The Other Side of Silence; What Sounded Appealing Regardless of its Horror

French retreat from Russia in 1812; 1874. Painted by Illarion Mikhailovich Pryanishnikov; Tret'yakov Gallery in Moscow

By Joan L. Cannon

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” George Elliot, Middlemarch.

Early in our lives, most of us are taut with eagerness to vibrate in unison with every sensation we find available. A few unlucky souls are oblivious. Those most observant, most open to subtlety, most susceptible to resonances with emotion become artists. The second tier of sensitivity allows for appreciation by the rest of us for what those elect produce.

As time passes, those less hardy understand better what George Elliot meant about “dying of the roar on the other side of silence.” In a world so full of fast communication and visual images, the test of survival (psychic and emotional) is often the ability to withstand the worst, even though it doesn’t happen to you.

As a teenager, I read whatever was recommended or what sounded appealing regardless of its horror, and managed only occasional nightmares. In a single summer I made my way through War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Anna Karenina, The Robe, and more. Those books were Book-of-the-Month Club selections on my aunt’s shelves.

Later I watched the movie Gone with the Wind, and suddenly the gripping scenes of the wounded in Atlanta, for instance, were no longer confined to what my imagination could conjure. I read All Quiet on the Western Front, The Moon is Down, Journey’s End. After a childhood surrounded by the knights of the Round Table, the exploits of Greek heroes, biblical warriors, I began to have a dawning realization of the difference between literary and artistic war and the real thing. By 1939, I couldn’t have escaped it if I’d tried.

I have several friends who have joined the general rave about the movie War Horse. Some wonder that I won’t watch it. As I’ve grown older, I’ve discovered that my tolerance for a lot of reality has diminished in inverse order to the number of years I’ve lived. I no longer find it necessary to keep up with experiences I doubt I can withstand without paying an emotional price I’m afraid is too high.

There’s no doubt I’m a coward, both physical and emotional. The things we all manage because we have no choice are beginning to seem like all I can take. I don’t need to subject myself deliberately to things that will be too easy to imagine far too accurately. So I won’t watch what horses went through (not to mention men and mules and farm animals and civilians) in World War I because I don’t have to.

Since I’m not alone in my love of mystery writers who combine puzzles with penetrating characterizations and engrossing settings, I frequently find myself watching or reading about terrible things — acts of depravity or cruelty that in some strange way fail to make me shrink from them. Probably this is simply evidence of the almost endless human capacity for self-delusion. There’s an invisible switch somewhere that signifies what my conscience must or may not respond to. Without a conscious decision, I’m able to become immersed in the story for itself so long as there’s a hope of some sort of redemption.

The corollary to this understanding is the question of whether that hypocrisy, callousness, failure of imagination become ingrained in the young before they know how so much as even to wonder whether there’s a difference between fact and fantasy. Yet another doomsday question about the future.

Are we in a time when we forget that the silence at the end of a disaster of whatever kind hides a roar that only saints and philosophers have the stomach for?

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The Other Side of Silence; What Sounded Appealing Regardless of its Horror

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