2
The Silences of Nature

Certain sounds, said Maurice de Guérin, make silence resonate, while also giving depth to space. Memories, in the form of reminiscences, then start to speak in the inner silence. On 14 August 1833, he wrote:

an immense motionless veil, without a single fold, covers the whole face of the sky . . . favoured by this silence, every sound arising from the faraway fields reaches the ear – the songs of the labourer, the voices of children, chirping and the peculiar cries of animals, and from time to time a dog barking I know not where . . . a great silence reigns, and I hear, as it were, the voices of a thousand sweet and touching recollections, which arise in the far-off past and come murmuring to my ear.1

For Leconte de Lisle beams of light were ‘the sparkling silence of the skies’.2 Mallarmé, on the other hand, wanted the accumulating banks of fog to rise and build ‘a great silent ceiling’.3 However, it is probably Henry David Thoreau who has most carefully analysed the more general link that connects silence to the things of nature. ‘The human soul’, he said, ‘is a silent harp in God’s quire.’4 When he walked in the woods and in the countryside, he felt that

all sound is nearly akin to Silence; it is a bubble on her surface which straightway bursts . . . it is a faint utterance of Silence, and then only agreeable to our auditory nerves when it contrasts itself with the former. In proportion as it does this, and is a heightener and intensifier of the Silence, it is harmony and purest melody.5

This led him to conclude: ‘Silence alone is worthy to be heard. Silence is of various depth and fertility, like soil.’6 Seeking greater precision, he analysed the effect of hay on silence, and the nature of the silence of mosses. Having stopped in the barn on Baker Farm, he sat ‘rustling the hay’, and observed that ‘the crackling of the hay makes silence audible’;7 and in his ‘Natural history of Massachusetts’, he records how he contemplated the mosses so as to appreciate ‘the beauty there is in [them]’, because their life was ‘silent and unambitious’.8

Once settled at Walden, deep in the country and close to the woods, Thoreau smiled at the good fortune that enabled him to analyse the host of small noises that both revealed the silence and created it. For there could be no silence unless it was broken by the infinitude of sounds of nature, of birds, of frogs, even of leaves. At Walden, there was no need to search for silence, it was everywhere. But, ‘if we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each other’s which is without, or above’, then ‘we must . . . be silent’.9

Max Picard, in the twentieth century, felt very much the same. ‘The things of nature’, he wrote, ‘are filled with silence. They are like great reserves of silence.’ The weather itself was impregnated with a special silence; each season came from the silence of the season that preceded it. In winter, ‘silence is visible’; in spring, ‘it is as if the green had passed silently from one tree to another’.10 Similarly, certain film directors have shown themselves alert to the silence of the quotidian, which some of them have tried to convey. Nicolas Klotz says that good films are silent, while adding that ‘being silent is by no means the same thing as not talking’. He regrets that more and more films today do not talk but that increasingly few are silent. Silence, he says, ‘is where the world begins’, but today it frightens people.11 Jean Breschand, appealing for silence, calls it ‘the non-rupture’ of a ‘sweet audible continuum, of the ambient familiar babble’, of the ‘background noise of daily life’. For him, silence is an ambience, a ‘sweet, soft and continuous sound’, and anonymous.12

Let us follow these general considerations by looking more closely at the times and the places in nature in which particular types of silence can be felt. The obvious place to begin is with the relationship between night – or, to be more precise, night-time – and silence. Lucretius, in the De rerum natura, evoked ‘night’s austere silence’, which is omnipresent. At the end of the eighteenth century, Joseph Joubert saw this time ‘as a great text of silence’.13 Maurice de Guérin dwelled on the moment when night falls and ‘silence enfolds me’. Then the wind drops, the copses become still and ‘the noise of man, always the last to be hushed’, fades into the distance. ‘The universal hum ceases’, and all that remains is the faint scratching of his pen writing in the nocturnal silence.14

Chateaubriand associated the still of night with the effect of the moon:

When the first silence of night and the last murmurs of day struggle for the mastery on the hills, on the banks of the rivers, in the woods and in the valleys; when the forests have hushed their thousand voices; when not a whisper is heard among the leaves; when the moon is high in the heavens, and the ear of man is all attention.15

It is then that a bird begins to sing and reveals the silence of the night. In his Contemplations, Victor Hugo wrote:

Je suis l’être incliné . . .

Qui demande à la nuit le secret du silence.16

[I am the bowed creature . . . / Who demands from night the secrecy of silence.]

Across the Atlantic, Walt Whitman proclaimed ‘the splendour of silence’ and evoked the ‘still, nodding . . . mad, naked summer night’.17

Georges Rodenbach, too, kept returning in his poetry to the connection between night, the moon and silence. He added the night-time presence of the water of the river and the canals of Bruges as it slept ‘in heavy silences’. Here, night ‘set out its silent jewels, on this water tormented by regret’.18

Gaston Bachelard has emphasized how night amplifies the aural resonances that compensate for the obliteration of colour. The ear is thus the sense of night-time. While shapes become indistinct at dead of night, noises are enshrined in the silence and reach the ear in an imperceptible fashion.19

In the twentieth century, Proust lingered over the quality of the silence of moonlight. Legrandin, on his terrace, waxes lyrical about the silence and its shadow: ‘[T]here comes in all lives a time . . . when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, the light [of] a fine evening . . . when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.’20 It is at dead of night, anchored to its substance, said Valéry, that the spirit, remarkably alone, distinct and rested, feels illuminated by the shadows, and ‘the silence speaks to it at close range’.21 When dawn breaks, the soul senses that ‘the first murmurings in the space that grows light settle on the silence’, and the coloured shapes that emerge are ‘superposed on shadows’.22

It is probably Philippe Jaccottet who, in our own day, has most perceptively described the sensations that link the moon and silence. At first, he says, he was frightened by the almost total silence existing out of doors at dead of night.23 On 30 August 1956, around three a.m., when the rising moon shone on his bed and the silence was total, and he could hear absolutely nothing, no wind, no birds, no traffic, he was gripped by a terrible dread. ‘Before this silent and empty immobility’, he felt fear and longed for the ‘arrival of light’. By contrast, one moonlit night, silence seemed to be another name for describing space. The night star transformed the earth, and made it freer, more transparent, more intimate. It conferred such tranquillity and immobility on the landscape that you could hear ‘the silent breathing of the leaves’.24

I shall begin my discussion of the places where silence has a particular importance with the desert, site of silence par excellence. I shall evoke the experience of the Desert Fathers at a later stage. Sadly for our purposes, we lack the evidence that would let us know what they felt in the face of this space, other than in relation to their search for God. By contrast, from the nineteenth century, we have major texts that describe the emotional experience of individuals confronted with the silence of the desert. In France, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Fromentin, Nerval, Flaubert and then, from the interwar years, travellers seeking adventure and participants in the colonization of the deserts, of whom there were many, all described the feelings they experienced when they had been entombed in this space.

Chateaubriand, who seized ‘the Orient by the ear’, depicted the desert as a vast silence of desolation born of despotism.25 He believed that the political system petrified people and the world. Already, in Constantinople, the silence was continuous; ‘no sound of carts or carriages’ could be heard. There were no bells and few trades employing hammers, and ‘you see around you a crowd of mutes’. To which was added, in his imagination, the silence of the seraglio. The executioner...