In Pursuit of Silence (37 page)

By and large, the unabashed noise lovers I met seemed to me to be exactly as barbaric as was the greater society in which we mostly live today. That’s to say, as barbaric as we choose to make them out to be, leaving aside aspects of their character we elect not to listen for because they squelch our caricature. If we use affinity for noise as a criterion for judging a person’s degree of civilization, there’s no great distinction between the erstwhile Boom THUG bumping down the streets of Bed-Stuy and the well-coutured young professional commuting to the gym with her personal sound device pumped to bump her own brain cells. The us-or-them divide doesn’t hold. We may feel that all the noise of the age is simply too much and that we must either make an all-out assault against it or retreat into our own personal version of the monastery. Or we may determine that in the crisscrossing nuances of the dilemma there are unexpected opportunities.

My last lesson in the unpredictable interplay between noise and silence occurred in connection with worms. Inside a neurobiology laboratory, I saw how easy it was to reawaken our wonder at listening to what only becomes audible when the world quiets down.

In a famous passage from
The Origin of Species
, Darwin writes:
“It may metaphorically
be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are
good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.”
Darwin makes the silent
evolutionary process itself the supreme agent of differentiation and, in the action of distinguishing, of the amelioration of the world.

Darwin also had a keen ear for the contradictions that accompany noise and silence. While exploring the coast of Brazil, Darwin wrote of how
“a most paradoxical mixture
of sound and silence pervades the shady part of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud, that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign.” Darwin knew that these paradoxes are never more poignant than when they’re manifest in human nature. In his autobiography, he recounts an amusing story of a dinner he had with Thomas Carlyle, of the not-so-soundproof study. Carlyle, Darwin wrote,
“silenced every one
by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence.”

One of Darwin’s great heroes in the epic of natural selection is the worm. The supremely unprepossessing worm that turns the soil in silence, sifting and reconstituting the earth’s composition as a by-product of its own digestive process, Darwin found emblematic of the way all work ought to be performed. The worm has neither the capacity nor need to make a noise about its achievement. And while its stature could not be more lowly, its accomplishment outstrips that of the most cultivated farmer. Darwin writes,
“The agriculturist in ploughing
the ground follows a method strictly natural; he only imitates in a rude manner … the
work which nature is daily performing by the agency of the earthworm.”

The worms I chose to look at were members of the nematode species graced with a Latin name that means “ancient, elegant rod.” At one millimeter in length,
Caenorhabditis elegans
is even tinier and lowlier than the earthworm. Yet when it was selected as genetic research subjects in the late 1960s, the dream was that this little creature would enable us to understand the entire nervous system. Scientists believed that if you could characterize its every neuron, discover their locations and the neurotransmitters they use, all the secrets of the human brains would be revealed. It hasn’t quite worked out this way. But the revelations provided by the worms are still legion. The first complete genome of a multicellular organism to be sequenced belonged to
C. elegans
. And today some of the most important research into RNA transpires through their simple bodies. No less than the service of astronaut Suni Williams, whom I had sought out at the beginning of my research for her insights into the noiseless depths of outer space, the service of the nematodes struck me as worthy of a moment of silent observation.

I had another motive, as well, for visiting a laboratory. Based on a few remarks by a scientist friend about the long hours of ascetic observation in her lab, I’d conceived a notion of the laboratory as a contemporary version of the monastery. I pictured rows of people bent over their microscopes, scrutinizing the minutiae of life’s genetic coding in an atmosphere of rapt concentration
that evoked the silent Cistercians hunched over holy writ.

Thus, one summer afternoon, I traveled uptown to the brown monolith of the Hammer Building on West 168th Street,
where I met a friend
who used to work in a neurobiology lab there.

We entered a large, fluorescent-lit room lined with black counters and high white shelves crammed with orange-capped glass bottles, microscopes, stacks of petri dishes, sleek instruments, and fat dark files. A number of researchers were hard at work in the space.

They were not, however, all quietly bent over their microscopes. Rather, most were talking intently in pairs and trios. Claire Benard, the high-spirited principal lab assistant, told me right off that
she would be
years
farther along in her research were it not for the noise-related distractions of the lab—if she’d been able to work in solitude instead of being constantly interrupted by colleagues, centrifuges, freezer mechanisms, fans, and the popping hiss of the giant worm sorter. When she needed to concentrate, she told me, she wore state-of-the-art noise-cancellation headphones.

