Читать книгу Adventures in Silence онлайн

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I did not realize how largely the habits of our life are bound up in sound until some years ago we hired a city woman to come and work in our farmhouse. We live in a lonely place. This woman spent one night with us. In the morning she came with terror in her eyes and begged to be taken back to New York.

“It’s so still here; I can’t sleep!”

It was true. Her ears had become so accustomed to the harsh noises of the city that every nerve and faculty had been tuned to them. The quiet of the country was as irksome to her as the constant city noises are annoying to the countryman, just from his silent hills. Perhaps you have awakened suddenly in the night in some quiet country place, let us say in the loneliness of Winter in the hill country. You looked from the window across the glittering snow to the dark pines which seemed to prison the farm and house. You fancied that you had finally reached the world of silence, and you were seized by a nameless terror as you imagined what would happen to you if sight were suddenly withdrawn. Then you heard the timbers of the house creak with the cold, the friendly wind sighed through the trees and around the corner of the house. There came faint chords of weird music as from an æolian harp when it passed over some wire fence. Or perhaps there came to you the faint step of some prowling animal. Then the terror vanished before these sounds of the night. For this is not the world which I ask you to enter with me. We are bound for the world of the deaf. I tell you in advance that it is a dull, drab world, without music or pleasant conversation, into which none of the natural tones of the human voice or the multitudinous sounds of nature can come. You must leave them all behind, and you will never realize how much they have meant to you until they are out of your reach. Could you readjust your life for a new adventure in this strange world?