Seeking out silence, and discovering all it can say

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Natural History of Silence, By Jérôme Sueur, translated by from French Helen Morrison. Polity. 227 pp. $22.95, paperback.- – –

Aflame: Learning From Silence, By Pico Iyer. Riverhead. 221 pp. $30

Bernie Krause has devoted years to recording the sounds of the natural world – rare songbirds and insects, whales and mountain lions. But in the predawn hours of October 2017, what he heard outside his front door in Sonoma County, California, was the sound of an inferno. Krause fled with his wife, Katherine, as fire consumed their house, car, pets, clothes, art, books, musical instruments, and decades’ worth of precious letters, journals and photos.

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“The fire was a humbling reminder of feral power and the absolute certainty that natural forces will always triumph in the end,” Krause later wrote. Devastated by the loss of his possessions, Krause was also haunted by the loss of the soundscape that had long surrounded his home. Gone was the “welcoming, healing, and reassuring” chorus of foxes, bobcats, coyotes, reptiles, amphibians and insects that trafficked in the nearby woodland. Would it ever return?

Rising temperatures and ecological destruction are reshaping not just the way the planet functions but the way it sounds. It’s the concern that underpins French eco-acoustic researcher Jérôme Sueur’s “Natural History of Silence,” a roaming meditation on the essence of sound and its absence, translated by Helen Morrison. Krause is just one of the many fellow travelers whose work and experience Sueur draws on. Sueur is an associate professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, but over the years his studies have taken him across the globe – from the snow-covered Chartreuse Mountains to the verdant rainforests of French Guiana to a dreary soundproof basement in Bristol, England, where he once spent many hours measuring the vibrations of a fly’s wings.

Sueur and his colleagues have positioned more than a dozen microphones across one forest to capture its murmur; other researchers have strapped recording devices onto the backs of lions to document the sonic footprint of their hunt. The work is methodical, but Sueur’s register in this book is ecstatic. When it comes to the croaks of the green tree frog, for example, he writes:

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We should make the effort, spend some time searching in the long grass, on stones or in damp earth in quest of this little animal, crouched like a cat ready for its nap, until finally we find it, fully concentrated on its nightly task of calling and calling, again and again, its throat swollen almost to bursting point as it proclaims its romantic longings to the stars turning far above its tiny, fragile head.

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The silence in the title of his book, it turns out, is a bit of a tease: The business of life is a noisy thing. The natural world teems with sound, none of it accidental. Animals call to their mates and hunt and sing, sand dunes moan in the wind, volcanoes speak in a low shudder. Many creatures, as they move through the world, fashion their own megaphones – be it fish singing into oyster shells, bats using tube-shaped leaves or crickets digging conical tunnels. Sueur asks readers to listen deeply, and with reverence. “We should love sound for sound’s sake,” he writes. Wherever he seeks silence, he finds acoustic treasures. Make no mistake: The quest for natural “silence” is an adventure. What’s being charted in Sueur’s book is the exploration of a final frontier.

A different, more interior version of that quest has also privately captivated journalist Pico Iyer for some time. Iyer has made a career filing sophisticated travel dispatches from around the world and publishing more than a dozen books; his previous one, “The Half Known Life,” took readers from Iran to Sri Lanka to Japan. Now, in “Aflame: Learning From Silence,” he turns to a location close to where he was raised, in California. The New Camaldoli Hermitage is a Camaldolese Benedictine monastery in Big Sur – a refuge to which Iyer has returned again and again since 1990, when a fire destroyed his home in Santa Barbara. Like Krause, he nearly lost his life: For three hours, he sat trapped as the flames closed in. After the disaster, when he had nowhere to stay, a friend suggested he take a room at the Hermitage, where for a suggested donation of $30 a night, he would have a bed, a desk, a view of the ocean, lunch and a hot shower.

It was a practical arrangement but also the start of a love affair, which Iyer traces with wonder in “Aflame.” Over the years, between professional assignments, he has repeatedly returned to the Hermitage. Perched on a cliff above the Pacific along a secluded stretch of the central California coastline, it is surrounded by redwoods, oak and desert yuca. Iyer is enchanted with the silence of the monastery – a silence that is “active” and “almost palpable.”

It’s the place where Iyer finds respite after loss: He went back to the Hermitage after his father’s death, and again sometime after his mother suffered a stroke. In the peace of his cell, he becomes someone else – or maybe no one at all. He finds himself writing in different modes, issuing forth “erotic sketches, long letters, parables. Poems in the style of Emily Dickinson.” But it isn’t the writing that’s central to him here. It’s the “release from the prison of the self.” He marvels that such a place exists.

Both Sueur and Iyer acknowledge something possibly selfish in their yearning for silence. Iyer’s wife, Hiroko, sees the Hermitage as her romantic rival: “If you meet another woman, no problem! I can be more, more excellent,” she tells him. “But how can I compete against a temple?” Sueur conceived of the idea for his book while briefly escaping a stressful family holiday with his children. Sneaking out into the snow for a solitary walk, he was struck with awe – and a book concept. “Sometimes at home I find myself seeking out silence in order to be able to listen more carefully or to concentrate more fully,” he writes, “but I am aware that this involves a form of tyranny.”

Still, neither author is interested in a silence of sterility. Sueur loathed that soundproof basement in Bristol. And for all the time that Iyer spends alone in his cell, it’s clear in “Aflame” that his brief interactions there with the monks and fellow seekers are a real source of joy. Everyone who passes through the Hermitage is on a journey, and – ever the journalist – Iyer is unable to resist collecting their stories.

“Aflame” and “Natural History of Silence” are books about interconnectedness. How we live – and how we tend to the places that give us refuge – is up to us. The silence Sueur romantically pursues is really the sound of intricate, interlocking ecosystems that are keeping the planet alive – our shared inheritance and responsibility. And it doesn’t escape Iyer’s notice that in the Hermitage, silence is achieved and maintained through collective effort. Contemplation is just one sliver of a monk’s job; running a monastery takes a great deal of administrative, organizational and custodial labor, in addition to support from outside its walls.

The Hermitage has been threatened by fire before. On one of those occasions, the prior who stayed behind while firefighters battled the approaching danger wrote regular bulletins to keep the monastery’s friends apprised. He described “a lot of pulsing light and occasional flash” and the “smell of smoke everywhere.” He went on: “Other than that, all is quiet and the bell calls us to morning prayers.”

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Mythili G. Rao is an audio journalist and book critic in London.

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