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This is a good read. Will post another good one shortly. jm

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Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours

Observation and Silence

On a beautiful cool morning last July, Lars and I left behind all our usual work and chugged out of Gloucester harbor in Massachusetts on a fifty-foot fishing boat. There were about twenty of us aboard, all of us in high spirits .... in anticipation of what we were about to see. It was not the cormorants that flocked on the tiny island at the mouth of the harbor, or the reef of Norman's Woe where the Hesperus was wrecked, or the lighthouse on Eastern Point.

We noted all of these things with interest (the oldest paint factory in the country did not rouse us much), but none of them were what we had paid our fifteen dollars apiece to see. Lars had called the week before to inquire about the advertisement. Did they guarantee anything? No, that was impossible, but in the twenty trips made so far that summer they had seen them every time. We decided it was well worth risking the price of tickets if there was even an outside chance of seeing them: whales. Not captive in Marineland, not doing tricks in the zoo, but real live full-sized unbelievable wild whales out in the open Atlantic Ocean, free-swimming, God-glorifying giants of the deep.

Our on-board whale authority turned out to be a man of about twenty wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs, with a baseball cap clamped over his long hair. He stood up in front of us with a chart and proceeded to show us pictures of "the whales we'll be seeing."

Well, I thought, he sounds wonderfully confident. Will we be so fortunate as to see even one spout in the distance? Sometime after half-past nine, he assured us, we might begin to spot them. We would understand the lookout's directions if we imagined the boat as the face of a clock, its bow representing twelve o'clock, its stern six. He then explained that the whales most likely to be in the area were the humpback and the finback, each having a characteristic "blow." Whales, being mammals, breathe air. They surface every few minutes, exhale a great column of vapor (the finback's is twenty feet tall, straight up into the air), inhale in a split second, and then dive.

They do their mating in the area of the Dominican Republic in the wintertime but eat little then. In the summertime they come north and do most of their eating off the coast of Massachusetts, occasionally going as far north as Newfoundland, depending on where the food animals are swarming. Instead of teeth these two species of whale have what is called baleen, a double series of triangular horny plates on each side of the palate (as many as six hundred all together) which fray out into a sort of hairy fringe to form a sieve which filters out of the ocean's soup all the nourishing tidbits such as plankton, krills, copepods, herring, sardines, and copelin.

The most remarkable of the tidbits is a creature called a diatom. These microscopic machines behave in some ways like animals (they swim and dig) and in other ways like plants. Scientists cannot agree on how to classify them, but whales love them and they provide more food than any other living thing, nourishing not only whales but a variety of infinitely smaller creatures like krills (I confess I had never once wondered what krills ate). Diatoms come in several thousand species, in marvelous shapes (pinwheels, spirals, stars, triangles, chandeliers, discs, rods, ovals), and the largest of them measures a mere millimeter. A humpback whale consumes rather large helpings of diatoms, netting several hundred billion every few hours, taking in several tons of water with each gulp and straining these vast torrents through his baleen, as much as a million cubic meters of seawater a day.

Among our fellow passengers was a very large lady wearing a knit tank top and slacks which she filled to bursting. She had a shopping bag on what there was of a lap. We had not left our moorings before she had reached into the bag and switched on a radio, then began foraging for something to eat. Most of her crackers and bananas were gone, she had downed a Pepsi or two and inquired in vain if there was food to be bought, by the time the lookout cried, "Blow at eleven o'clock!'' We rushed to the bow in time to see a distant geyser. The captain made for the spot, and soon we saw the huge glistening back and dorsal fin of a humpback roll to the surface and heard the surprisingly powerful phooh from the blowhole before it vanished.

Within a short time we had sighted other spouts, other fins, and then, to our great excitement, the monstrous tail or fluke splendidly flashed clear of the water so that we could see its markings and the clinging barnacles.

"There's your fluke, now," the captain's assistant remarked laconically.

