Silence is truly golden
And embracing nature: inspirations to aspire to
I’ve toyed with my conscience over sharing this: not from some misplaced desire to keep a secret but because some things in life take on an aspect of an actual personal arcana, to be held in trust for the pure sake of one’s own silence – that total quiet too often missing from our lives.
But, conscience insists I tell this short story because it ought to give pause to the lie that only travel to an exotic – foreign – location may provide relief from the strains and stresses of everyday life, as lived by all of us in badly broken Britain. So, from the off, here’s the good news. Not all of this country is in a state of ruin; far from it. Enough remains in an Arcadian state of nature to enjoy, even if most of us in this crowded island so frequently and sadly miss seeing or visiting it.
So, we come to Cornwall – I won’t say exactly where – and to staying in a converted barn, with an actual heat pump, set high up in the midst of fields, far away from any other inhabited building, reached down a long farm track – and, on arrival, a view of the sea. And then there was the silence from the moment we arrived. It stunned us with its presence – the only word to describe it. Silence filled the air, if that makes any sense, creating a constant balm for us that lasted for the entire time of our visit. (You will allow that I am excluding natural sounds: birds, sheep, cattle, a scurry of mice in the wainscot.)
The only niggle was that we were cut off from the coastal path, a mere mile away, by a main road, with no cut verges to tread upon and busy enough to make the short walk needed to reach any connecting path lethal (there were blind bends to negotiate). It got us thinking – not for the first time – about just how dependent we have all become on our cars even when, in our case, their only use was to transport us half a mile to where it was safe to be a pedestrian.
Our cars may be convenient but they are noisy, they pollute (especially electric ones, with their heavily mined, highly polluting, lethal Lithium batteries). All cars maim and kill every kind of life that gets in their blundering way. They give us all a false sense of security and, from the observation of fellow drivers, allow for extremely bad behaviour. Their omnipresence in our lives has distorted our entire perspective on, for example, the delight in slow progression – by walking – to and from wherever we truly wish to go. They represent today less freedom than we once had (think of endless jams; streets blocked with the bloody things), act as a succubus on our lives; we falsely believe we can’t live without them when in fact we can – and should, for the sake of the future and that of the planet we camp upon.
The natural silence we experience once we remove their ugly presence out of sight – and, most of all, sound – combined with the ability, when they are absent, simply to stand and stare at the world surrounding us can provide us with pure, unalloyed, delight.
As W H Davies’s 1911 poem has it:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
I’ll leave it there for this week. In fact, I’ll leave you with the thought that your silence is to be found nearby, wherever you are, even though it is harder and harder to discover. Like the night skies, unpolluted with artificial light, showing the absolute wonder of the Milky Way, billions of stars in just our galaxy, silence, perhaps in a wood at night, nearby, is closer than you might think.
For all too short a time, we found our own silence: we slept with the huge glass doors fronting the whole length of our barn ajar, safe and secure. It gave us back far more than we could have imagined: peace doesn’t quite cover it, but it will do for a start. Shhh!
This week: Tim watched Gaza: Doctors Under Attack on Channel 4, the programme the BBC decided not to broadcast after heavy pressure from the highly organised, slick Israeli propaganda machine. It is extremely hard to watch but, in its forensic exposition of the wickedly deliberate efforts by the IDF and the Israeli Government to murder doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals in Gaza, thereby ensuring that the deaths of injured and ill Palestinians continue for years. (You can rebuild hospitals but replacing trained staff takes a very long time.) It further exposes the genocide we all know is taking place before our eyes every day. If you can bear it, I urge you to watch it.
Quote of the week: ‘Do as you would be done by’, an epithet to be found in Kingsley’s Victorian subtly subversive child-directed, masterpiece, The Water Babies, based on Darwin’s evolutionary and, at the time, revolutionary theory of natural selection. It’s a call for us all to – basically – behave like, well, truly civilised, caring humans. The words can be readily applied, not just to our own lives, but those of our ‘leaders’. Keir Starmer et al, take note.
Music of the week: Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro, highly controversial (and also subversive) when first performed (in Vienna in 1786). The lyrics are by Lorenzo De Ponti, Mozart’s greatest wordsmith collaborator on his operas. The libretto is based on the 1784 stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro. It tells how the servants of the household, Figaro and Susanna, succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva in his attempt to seduce Susanna and teaching him a harsh lesson in fidelity, much appreciated by his long-suffering wife, the Countess. The music is beyond sublime (we used the overture for our wedding). Many consider this to be the perfect opera, the greatest ever composed. There is a wonderful version on Decca (1983), Sir George Solti conducting the London Philharmonic, with Kiri Te Kanawa, Lucia Popp, Thomas Allen and Samuel Ramey in starring roles. Second-hand versions (the original is, sadly, out of stock) start at a mere £19.95.