The silence of the snow

Silence has become a rare currency. Noise everywhere leads us. Through her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand draws us into the rustling of silence, a balm for our bodies and minds in these noisy times, a common good to cherish and protect. Second of eight articles.

I was waiting for the snow, which did not come. The one in big flakes, which descends directly on our hearts. Not swept by stormy winds, no, soft, falling on our eyes like tissue paper. The one who has the good fortune to calm the Earth, smoothing out its roughness, covering its wounds and its ugliness, emptying it of its harshness. The one which has the gift of slowing down our mad races and freezing us in that whiteness which wells up from the sky like little tufts of wool. She, “the pensive sister of silence¹ “, did not come.

How far do you have to go for it to snow? I haven’t had my fill of that in this winter of 2024. How far do you have to go to hear its silence? I haven’t had my fill of that silence.

So I ran after her, headed further east and further north, and headed toward Minganie in the hope of finding her. Minganie? A portion of the North Shore between Rivière-au-Tonnerre and Natashquan, whose feet bathe in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The weather forecast played in my favor. I found snow where I expected to find it: falling on the large peat bogs surrounding Havre-Saint-Pierre, the main town in Minganie, where about 3,500 people live. The wet flakes burst on your face, you drink them in. I enter the whiteness, “horizontal silence as far as the eye can see² “.

Reaching out to silence

“Silence is one of the primary characteristics of the Northern imaginary,” writes Daniel Chartier, director of the International Research Laboratory on the Imaginary of the North, Winter and the Arctic at UQAM, as are cold, immensity, and horizontality. “Silence is not perceptible by itself,” he continues, “and only reveals itself when it is broken by a noise, a cry.”³. » The whirl of a waterfall. Leaves stirred by the wind. The crashing of ice on the river. Or a bird. Like this crow that flies before my eyes above the milky expanse and makes the silence ring with the beating of its wings.

Here we can see him, silence, almost reaching out to him. Like a being of flesh that would be silhouetted in the distance in the peat bogs. Oh, like the “evening visitor”, a famous character in a 1956 painting by the Quebec artist Jean Paul Lemieux. “Of silence and space” is the title of the exhibition dedicated to him at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Rarely has a character more eloquent of silence been seen than this evening visitor.

The trains on rails that the artist, born in Quebec in 1904, painted, standing out against vast deserts of snow, also literally make silence speak. The Midday Train (1956), Train time (1966), The fast one (1968), The Portages-des-Prés train (1971). Paintings that are traversed by “a silent, anonymous, universal humanity”, writes Michèle Grandbois, a specialist in Lemieux’s work. A breath of fresh air for our eyes. Something mute that remains.

Illiterate of silence

It’s still snowing. The bogs stretch as far as the eye can see, cracked with ice, bristling with short, spindly spruce trees.

Could silence be a cultural marker? Philosopher and writer Michel Onfray claims that “in a civilization with an oral tradition, silence weighs more heavily than in a civilization with a written tradition, and therefore talkative.”⁴ “. In the same vein, Professor Chartier of UQAM puts forward the idea that “mutism would be one of the characteristics of the Amerindians and the Inuit, and the latter would have learned to use it to protect themselves.” He quotes a Greenlandic heroine from a Danish novel: “Abandoning Europeans to silence is always an interesting experience. For them, silence is a void in which the tension increases until it borders on the limit of what is bearable.” I smile at the accuracy of this observation made by the Inuit heroine.

“The idea often comes up,” continues Daniel Chartier, “that the Westerner is in some way illiterate in silence, incapable of grasping its meaning and richness.”

Thus silence would have to do with cultural identities. But so many nuances are necessary. Professor Chartier extends this sobriety of language to the people of the North in general, including the people of Quebec, in comparison to the people of the South, whose speech is considered more abundant. The men and women of the generations who preceded us here were not known for being voluble. Their interiority often spoke only to themselves. Something of this linguistic economy has, it seems to me, remained with us.

And this restraint of speech can also extend to the inhabitants of the heights, those mountain dwellers with a reputation for being silent. We will return to this in this series.

As for indigenous peoples, this also needs to be qualified. Their speaking out in recent years, particularly from women writers, has also proven to be a tremendous liberation. “Self-expression brings freedom,” says Innu writer Naomi Fontaine, “and helps us understand our own history.”

A code of the sublime

It is still snowing. The sky is the color of old silver. I advance slowly in the white patience of the earth. “Silence is not a hollow but a fullness⁵ “, claims Jérôme Sueur, ecoacoustics researcher at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. A fullness that is in the vicinity of the sublime.

With the stories of travelers and their imagination, a code of the sublime developed in the 18th century.^e century, the century of Enlightenment, says the historian specializing in sensibilities Alain Corbin. We begin to seek out the effects on ourselves of deserts of snow or sand, of vast plains, of mountains, of the sea. We begin to seek out these little moments of eternity for ourselves. Of totality, of perfection. Of pure presence.

I think of the words of the French-speaking Algerian writer and columnist Kamel Daoud who, listening to the sounds of the planet Mars captured in 2020 by the rover Perseverancereports his experience. “Here is the voice of a place with virgin waves. Here, neither Trump nor horn. Neither sonic aggression nor engine noise. Pure presence. The columnist likes to listen and re-listen to this sample of nothingness, to rest, even from himself.”

* * * * *

After the planet Mars, back to Earth. I left the uninhabited star of snowy peat bogs. Need to shake myself off. To warm up. I have a hunger pang.

Restaurant La Promenade, Havre-Saint-Pierre. Festive atmosphere and background music. The waitresses waltz with the plates. There is laughter. There is drinking. There is eating. Four guys, four girls on either side of a large table. Four hamburgers and fries on one side, four salads on the other. I laugh. Back to good old humanity. Human warmth. Warmth, pure and simple.

It’s not snowing anymore. On the other side of the street the sea gently laps. Like a silence.

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