“The fisherman turned round and listened, even though they could not understand,” Arnheim recalled. “It was very quiet, but suddenly from behind me came a spitting and a spluttering, then screams and squeaks and whistles-the wireless was being tuned in.” The owners of the café, which was situated “in a little Italian place where strangers are almost unknown,” hoped that the sound of the radio-English announcers, a German choir-might attract customers. “The fishermen, their legs a-straddle, their hands in their pockets and their backs turned to the street, were gazing down on the boats which were just bringing home the catch,” he wrote. The psychologist and art critic Rudolf Arnheim captured some of the wonder and power of it when he recalled sitting outside a café by a harbor, in a southern Italian fishing village, in the nineteen-thirties. How strange it must have been to hear voices separated from place for the first time. But I do so while speaking to friends in New York or outside of Boston, to my brother in France, to people throughout the borderless world that gives definition to my life. I gaze out the same windows she did, with their old and watery glass. From this house, the widow would have heard no one farther away than shouting distance. This easy access to sound means that the scope of our worlds differs. Just knowing that I can simply cancel the quiet changes it. But, in one essential way, her quiet was different from mine: with the flip of a switch or the tap of a screen, I can hear other voices singing or speaking. I’m sometimes tempted to believe that this quiet connects me with the past, that the widow who lived in this house a century ago must have also worked in silence, listening to sounds-some similar to what I hear, some particular to her own time-from the street, the yard, and the woods and fields beyond. ![]() Even then, the quiet feels spacious-a place in which my thoughts can roam as I work. When the weather grows warm, I open the windows, and sometimes a little talk from passersby floats in. On a winter’s day, I can hear snow landing on the windowpanes and flames muttering on the stove, tires hissing on the wet street, my cats shifting in their beds.
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