Fifty Days of Solitude Read Online Free PDF Page A

absolutist and believing, I think, that any break in the tapestry of silence would cause the whole plan, the unconditional experiment, to come undone.
    In the afternoon I worked for a while, keeping the fire going in the woodstove in the living room. Then I lay down under the afghan my daughter Elizabeth Cale had crocheted for me and finished The Bear . It is about a lonely woman, working in the isolation of an island in Northern Canada, who finds companionship and then love, yes, with a bear. I read the novel nearly twenty years ago for the New York Times Book Review and was impressed and startled by its originality. I had never heard of the Canadian writer Marian Engel, so I went to the Library of Congress and read her six previous novels, all in order to report that The Bear was unique among her writings.
    The other night I found the book again and reread it, to see how Lou, the librarian-researcher of early settlements in Canada, dealt with her time alone on Cary Island, alone except for the bear that had been chained up by the previous owner of the place behind the curious octagonal house Lou inhabited. At first she discovered she was listening to tiny sounds of small bird-feet in dry leaves, the river sucking at reeds and stones, the cracking of branches.
    But then she found herself “hating to disturb the precious felted silence” inside the house. “She filled the kettle, nervously scraping the dipper against the pail. She dressed and heard the tearing noises of her clothes. She stomped her shoes on and heard the laces whirring against each other as she tied them. She scraped the butter knife against her toast. Stirred her coffee with a jangling spoon. Not everyone, she thought, is fit to live with silence.”
    I had noticed the singular and disturbing effect of a little sound in a quiet house, especially a noise I did not anticipate. Sitting at the computer I jumped when I had to adjust the Velcro-fastened straps of my wrist band. Velcro is noisy, much louder than a zipper, totally unlike a button or hook and eye which make no sound at all. Closure with them, to use Engel’s good word, is felted. But Velcro: The arrangement of dense nylon hooks on one tape tears at the other one of nylon pile making a ripping noise that grated on my ear. It was not that I was not fit to live with silence, but rather that I was unprepared for its interruption.
    Perhaps the time would come when I could no longer bear it, after I had made an effort to spend hours without activating disturbances: doing a wash, rinsing the dishes, walking on the bare floor in heavy shoes. There was so much silence in my days that I had become aware of it only when a sound stopped: the refrigerator going off, the toilet ceasing to flush, the rain no longer falling on the steps. But I considered the possibility that quiet might become as oppressive as noise, that silence, unlike the harsh, unacceptable sounds that bounce off my ears like stones, could bring tears to my eyes and break my heart.
    B OOKS arrived, unbidden, in their hard brown mailers, unexpected titles I would never think to read if they were not delivered to my door, hopeful gifts from publishers who think I might recommend them to others. One day Maria Riva’s biography of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, came, a thick book (almost eight hundred pages) that vacillated between general admiration of the actress’s accomplishments, strong will, and creative skill at transforming herself into myth and legend and then particular dialogue that destroyed every bit of the celluloid vision we had all grown to revere.
    It took two full days of my hoarded time to read the book. I was fascinated by it all, despite the doubts about its veracity that crept in after the first hundred pages. Until then the evidence about Dietrich’s early career came from letters she wrote to her husband, entries she kept in her diary, and copies of letters from her lovers she sent on to her