THIRD EAR

A gentle essay on the world’s soundscapes, many of which often go unheard.

An elephant, writes novelist Rosner, gestates with its feet next to the lining of its mother’s womb, receiving information “at infrasonic levels inaccessible to our ears.” When it emerges, it listens with its feet as well as its ears. Human babies hear high-frequency sounds much more clearly than do adults, which adults accommodate by heightening their vocal pitch when talking to them, which in turn “makes babies feel safe.” And who knew that a baby’s babbling might be a “way of processing stress”? Well, babies have plenty to be stressed about, and so too adults, one reason why it’s restful to read of Rosner’s immersion in a placid sea surrounded by a pod of chattering dolphins. She writes that she first became aware of the meanings of both words and silence in the speech of her multilingual parents, survivors of the Holocaust, who cloaked sensitive discussions in languages inaccessible to their children’s ears. “Maybe this prepared me for a life of eavesdropping on the world, listening with all of my senses, reaching toward sources of interconnection,” she writes. Without ever losing coherence, her narrative skips around to many topics: on one page she’s writing of the linguistic abilities of a beloved dog, which she’s convinced could pick out her toys by name, while on another she recalls a culture more revealed by a Cheyenne writer who would not “jump in” to a conversation, but instead waited to be invited to enter it, understanding that, that way, she would be heard. Horse whispering, telephones for calling the dearly departed, the terror of hearing loss in old age, “the holiness of birdsong”: This is a book packed with perceptions and revelations.

Science and art meet in this eloquent study of the aural world around us.