The Extinction of Silence

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an independent reporter, born in 1987. She works alongside Szymon Opryszek, with whom she published the books “Tańczymy już tylko w Zaduszki” [We Only Dance on All Soul’s Day Now] (2016) and “Wyhoduj sobie wolność. Reportaże z Urugwaju” [Grow Yourself Some Freedom: Reportage from Uruguay] (2018). A lover of Latin America and life in the countryside.

Quietness opens up the world that we don’t hear in our everyday lives. That’s what makes it so precious. Maria Hawranek talks to Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who has circled the globe three times in search of nature’s rarest sounds.

Maria Hawranek: Has any sound especially surprised you?

Gordon Hempton: Melting snow. It’s a beautiful sound. I found it only because John Muir wrote about it. I doubted that he was being accurate in his description – I suspected that he was using his poetic license to, as Mark Twain would say, improve on the truth. But then I went up and recorded melting snow, and of course, it was just fantastic. Since then, whenever I can, I record melting snow just one drip at a time.

And the spruce logs on beaches?

A different kind of music, but definitely not random and really incredibly beautiful. It’s nature’s largest violin. John Muir, whom I mentioned, was a naturalist in the 1800s. I spent two years studying his life and quickly learned that he was quite possibly the greatest nature listener at a time when the Earth was most musical. He became a teacher for me. He was asked to join the fight to create Yosemite National Park. Muir was a man of the mountains, not a man of politics, so he hiked up into the mountains to spend a night at Soda Springs. In the morning, he woke up and decided he would join the effort. I decided to go to the same place, because I wanted to hear what he had heard that convinced him to come out of the mountains and join the political fight. I went there on a full moon winter’s night. It was absolutely beautiful and the circumstances turned out to be very favourable, because there was a renegade bear that had frightened all the campers, so they all left. Even the ranger was headed off in the other direction.

Weren’t you scared?

I thought: Oh, this is great, I’m going to have the whole place to myself, the bear won’t bother me. And it didn’t. I was just standing there,

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Maria Hawranek:

an independent reporter, born in 1987. She works alongside Szymon Opryszek, with whom she published the books “Tańczymy już tylko w Zaduszki” [We Only Dance on All Soul’s Day Now] (2016) and “Wyhoduj sobie wolność. Reportaże z Urugwaju” [Grow Yourself Some Freedom: Reportage from Uruguay] (2018). A lover of Latin America and life in the countryside.

Publish date: 06.12.2019

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Paweł Janiszewski:

A historian at the Institute of History, University of Warsaw. He sometimes studies the Roman Empire, and is particularly interested in its religious phenomena, systems of philosophy, and culture.

The ancients condemned us to live in constant noise, abandoning the hunter-gatherer existence and then establishing cities. We are similar to them: on the one hand we miss silence, on the other we’re terrified of it.

Man is an extremely noisy being. The transition from migratory hunter-gatherer communities to living in permanent settlements was a particularly noisy episode in the history of our species. However, the uprising of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt at the turn of the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, and then of Syria and Palestine, and the construction of the first large urban centres, meant a transition to living in constant chaos. There are many quite obvious factors behind this: the concentration of the population in a small, closed area; multi-generational families with a large number of young children; co-living with animals (poultry, pigs, dogs, donkeys, mules, etc.); and the numerous marketplaces, shops and craftsman’s workshops operating in the cities. Added to this are the palaces and shrines of the gods with their loud celebrations and processions combined with music and dance. In other words: the denser and larger settlements and cities were, the louder they became. Athens, Corinth, Argos, Thebes – the classical Greek poleis were not oases of peace and quiet. And life in the great metropolises of the Roman Empire was a total nightmare. At close to a million inhabitants, Rome was a never-quieting monster. A Roman poet wrote that even at night, it was hard to sleep a wink there, because when darkness fell, the numerous witches and sorceresses of the empire’s capital would perform sombre rituals, pounding relentlessly on bronze pitchers and platters. Genuinely nightmarish.

The Extinction of Silence

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Oh Silence, Oh Deathly Silent Uproar!*

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