* Listen Far – spend 5 minutes in an undistracted setting. Park bench, your apartment, or a street corner. Listen. Listen to the faintest sound you can hear. Now try to listen beyond that sound.
Bobst Library, Second Floor — seated at a table facing away from the central lobby. My ears are toward the reference area where students are typing.
Immediately above my head, the HVAC system rumbles.
I hear the electronic ding of the lobby elevator out in the central lobby. It reverberates briefly against the smooth tiled surface of the lobby floor. I am seated in a carpeted area, so the sounds immediately around me are muffled.
A door slams (“guuuhm”) in the distance and its echo lingers in the lobby area.
I hear light female footsteps, the sharp attack of boot heels against the tile ringed with bright reverberation. They approach and become slightly muffled on carpet. They come up the stairs located behind me then continue further up until my listening is interrupted by someone whistling a melody out in the lobby. I presume it’s the lobby by the reverberation.
As I look over my left shoulder, I see a young woman typing at a Macintosh computer. I can hear the faint mechanical clacking of the keys from her keyboard even at a distance of 50 feet. I wonder if I can hear anything beyond the sounds of her typing. Can I hear her shift in her chair?
She doesn’t move.
I wonder what my experience would be like if I could hear the whirring of the hard drive in the computer in front of her.
A pen falls (“taakkkk”) onto the surface of a desk in front of me and my focus changes.
I’m aware of the difference in frequency responses between my right and left ears. Last semester, a large mass of wax built up inside my right ear. It’s starting to happen again. The high frequencies are not as bright in my right ear as they are in my left. It’s time to start using the Murine again to loosen the wax.
A sneeze echoes from the lobby.
How deafening the world would be if louder if I could hear the hard drives spinning — the rustle of clothing — the scratch of pen or pencil against paper… What if the lowest frequencies were perceptable — the atoms in the objects at rest: books, maybe still echoing with the sound of the typesetting equipment that deposited the ink upon their pages.
Then I would be listening deeply and I would understand.