Quiet

"It occurred to me around dusk
after I had lit three candles
and was pouring myself a glass of wine
that I had not uttered a word to a soul all day."

-- Billy Collins, "Quiet" in Ballistics: Poems


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Read the full poem here. Preview the book here:

The whole book is great--each poem, too. For what it's worth, my favorites are "August in Paris," "Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles," "The Four-Moon Planet," "The Poems of Others," "Quiet," "Tension," "(detail)," "Baby Listening," and "The Great American Poem."

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Just as I was starting an episode of The Wire, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pushed Pause and then Talk. "I've just had a really crummy day," said a friend, who then asked if we could meet somewhere, a coffee shop, maybe. "Absolutely," I said, and suggested the café on the second floor of a Barnes & Noble nearby. We met and read--aloud in the bookstore café--a Dryden poem, "Religio Laici," while close by a group of middle-aged students recited Italian around a book-covered table and laughed at mispronunciations.

She picked the poem because of the day she'd had: the rigors of graduate school are getting to her. We read it taking turns, stopping arbitrarily after stanzas and spinning the old blue hardcover book around. I'm not usually one to read Dryden (or any Reformation poets) aloud, preferring the Elizabethans or modern Americans with that wonderful emphasis on how this stuff sounds, but this one surprised me. I found myself muttering, "Mm," after certain phrases, marveling at those intellectual rhymes.

Also talked about Orthodoxy (of course), and Thornton Wilder and the final scene from Our Town. (See? Bookstore conversations are never a bad decision.) During our talking I asked how old she was.

"Twenty-four," she said, and then I said,

"Huh, I'll be twenty-four this Mother's Day."

"Enjoy it," she said. "It's a good age. It's the last year that you're officially 'in your early twenties.'"

Which, naturally, gave me some pause.

She's a grad student; I'm a working, acting stiff. It's strange to feel so removed from school after only two years. Last night I realized that I could have easily been the one calling a friend in the evening after a crummy day of grad school.

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Before all that, I read aloud the entirety of Billy Collins' book. Not a huge achievement--only 110 pages with plenty of white space--but it was still good to do. I can't remember the last book I finished in a single sitting. Let alone, out loud.

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Still working on the Mark Twain show. The rub is that entertaining 400 kids for 45 minutes while reading 150-year-old stories seems so daunting. I scoured the bookshelf at work (mostly anthologies of plays and non-pertinent books about how to act) for inspiration and came upon a sort of textbook called Storyteller, by Ramon Royal Ross, which I had picked up for 25 cents--or less--at a recent library book sale. I scanned the contents and flipped to the last chapter, entitled "Ten. Reading Aloud."

Ross writes:

The oral interpreter has three duties. The first is to the author; and the duty here is to do more than simply read the words without mumbling... The second duty is to the audience, and for them the reader provides not only entertainment but also understanding and excitement--a sense of the meaning of the selection in their lives. Finally, the reader must be faithful to himself. He must choose literature that has relevance to his own experience... He creates, in his reading, a bond between himself, the audience, and the author.

With its lively adventures and youthful narrator, Treasure Island, like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has found its primary audience among children...

And if you are a teacher... I remember, as a boy, coming in from lunch recess at Springdale School and listening to my teacher read to us from Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Under the spell of those words, stained plaster walls and a blackened wooden floor changed and grew into a deep forest, with the broad Mississippi flowing by...

There's no question that books, carefully chosen, shared throughout the years, create worlds in the classroom that would otherwise be impossible to reach... So, read aloud. Read to your children for a half-hour each day. Read only the finest, for you send a signal with what you read. Read poems. Read long, difficult books--books they'd not read themselves. Read portions of books--"book bait"--to hook potential readers. And after you've finished reading, leave the book in the classroom where it can be read again. And again.

I don't know whether to feel more inspired or intimidated--though the best intimidations always inspire us. This Mark Twain show is going to be comprised of "book bait" (what a wonderful phrase), and so the challenge turns from deciding the format of the show to picking worthy excerpts.

What, then, from Tom Sawyer? The first chapter is dynamic but only involves three characters seriously; the fence-painting scene is popular; the pirate section ought to get a few laughs. Doing the graveyard scene would probably get me into trouble.

But if I was worried about trouble, wouldn't I steer clear of Huckleberry altogether? I've already decided to replace all N-words with "slave," because for the most part it gets the point across without risking offense. Twain would roll his eyes or punch me in the face for this, but you have to pick your battles.

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Orthodox pray frequently for a "peaceful, quiet, sinless Christian ending to this life," but from what I've seen this is generally how they would like to live, too: in serenity, quietude. It's a very different view--one concerned with privacy and humility--from the evangelical pomp I grew up in.

How many times was I told to "take it to the streets," "shout it from the rooftops," or "praise him with your lungs or the rocks will cry out"? This, of course, translates to a number of things which have become stereotypes of young American Christians: in-your-face, on-the-street evangelism; tracts left on public toilets; asking strangers the infamous questions, "Would you like to be born again?" and, "Have you asked Jesus into your heart?" and, "Are you going to hell?"; altar calls with syrupy keyboard underscoring; electric guitars and full drum sets during praise-and-worship (at one church I remember the praise leader switching guitars and taking solos during a single song); and a kind of motivational-speaker approach to church sermons (wireless ear microphones, stylish but conservative attire, canned gestures) that I can't let myself abide any more. I'm not judging it; the proper attitude would be to say, simply, that God is surely at work there, too; but it's not for me. I doubt it ever was.

Give me, instead, a peaceful, quiet, sinless Christian life. Or, at least, as close to it as is possible in a world of war, chaos, and guilt. Let me light a candle, kneel in the corner, and pray.

That being said, telling stories aloud is something I love to do--on a stage, in a bar, at a coffee shop. The quiet of life contrasts with the loudness of fake-life. The arts of language and theatre have always been fused, for what is a silent language but bird tracks on a page, and what is a wordless theatre but an incomplete spectacle?

I will not say the silence exists for the noise; I think it's the other way around. We please the ears to make the silence deafen. We play at life to make reality better, and we pray aloud for the quiet life.

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And now, back to Twain.