I thought it actually seemed pretty quiet in the room. The people engaged in conversation were speaking softly. There was no background music; no big machines were running. But I’d been disabused of my laboratory-monastery analogy. And with a sense that I’d again gone off into the world in pursuit of silence only to find another strain of noise, I asked to be taken around the corner to the darkened room where I was to look through a
high-power microscope at the worms, whose neurons, I learned, had been grafted with luminescent jellyfish genes to illuminate them.

I took my seat before a big white Zeiss. My friend adjusted the focus and turned to Benard to continue a conversation they’d begun in the corridor. I bowed my eyes to the stereoscopic viewfinder, and suddenly I was transported. The worms, inlaid with soft emerald glows, swirling microscopic cosmos, took my breath away. Inside their bodies floated nebulae of pale green (the neurons) and tiny, hard bright glitterings (“gut granules”), little accumulations of fat crucial for the worms’ survival. I watched a pair of worms tie themselves into a sailor’s manual of knots. The circle within my viewfinder became an upside-down planetarium, presenting constellations in motion—the birth and destruction of galaxies; hieroglyphics raveling and unraveling—pricked with fiery cat eyes.

I don’t know how long it was before I realized that, while I hadn’t given a thought to the silence of the worms’ labors, I’d lost all consciousness of the ventilator above me, and even of the voices of my friends. They were just gone—vacuumed into the intensity of this vision. The composer John Cage wrote:
“There is no such thing
as an empty space, or an empty time … try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” Yet the reverse is also true. Sometimes, try as we may to make noise, we cannot. Just as the moment of quiet when ground control cut out enabled astronaut Williams to see the depths of space, the fathomless sight of these blurring emerald stars and filigrees of light had created silence everywhere.

I finally managed to lift my eyes, but words still failed me.

Benard smiled. “Yes … It’s beautiful.
This
keeps me going—still.”

We wandered back to the main room of the laboratory. And there, another extraordinary thing happened.

As we entered, one of the scientists lifted a petri dish, opened it, brought it down on the counter with a hard click, and slid it closer to her microscope.

“That sound!” my friend laughed, remarking how it brought back memories of her years at the lab. She picked up another dish—they resemble big round eyeglass lenses—and repeated the motion, unscrewing it and bringing it down: a hard
tick
, followed by a cool
crissing
scrape.

Another researcher was using a device that looked like a thick pen to lift tiny plastic vials, release drops of liquid from them onto a slide, then eject the vials into a bin.

“Do you hear that?” Benard smiled. “That sound of the tip releasing—it’s like a camera shutter.” I listened harder as she replicated the gentle, split-second whir. Benard added that one of her favorite sounds of the lab—though she felt awful admitting it—was the sound made when you burn a worm. The scientists have to do it, she explained. “If we pick up a larva, say, when we’re trying to get a group of hermaphrodites …”

My friend turned up the flame on a small Bunsen burner. “I like the burner sound too,” she said. She turned it high. It crackled like a bonsai fireplace. Benard lifted a long, thin needle and danced it in the flame until it glowed. Then she dipped it into the gel on a petri dish until she’d plucked a worm. She brought that
over the flame and I heard a faint, fleeting,
kihh
amidst the fire noise. “I don’t know why—I love that sound.” Benard laughed.

Luisa Cochella, a woman at the counter behind us, abruptly remarked that she loved the sound of “chunking.” Chunking involves cutting out a tiny slab of gel to replenish the food on a petri dish. She demonstrated the process, heating a tiny, thin silver spatula over a flame, then lowering its blade into the gel. As the hot spatula hit the gel, the two substances made a delicate squeezy-kiss. Cochella’s eyes lit up and she laughed.

“And then of course there’s this noise.” My friend lifted a glass slide, then neatly tossed it into a red bin where it struck a mound of other discarded slides with a sharp
ting
. She did it again. This time the
ting
mixed with
crunnch
.

Suddenly different people at work around the room began entering into the play, pressing different sounds on me. I hadn’t sought out this strange, enchanting hear-and-tell. It hadn’t occurred to me to do so, but one after the next they came. And after each noise, the scientists would ask, “Hear that? Do you hear?,” repeating the actions that made their favorite sounds with infectious delight.

The laboratory wasn’t silent the way a monastery is silent. Yet it was quiet enough for the people working there to take the aural temperature of where they were. To hear and savor a great deal that might easily have been lost. These were the subtle sounds that picked out the hours for them—little noises that opened vast networks of association, like the constellations of neurons glowing through the bodies of the worms. Listening to these sounds was at once the recreation and reminder of the substance of their day.