It's Oh So Quiet...

Riding my bike home from a friend's apartment tonight, I could hear only one thing: my own breath.

Okay, so maybe I'm not so fit. Maybe I do sound a little like a hyperventilating walrus when I pedal through the city center. I'll concede that. But the fact is that Copenhagen is revealing many sides of herself to me, and the most profound of these is that she is silent.

I mean silent like worship. I mean soft as snow. Muffled. Hushed. Riding my bike this evening, it was me, my walrus breathing, and the sound of this city -- the wind, the crystalline, almost gothic, cackle of leaves over cold streets... the nothing.

When I am in my apartment -- on the third floor -- I can hear the clip of a kick stand across the street. I can hear a car over cobblestones three blocks away. At three in the afternoon, I hear the children laughing as they come home from school; I hear church bells at six. In short, I can hear everything -- and nothing.

The peace is immense, almost painful, but this is not to say that nothing is happening. This is not the quiet of a small town on a Sunday evening. This is not the quiet of desertion. It's the quiet of Denmark. Of the Danes.

Copenhagen is a city packed with people, with bars and gatherings and a hundred thousand bicycles. And there are children -- so many tiny children! At the risk of seeming trite, they are undoubtably the happiest, most contented, quietest children I have ever seen. They put something in the water here; even the dogs are reticent and mild-mannered. I've yet to hear one bark.

But this is the funny thing. In a city where babies sleep noiselessly outside of genteel restaurants, a city where I might hear a petal plucked from the garden on my street, I am somehow ten times louder. I am American, hear me talk!

And talk. A lot. I can't seem to shut up. Whenever I meet someone new -- and this city is full of someones new -- even I am embarrassed as my lips move. I am helpless to stop them. What is it? Is it the fact that I am often alone? Is it that I don't speak the language, and am all too happy to exercise my own? Is it the very Danish silence that burdens me to break it?

I've been criticized for talking too much -- perhaps from the time I could talk. It's not so sad a quality of itself. I do it because it's sociable; I despise the awkward lull. I do it because I want you to feel comfortable. And I do it because I want you to understand.

But I've come to find that, with all of these words, I'm not saying much. I'm not saying all the things I thought I was saying. I am reverb; I am white noise. I am the sonic equivalent of a porno mag: all reveal and no revelation.

Then so, among the many lessons this city would teach me, perhaps I am listening. I'm getting that what I say is not the same as what I do. I get that what I do prevents me from learning who you are. And the revelation -- as sound as a breath over silent streets -- is that I very much want to hear it.

I want to hear it all.


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