Christian McEwen

From "O Taste & See! Using the Five Senses to Write About Nature" by Christian McEwen

Some Notes on Silence

Because teachers spend so much time asking their students to please keep quiet, children have a bad reputation when it comes to noise. It’s as if they themselves would prefer to live in a perpetual racket. But the fact is that most children have a deep appreciation for silence and the kind of spacio us attention it makes possible. Since this too is one of the essential skills for the beginning naturalist, I like to take the time to elicit it in school. Ideally one would do such work outside, in smallish groups. But even in a classroom setting, one can make a good start, working partly from memory, partly from immediate experience.

At Central Valley, I introduced sound and silence to a fourth grade class by asking everyone to shut their eyes and put their fingers in their ears. We all did this for maybe as much as a minute.

“What did you hear?” I asked the kids.

And of course, in a class of twenty or twenty-five, very little had escaped them. They’d heard the blood beating in their veins, the tiny movements of their fingers squinching against the inside of their ears. They’d heard a pencil falling, papers shifting, someone scraping the metallic legs of their desk against the floor. And there were more distant noises: the teacher bellowing instructions down the hall, the lawn-mower in the field outside, a far-off plane.

Silence is rarely absolute. Almost always it is shaped (enlivened, accentuated) by tiny outbursts of sound. This is true in the country and in the city too. I told the kids about my old apartment in Manhattan, how even in the middle of the night I could hear the hum of the refrigerator, the television talking to itself from the floor below.

And then I read them this little poem by D.H. Lawrence:

The White Horse

The youth goes up to the white horse to put its halter on
And the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.

After making sure everyone knew the meaning of “youth” and “halter,” I read the poem again, explaining that in real life we would probably be able to hear the horse munching grass or the boy breathing. But something else was going on here, some particular harmony between the two of them. It was a special kind of silence, not what people call a “dead” silence, but something more interesting and engaged, a “live” silence if you will.

“Where have you experienced that?” I asked. “Where have you yourself felt especially calm and tranquil?” And then I stood ready at the chalk-board, and the children called out their responses.

“In church – ”
“In the library-”
“In the basement at home-”
“In the middle of the woods –”

When we had a good list of especially silent places, I shifted the question to silent times. “Is winter quieter than summer? Or night quieter than day?” The children had plenty to say about this too. In their opinion dawn and sunset were especially quiet, and of course the middle of the night. Winter was quieter than spring. Being alone was almost always quieter than being with someone else.

“What about silent creatures?” I asked. “Birds and fish and all the different mammals?”

Again we came up with a list. Cats were quiet, most of the time, the children told me. And so were deer and snakes, and rabbits and ants and spiders.

One by one, I wrote these up on the board, sometimes asking an e xtra question. “A deer isn’t so quiet when it’s racing away through the underbrush. When is a deer most silent?”

Finally, I paused, and explained that I was going to ask a different kind of question altogether. “If silence were a color, what color would it be?” There was no right answer, I emphasized. But what did they think?

The children were happy to tell me. The question didn’t faze them in the least. Silence was white, silence was black, silence was silver, silence was goldish-blue. Silence was transparent, it was pink and peach and lemon, the softest, palest color of the sky.

I asked about noise too. “What color might noise be?” By then the arms were flailing. Noise was tie-dye, noise was purplish-red. It was white if silence had been black, and black if silence had been white. Noise was all the colors of the rainbow.

I didn’t bother to make a list of colors on the board. But I did write up the words “silent” and “silence” – hard words for fourth graders to spell; also “quiet” and “quietness.” And then I asked the children to write a poem about what silence meant to them: an image or two in each line, if possible.

Silence is goldish-blue. 

It is like seeing the moon in the rain.

Silence is like standing by the window 

when all you can hear is the sound of the wind blowing past you.

It’s like standing in front of a gate in heaven.

(Joseph)

Silence is a walk in the park at midnight
Or a hard decision you have to make, Now or Never.
The dead of winter, the spring rain, they are all
silent. Driving on a backroad at dawn.
A restless night. This is silence. (Brian)

These two poems were my favorites, both written by nine-year-old boys without a moment’s hesitation. But many of the other poems had terrific lines as well:

Silence is black as charcoal and its sound is transparent as a piece of glass
…
Silence is a worm digging into the black cold earth (Alex)

Silence is the wind rolling over the tall grass of the plains…
Silence is a pair of scissors sliding through a piece of paper like it was air… (Justin)

Some children preferred to use the word quiet:

Quiet is midnight when an owl looks down on me.
Quiet is a spider making a web to sleep. (Brett)


It is very quiet when I am in the car driving some place far away.
It is quiet when two girls paint their nails. (Kathryn)


Then, of course, for the speedy writers, there had to be some poems about noise. Julie Ann described it with a cool exactitude, as if she were a journalist filing a report on NBC:

Loud noise of thunder hit the ground with a horrifying roar. People huddled in their basements with fear. A twister round the land as far as you can see. When the torching [torturing?] night was over people thanked god they were alive.

Other children held to more familiar, domestic images. For Jessica, whose silence was: a gray cat sleeping/​ a long book/​ a walk in a park/​ a deep sleep/​ the dew just falling on the grass, noise, by contrast, was:

big bright colors
screaming in excitement
chatting to a friend

while for Cynthia,

Sound is a warm bath and a towel to put around you…
Sound is a laugh when you can’t stop…
Sound is the end of this poem.