That day I expected a routine appointment, when Dr Euleman told me he’d shared my file with another specialist and confirmed his hunch: a new type of surgery was almost sure to give me normal hearing. I was dazed. That inscrutable dimension called sound could now intersect my world!
Dr Euleman put me in touch with someone who’d undergone the same procedure a year before. To Ralf, at first, sound was but a disconcerting intrusion. He found that relating sounds to movements greatly helped to make sense of the new chaos, so he started attending concerts - “where people sit in silence only to admire other people whose gestures produce beautiful, carefully crafted sounds,” as he put it.
Ralf was fascinated by Beethoven’s life, so contrary to his own: devoted to sound from the start, then forcefully plunged into silence.
“Those four movements were like sentences written by a god and carefully translated by the composer to be intelligible by people,” he said of the first symphony he listened to. “Four sentences each with as many meanings as combinations of musicians playing them. A divine paragraph that takes us seventy minutes to grasp even barely.”
In the end I decided against the surgery. Whatever my world of silence is in contrast to something I don’t know, I like it. But from Ralf I learned that true beauty takes time to take in. So I let the things I enjoy be my symphonies.
(Contribuição para um desafio do Global Writing & Storytelling Group do Internations em Maio de 2022.)