"Having
disciplined mind and body to quiescence, I must discipline them also to
activity. The senses must be used. For the ear, the most vital thing that can
be listened to here is silence. To bend the ear to silence is to discover how
seldom it is there. Always something moves. When the air is quite still, there
is always running water; and up here that is a sound that one can hardly lose,
though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the watercourses. But
now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening
to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It
is like a new element, and if water is still sounding with a low far-off
murmur, it is no more than the last edge of an element we are leaving, as the
last edge of land hangs on the mariner’s horizon."
from The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
written in the 1940s, first published 1977
2011 Edinburgh &
London, Canongate. [page 96]