Our knowledgeable young man had described something he called a "bubble net" which he hoped we might see. A whale goes down about thirty feet, blows a twelve-foot circle of bubbles so that the surface of the sea turns effervescent turquoise. No one is quite sure why or how this works, but it seems to have the effect of confusing the small fish and other creatures so that they are "caught" in this net. About ten seconds elapse (the gulls have time to flock to the scene screaming, the eager watchers also scream and focus their eyes and cameras). Then, suddenly and awesomely, the whale's cavernous mouth explodes from below and swallows the "net" (and sometimes, the man said, an unwary seagull or two). We had seen perhaps three or four whales surface, blow, and disappear some dozens of times before the lookout shouted "Bubble at seven o'clock!" We raced to the stern, found a great green pool not many feet away, and held our breath as the enormous square warted snout of the humpback shot out of the water, the entire pool poured through the billowing mesh of baleen, and before we could blink in disbelief, the ocean was as faceless and empty as ever. I don't think anyone said a word unless it was "Wow. " There would have been complete silence if it hadn't been for the sound of the radio in the shopping bag.

The lookout called our attention some minutes later to what seemed to be a patch of dim, pale-green light moving smoothly alongside the boat, perhaps four or five feet beneath the surface. It was the gray sidepatch of the finwhale. If he had not pointed it out, our uneducated eyes would never have noticed it, for there was not the smallest ripple, there was not the least sign to indicate that a fifty-foot giant weighing some sixty tons was accompanying us.

The fat lady, I think, missed it. She was eating another banana. Not long after we had made this trip I received another of those letters from an aspiring writer. A young woman wrote, "I often yearn to be a writer but after reading books like yours, I feel that all the important things have already been said!''

They have indeed been said, and long before I said them. If a thing is true it is not new, but the truth needs to be said again and again, freshly for each generation. I have often been introduced to some seventeenth-or eighteenth-century writer by a nineteenth-century writer. If I quote what I learn from the ancients, a twentieth-century reader is sometimes helped when he would not by himself have found Crashaw's poem or St. Francis' prayer or St. Paul's Love chapter.

What of the twenty-first century? Which of the young people I know are now laying the groundwork for being the writers or artists or, as I like to think of any who show truth in any form, the prophets for my grandchildren's grandchildren?

I wrote to the young woman:

Don't give up that yearning. During these busy years while you take care of small children and give yourself to being a godly wife and mother, lay the firm footing on which good writing must be built. Read great books if you have time to read anything at all. Get rid of the junk that comes in the mail, eschew all magazines and newspapers if your reading time is limited, and by "hearing" the really great authors, learn the sound and cadence of good English.

There are two other things required of "prophets." Observation ("What do you see?" Ezekiel and John were asked) and silence. ("The word of the Lord came to me.") Obviously we (I, at least, and most others, I suppose) are not anything like the biblical prophets. Ours is a different assignment. But we are charged with the responsibility of telling the truth, and I don't see how this can possibly be done without opening our eyes to see and our ears to hear. There must, there simply must, be time and space allowed for silence and for solitude if what we see and hear is to be "processed."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of Wind, Sand, and Stars, said in a conversation with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, "The great of the earth are those who leave silence and solitude around themselves, their work and their life, and let it ripen of its own accord."

If any of the crowd we saw fishing from a breakwater as our boat entered Gloucester harbor again are among the "great of the earth," it will be against terrible odds. They, like the lady on board, were also listening to a shrieking radio.

ln the cry of gulls, in the blow of a whale, in the very stillness of an early morning, it seems to me, we are more likely to hear the Lord's quiet word.

Speak, Lord, in the stillness,
While I wait on Thee.
Hushed my heart to listen
In expectancy.

Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours

Thinking

Question-and-answer is a vanishing art. We are so drowned and smothered and deafened by panels, dialogues, rap sessions, discussions, talk shows, and other such exercises in the pooling of ignorance that, far from developing the art of asking questions and giving answers, we have very nearly lost it altogether.

The time allotted for a program must, it seems, be filled--it doesn't much matter with what. When is the last time you heard a clear, short question asked and a straight answer given? My heart sinks when it is announced that, following the lecture, there will be time for discussion. People put up their hands, but it turns out that it is not information they are after at all. They want the floor. They go on and on.

