Silence has become a rare currency. Noise, everywhere, leads us. Through her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand draws us into the rustling of silence, a balm for our bodies and minds in these noisy times, a common good to cherish and protect. Last of eight articles.
I had arranged to meet him at the day bar on Magpie beach. In June, in these latitudes, the night begins to dissipate at 3:30 a.m. But “beauty awakens”*(1). He is waiting for me dressed in his expedition clothes. I am dealing with a pro. I am more in city clothes. No matter, the canoe will carry us both on a calm sea.
Gabriel Rondeau, 25, lives in Magpie, a microvillage located between Sept-Îles and Havre-Saint-Pierre, bathed by the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He has just returned from a fascinating canoe expedition to the heart of the Quebec-Labrador peninsula, where he was inspired by the Travel Journal and maps drawn by explorer Louis Babel in the same watersheds in 1866. A young man following in the footsteps of another, a century and a half apart. But a young man from 2024 teaming up with three fellow explorers, the quartet equipped with a drone and two cameras. “My mother and my girlfriend followed me using geolocation technology.” Times change, of course, but not the challenge. A perilous journey that, in all eras, few humans, both non-native and indigenous, have faced.
Kneeling in the bottom of our gondola, Gabriel’s movements are sure, slow and silent. The oar goes in and out of the water without encountering the slightest resistance. The blinding fireball follows our boat. As well as a cloud of small black flies. Well, you can’t have it all: all the beauty in the world and no mosquitoes!
Crystal Morning
At the front of the canoe, a little bubbling: a sea trout? Or wriggling sand eels? More like sand eels. To be honest, I am suffocated by so much splendor on this crystal morning. We are moving forward in the middle of an amphitheater-like landscape. It’s crazy, I’m thinking of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus below the Acropolis of Athens that I saw a short while ago. The village of Magpie above forms the stands. The bay is a sapphire blue stage on which gulls declaim and loons dance. The clouds applaud wildly.
My oarsman explains things to me, I listen a little distractedly, I confess, finding myself in a sort of stupor, totally absorbed by what I see. Seeing and hearing at the same time sometimes seems impossible to me. Not gifted.
Windless morning. We move away from the shore a little to escape the mosquitoes. My thoughts float, scattered, unexpected. The silence of the sea. One of the most beautiful things I have ever read. A short story, published under the counter in 1942 during the German occupation of France by Jean Bruller, known as Vercors. The silence of the seawhich, moreover, has little to do with the sea. A niece and her uncle, whose house has been requisitioned to shelter a German officer, decide to impose absolute silence on him, to make him non-existent. “The silence continued. It became thicker and thicker, like morning fog. Thick and still.” The officer does everything he can to make himself amiable, but nothing works. The tension builds and builds, soon becoming unbearable. Unable to stand it any longer, the officer asks to be transferred. This news became the symbol of intellectual resistance to the occupation.
Back to the canoe. Suddenly, a few meters away, two moyacs, the name given in eastern Quebec and Acadia to common eiders. An advance guard that soon announces about fifteen males in their elegant black and white plumage, heads speckled with pale green, all cut out like a polychrome painting by the Quebec painter Fernand Leduc. Our presence scares them. They run away. The most beautiful things are often the most fleeting. Look, like a heady smell, of roses, forest or sea. The first breath is paroxysmal. The following ones decrease in intensity. The more we persist, the more the scent fades.
It is little known that the Duvetnor Company, from Quebec, harvests each spring, in accordance with a very strict protocol endorsed by the federal government, a portion of the down from the eider ducks that nest on the islands of the Lower St. Lawrence, a rare place in the world where this practice still exists. The down, from females that pluck plumules from their breasts to line the nest, is used to make duvets and outdoor clothing.
Silence, a privilege of the rich?
The canoe licks the light. My paddler continues his movements with grace. My mind is running away again. In Magpie and in the countryside, silence and natural sounds, those of the wind, trees, birds, are certainly more accessible. But in an urban environment, these elements increasingly appear as privileges of the rich, luxury products and new factors of social segregation. This is the point of Christian Hugonnet, an acoustic engineer, in a France Culture documentary. “The wealthiest populations buy good natural sound. Sound is not the same for everyone.” “We can say,” he continues, “that there is noise for the poor and silence and/or good sound for the rich.” *(2)
Recently, Dany Laferrière told Radio-Canada host Anne-Marie Dussault that what struck him when he moved to Montreal was the silence, because he came, he said, from a poor and therefore noisy country. “I usually say that in Haiti, the rich, a very small minority, bought the silence,” the writer told me. “You only have to look at their big houses surrounded by high walls. In Port-au-Prince, 11% of the population occupies 33% of the territory. » In the same vein, it is interesting to note that Zurich, the largest city in Switzerland, is considered the quietest in Europe, but also one of the richest in the world, home to nearly 100,000 millionaires out of a population of 400,000!*(3) Finally, closer to home, it is probably fair to think that the sound environment and noise from the neighbourhood are less exhausting in the Plateau-Mont-Royal district than in Côte-des-Neiges in Montreal, or in the Sainte-Foy district than in Saint-Sauveur in Quebec City. And silence often goes hand in hand with trees and greenery. There seems to be a correlation, in cities, between income level and the level of calm, silence and greenery.
A privilege of maturity?
Back on Magpie Bay. The light flutters around our boat as it cuts through the flat sea, trailing a constellation of golden drops in its wake. Gabriel rows methodically. We pass rocks that drop sheer into the sea. A shiny moss, adhering to the rock face, indicates the line of the highest tide.
Why, as life carries us along, does silence seem to become more precious? Could it be a privilege of maturity? Once the trance of feverish music, frenetic rhythms, and our wild youth has passed, could silence be a more discreet state of plenitude, the enchantment of pink mornings and blue evenings? I think of the beautiful verses of Paul Valéry: “Each atom of silence / Is the chance of a ripe fruit.”*(4)
Engrossed in my marine delight, I do not see, or barely see, the curtain of small biting creatures that assail me. I will see them tomorrow when I run to the pharmacy, itching all over.
For the moment, I am occupied only with the sea, “an immobile wonder spread out to the edges of the sky” *(5). I speak only to silence. And I believe it answers me.
*(1) With the fairiesstory by Sylvain Tesson, 2024
*(2) Silence for the rich, noise for the poor? documentary from France Culture, 2020
*(3) World’s Wealthiest Cities Report 2023by the firm Henley & Partners
*(4) “Palme”, poem by Paul Valéry, published in Charms1922
*(5) Ocean scrapersstory of Anita Conti, first French oceanographer, republished in 2017