Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [31]
At any rate, now that she had begun to see the breadth of possibilities the cooking craft offered, household tension evaporated. The domestic dungeon burst its bonds, and Mary the artiste stepped forth.
One thing continued to gnaw at me, however. It seemed a pity to throw out Mary’s delicacies after only one tasting. And our decision to forgo electricity still constrained us from sticking food in the ol’ fridge. But at some point—maybe it was after our third or fourth food-spoilage discussion—a bell went off in my head.
Because of the failure of the ram, I was still pumping water from the cistern by hand. Tall buckets of it lined the kitchen wall, ready to be used to take a bath or flush the toilet. All that water sat there with nothing better to do than leak its fifty-five-degree coolness into the atmosphere.
The next chance I got, I placed Mary’s food in glass jars and submerged them in the buckets using rocks to keep them under. The food lasted until the next day.
Bit by bit we were regaining skills of daily living that technology had taken from us.
Seven
The Sounds of Silence
Beginners though we were, I venture to say that over time we proved Nate wrong. The number of steps we took forward exceeded the backwards ones by a ratio surely greater than eight to seven, or even two to one. But whether we made progress or not on a given day, one thing was certain: the day would come to an end. Here was reward to struggles of all kinds—their simple cessation. Yet just as there was more to work than labor, there was more to rest than the absence of work.
When the dishes were done and daylight began to ebb, Mary and I would sink into the two easy chairs the Millers had placed for us in the living room and allow our muscles to uncoil. No after-dinner cordial could surpass this lovely wash of endorphins streaming out through our limbs. Light would drain from the space until little remained but a gray gauze. At the flick of a match, the house lights would come on, and then the music would begin.
At first the sound blended in with the general lushness of dusk, and we unthinkingly reclined in it as we did upon our chairs. Gradually becoming more distinct, then, through the tall open windows and the proscenium formed by the columns of the front porch, it would roll in and wash over us, wave after audible wave. Soon we would be tingling crown to toe in a sympathetic vibration as if our bodies were musical instruments themselves (which in a sense they were). Hundreds of unseen, unpaid fiddlers were bending to their nightly duty.
Almost as soon as we took note, the music would break off. Crack! Nothing. Perhaps a twig had snapped, or some hacker back in the seconds had skipped a beat, throwing off the timing and triggering confusion among the players. Or perhaps they had somehow become aware that they were being heard. Whatever the cause, the music stopped. A lone owl could be heard hooting as if on a pitch pipe, to no avail. A distant dog would bark like a coughing spectator.
Then silence would descend.
It could go on for minutes at a time.
When had we had silence like this? The music of the crickets was one thing, but the silence was everything, all-enveloping. It was almost disorienting. In the twilight, you had the feeling the room was slowly spinning. When the vertigo passed, the silence fostered a calm deeper than any sound.
As we settled into our easy chairs, lulled into a contemplative mood by the quiet ebb and flow of sound, we turned to our books. My selection for the night, The Education of Henry Adams, was a tome that had long daunted me. It had been assigned in two courses, one at the undergraduate level and one in graduate school. The autobiography of John Quincy Adams’s grandson and a man of letters, it had set the tone for a whole era of Americans. It broached the subject of technological