I was one of the panel of experts (i.e., married women) discussing the subject of marriage in a college women's dormitory a few years ago. Afterward there were lots of questions. But it was hard to figure out just what the questions were. Here is one of them (verbatim--I did not make this up. It was taped and then transcribed):

Um--like--um--I have a couple questions. Do you think--like--that--uh--do you think a woman could have a call just to be--like--a wife, but not--like--not just to be a wife--like, say, you know--if you're gonna be personal--like--my own engagement--like--I have a gift of--you know--a talent in music, you know--like--I mean, I know you're not saying--like--you know, especially in that case, I mean, you're saying more like--you have--like ....

(I apologize for not knowing the rules of punctuation for this kind of English.) Nobody on the panel knew what the girl was asking. She was confused--that came through loud and clear, but she might have seen through some of the fog simply by making the effort to clarify and shorten her question.

Sometimes I have been tempted to tell the audience that only questions of twenty-five words or less will be entertained. But I don't want to put people off any more than I can help.

William Strunk, Jr., in his wonderful little book, The Elements of Style, gives this advice:

To air one's views at an improper time may be in bad taste. If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at cats... Bear in mind that your opinion of cats was not sought, only your services as a speaker. Try to keep things straight.

Americans dearly love to be polled for opinion. They feel that they ought to have opinions, to "hold views," on everything, and polls give them a chance to let fly. It is interesting to note how small a percentage of those polled admit to having "No opinion."

If the answer is Yes, say Yes. If it's No, say No. (The Bible will back me up here.) If it's I don't know, say that--if you possibly can. My daughter had a classmate in the seventh grade who, when asked a question by the teacher, never raised his chin off his hand, but looking into space said glumly, "I don't know." To a second question he replied, in the same laconic tone, "I don't know that either." I couldn't help wanting to know which boy that was. I liked him. It was discouraging for the teacher, I'm sure, that he didn't know, but it was not nearly so discouraging to hear him say so in three words as it would have been to hear three hundred words which came to the same thing. Every day in the mass media we have to listen to palaver, twaddle, and balderdash which, when interpreted, means "I don't know."

Some people are constitutionally incapable of admitting they don't know. "Well, let's just say I don't know the answer to that one," a woman once said to me.

Great people, however, can often disarm us completely with a candid acknowledgment such as Samuel Johnson's when asked by an indignant woman whatever made him define pastern as he did in his lexicon. "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance!"

The Quechua Indians of Ecuador have a way of dropping the corners of their mouths, thrusting out their chins, and gazing off across the treetops, saying "Hmm hmm?" which is supposed to convey the impression that the matter is a mysterious one which they are in on but which would really be beyond you. At other times they come up with ineluctable answers like the one a missionary got when he wanted to know the name of a tree with yellow flowers on it. The Indian studied the tree for a little while, shading his eyes with his hand, and then said earnestly, "Well, I'll tell you, Senor Eduardo. That tree over there, the one you point to, the tree with the yellow flowers on it--that tree, Senor Eduardo...we call The Yellow Flower Tree."

The late W. H. Auden once appeared on a television interview and it was delicious to see his interviewers thrown completely off balance by the clarity and the brevity of his answers. They had their questions carefully worked out and the timing approximated, but long before the show was over they were casting about for new questions. When they asked if he thought of poetry as a means of self-expression, he said, "No, not at all. You write a poem because you have seen something which seems worth sharing with others." The ideal reaction from the reader is, 'I knew that all along, but I never realized it.' He could, I am sure, have lectured for an hour on that one subject, but he didn't. He had a sense of occasion.

"You will be living in Oxford, England, Mr. Auden. Do you expect to be teaching there?"

"No."

"You won't be teaching. (Pause.) Well, Mr. Auden, as you move into the more--shall we say--mellow years, would you say that you have any unfulfilled ambitions?"

"No."

One of my unfulfilled ambitions was to hear a simple answer on a TV talk show. Thank you, Mr. Auden.