In Pursuit of Silence Read Online Free PDF

you’re listening to headphones you don’t realize the volume. Continuing loud sounds put a stress on the auditory system because the middle-ear reflexes are constantly trying to protect you from them … If you’ve got a generally noisy environment, you don’t hear the twig snap. But really loud sounds are just going to knock you off your perch no matter how preoccupied you are.”

    In 1961, Dr. Samuel Rosen, a New York ear specialist, wanted to measure the hearing of a people who had not “become adjusted to the constant bombardment of modern mechanization.” Rosen went off to visit the Mabaan tribe, some 650 miles southeast of Khartoum, in what was then one of the most noise-free regions of Africa. The Mabaans were notable among their neighbors for having neither drums nor guns. He went armed with 1,000 bottle caps, which he planned to distribute to tribe members as rewards for their participation in audio tests: Mabaan women, he had heard, liked to fix the caps to their ears and make necklaces from them.
    Rosen discovered that the hearing of Mabaan tribe members at the age of seventy was often superior to that of Americans in their twenties. Some 53 percent of Mabaan villagers could discern sounds that only 2 percent of New Yorkers could hear. “Two Mabaans standing 300 feet apart, or the length of a footballfield, can carry on a conversation in a soft voice with their backs turned,” he reported. Rosen attributed the extraordinary preservation of hearing among the Mabaans to both their low-fat diet—which along with eliminating heart disease kept the cochlea well nourished—and the fact that they heard so little noise. The imbalance between noise and silence to which most of us who don’t live in remote tribal areas are subject dramatically accelerates the aging process of our hearing.
    Without having recourse to the hearing power of the Mabaans, there are still a few groups of people who use their ears in a manner consistent with the evolutionary pursuit of silence.

    When Jason Everman spearheaded the Third Infantry in the invasion of Iraq, he and his team were fitted with state-of-the-art noise-canceling headphones that had two radios, one internal and one external. He was never comfortable with them because of the auditory isolation they created. He always wanted to be, he said, “totally tuned in to the ambient sound.” Every noise a soldier hears on a special operation can be a clue to the situation he’s approaching. Everman didn’t want to miss a single auditory clue, and so he often just cupped one side of the headphones to his ear as he walked. He was also never comfortable with the modified Toyota trucks he and his team drove around in because, he said, “they were like an enclosed bubble, and if someone wanted to shoot at me, I wanted to hear it.”
    Everman has a certain sparkle in his light eyes and a beard that flows in great scrolls, making him appear rather like a better-groomed version of Santa Claus, if Santa Claus were given todying his hair ginger-gold and wearing exotic finger rings. He is listed as second guitarist on
Bleach
, Nirvana’s debut album. (Kurt Cobain later said that Everman didn’t actually play on the album but was credited as a thank-you gesture for having paid the $606.17 recording-session fee.) While he was in high school, Everman read Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, and resolved to make a project of developing the artist, warrior, and philosopher facets of his personality, in accordance with the Renaissance ideal. Having completed a stint as a grunge guitarist and service with the U.S. Airborne Rangers, he is now studying philosophy at Columbia University. Everman is not to be monkeyed with. When he met me at a dim SoHo wine bar, the slowness of his movements made me anxious. It was as though a big-game animal had wandered into a petting farm and might accelerate from zero to a throat-ripping sixty at a heartbeat.
    Silence, Everman told me, was at the crux