that book, to hand it down throughout time, appreciating its value, its worth, its contribution to society. I fear for the books written in the last century. I fear that in their plenitude someday they will be not be plentiful; because they have been weeded, discarded, placed in dumpsters to be incinerated because someone deemed them irrelevant - plus they took valuable space on already too empty shelves – space required to remove more bookshelves in order to add more seating areas, more computers, and more gathering spots.

But. This started as a topic on appreciation of silence, not as a tirade against the societal change of libraries throughout time. I did not become a librarian for the silence. I value the quietude of my home; of its contribution to my soul to help me regenerate and recharge my internal battery.

I appreciate silence in places like mountains, waterfalls; the ocean. Silence, for me, is not the absence of noise. Here in the silence of my house I can hear things – the birds outside singing their morning joy, the sound of the swishing of the overhead fan; the hum of the refrigerator cooling my food, even the high pitched whine being emitted by the lamp on my desk. Silence is the lack of clutter of noise. Of tapping, or sighing; snuffling, shuffling, engine sounds, radio, television – of hundreds of other sounds made by mankind. I can breathe deeply, exhale and know that each time I do so my heart and soul become a little more aligned again, that my internal rhythms begin to sync again.

A few years ago I went to Death Valley with a friend. I did not like it there. It was hot, dry; dusty. But more, it was despotic to me. I felt as if God’s hand was pushing down on me, that I was being dominated and diminished in a too large sky, in a too large expanse of something. As far as the eye could see there were rocks, dust, dirt, tumbleweeds, sand. To the eye, it was pleasing in a very strange way, but the nature of it was stifling. I told my friend it was as if my body was reacting to it – like maybe I was one of those settlers trying to cross it 150 years ago and I did not make it out alive. My reaction was terrible and strange and a little bit frightening. It stayed with me, and I still recall it. However, what I truly fell in love with in Death Valley was the silence at night. The world changed. It became less about the heat and oppression, and more about the wide open beauty of the night sky. Such a huge contrast. The day, blinding white, dry, hot, dusty; a little unfocused because the eye can see so much further than can ever be comprehended and mirages take over visual focus; everything shimmers with heat and dust and brightness. But the night; cool, calm, serene - silent. I long to go back to Death Valley for the night alone. The blackness was cool and beautiful; crystal clear. And the stars – in my life I have never seen so many stars. I had no idea there were layers and layers of stars in our night sky. I have been a star gazer all my life, and the night holds much beauty for me. The night and the sky in Death Valley is incredibly, indescribably magnificent. The silence is huge. There is not residual sound, there is not static light – the lights of Las Vegas, of Los Angeles can be seen as a dim, very low quiet glow from Dante’s View, a 5400 foot high outlook overlooking Bad Water Basin and the lowest point in the continental United States; 280 feet below sea level. Upon leaving Dante’s view (there is only one way up and one way down), driving back toward the canyon  we stopped at a parking lot, and the glow of those distant cities cannot be seen; no light, no sound can be heard; we were alone in the night, no persons, houses, cars – nothing was there except an empty lot, trees, and the sky. If a car approaches it can be seen and heard miles before for it arrives. Not many people wander the valley at night. The silence was complete and it left me wonder-struck. It is one of the most beautiful experiences with silence I have had in my lifetime, and leaving there caused a physical ache in my soul.

This morning’s silence is not so intense, not such a treasure, but it has value of its own. I can feel my heart and soul smiling as I breathe deeply, let my body relax into its own rhythm and patterns. I have absolutely nothing pressing, no deadlines, I have no must-do list for the next 45 days. Today is the beginning of rebalancing my life and of taking back some of the portions of me I have doled out over the past few months. It’s time for Me, and I am relishing my silent aloneness.