Christian McEwen talks about listening at Monadnock Summer Lyceum

Author, educator and activist Christian McEwen recalled that the first time she saw someone reach for their phone “during the happy hubbub of a family Thanksgiving,” she was “startled by her rudeness.”

“Now, I am sorrowfully unsurprised,” she said. “As I am no longer surprised by seeing a driver backing up a hillside into moving traffic, her cell still pinioned to her ear.”

McEwen, who was the first speaker of the season Sunday at the Monadnock Summer Lyceum at the Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church, has spent a lifetime listening, writing about listening and contemplating the effect sound has on human beings and the role of auditory memories.

Moderator and fellow author Howard Mansfield, a longtime friend of McEwen,  said in his introduction that her writing “councils us to slow down,  to listen, to breathe.” 

McEwen, a former MacDowell fellow, is the author of “In Praise of Listening,”  “The Tortoise Diaries: Daily Meditations on Slowing Down” and the upcoming “The Little Book of Listening,” and many other books available through Peterborough-based Bauhan Publishing. 

Mansfield read a passage from “In Praise of Listening,” which describes McEwen’s own auditory memories from her childhood in Wiltshire, England.

“McEwen writes, ‘I was invisible, I was catching fish; I was listening,’ ” Mansfield said. “Every story begins with listening; every writer starts by listening.” 

In her work as a teacher and activist, McEwen often asks people to recall sounds from their childhood, or to draw maps of their sound memories. Her own clearest memories include calls of certain birds, the sound of her father shaving and “the water running for a long, hot bath.” 

“My mother recalled the hiss of the gas fire, and the call of the muffin man from below,” McEwen said. “In the past, we were each delicately receptive to the surrounding soundscape. But that way of knowing the world is being forgotten, displaced by the gadgets and distractions of the digital age.”

McEwen said that recalling a childhood sound often opens up a stream of forgotten details, citing the example of a friend who said she did not have a lot of childhood memories.

“Then, she remembered the sound of the bell on her tricycle, and suddenly her memories opened up. She could clearly see the white paint peeling on the bike she rode, the cracks in the sidewalk, the parched lawn. The details were released by the sound of the bell; the sound freed the memories. After she recalled the bell, she came up with a long list of childhood sounds, like big sheets  flapping in the wind when her mother did the laundry,” McEwen recalled.  

McEwen laments the pace and constant distraction of modern culture, where people rarely focus on or even notice the sounds in the world around them. 

“True listening is under siege. Now I am no longer surprised to see students strolling under the moon, staring at their phones,” she said. “Adults focus on the human voice, but children make no distinction between what is worth and not worth listening to.”

McEwen asked the audience to “recollect some of the sounds you yourself recall from childhood.”

“Then tell someone about it,” she said. “Tell the person you are with, the person sitting next to you, someone you meet at the reception. What other memories do these sounds bring forward?”

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked McEwen how to cultivate a practice of listening.

“Take a walk,” she said. “And leave your phone at home. Listen to the world.”

Another audience member asked if “the cruelty in the world today is a result if being unable to listen fully.”

“Absolutely,” McEwen said. “We no longer listen.”

McEwen cited the work of late activist Paula Green, a psychotherapist, activist and founder of the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding in Amherst, Mass., who dedicated her life to peacebuilding.

“We need to set up opportunities to listen to people across the aisle, for people in opposing parties to talk, to really hear one another,” McEwen said.  

McEwen described a public art project in which she created “a giant papier-mache ear” outside a public library, and just encouraged people to sit down and talk.

“Some people sat down and told me the entire story of their divorce. Other people talked about politics. What I learned is that the hunger to really be heard is there,” she said.

The Deep Woods Cello Quarter played introductory music for the event, which was sponsored by Bauhan Publishing. Rosaly’s Garden provided the flowers. 

Next week’s Monadnock Summer Lyceum will feature author Shilpa Jindia, who will speak on “Why Are Ideas Dangerous? The Fight for Academic Freedom on College Campuses.”

Monadnock Ledger-Transcript editor Bill Fonda will serve as moderator. Kaamadhaynaa will provide music.

All Monadnock Summer Lyceum events can be accessed at monadnocklyceum.org.