The Latitudes of Silence

Indian summer in Montreal. Fall colors against a clear September sky. I took a walk with my beautiful wife and told her I was leaving. For a while. She said she knew it. Somehow she always knows, even before I do. “How did you know? I asked. She laughed. “You talk in your sleep, something about a walkabout.” I'm standing in front of this gigantic globe that revolves around its axis. It's transparent and a strong light glows in its core. I stand still, watching in awe: continents, islands, atolls passing by in front of my eyes, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Cook Islands, Fiji, Vanuatu, New Zealand, and Australia. It's all out there, waiting for me and my little vessel. A world of my own. I could almost touch it. I sat in meetings all day without saying a word...looking moronic catatonic, and in my eyes a blue sea was rolling wave after wave of infinite power. I kept my usual poker face but if you came closer and looked me deeply in the eyes you'd see a world of water vapors and rainbows, of killer whales darting out of the ocean, turning in mid-air and landing hard on one side with a big splash. You would see Canada geese gliding south along the Pacific shores or the stork flying in the silence of the dunes of the Namib Desert. You may see the Arctic fox digging her catch in the snow and the narwhals in a sword fight. You may even get a glimpse of the Japanese swans flapping their white wings over green fields of rice where straw hats look down in the water only to see their own reflection. I belong to no one. I belong to the great space inside and out. I fear nothing. I am alive. "So what is your estimate for the 2006 efficiency gains for our product line?" The question came like the loud morning buzzer from the bedside clock. I wanted to snooze it, turn around, embrace my pillow and go back to my dream. “Sir?” Then the question came again. "Do you want me to make up the figures or would you rather do it yourself?" "You go ahead," I said, thinking “I need to drink water. Why is my mouth so dry?” I heard the flute echo in the valleys, and the axe resounding from the forest as it struck the tall fir. That was so many lives ago. Snow crackling under frozen boots on that path across the mountains of my childhood, in that forgotten country in Eastern Europe. Summers rafting on the river, the swish of an arrow across a cloudless sky. Eating cherries from the top of a tree, the sweet ones burned by the August sun, dark red and juicy. Free children in a forgotten world. Post-war children, innocent and ignorant, as children should be. The trenches were covered in yellow wild flowers and apart from the occasional rusty Russian bomb shell, no visible sign of a world war. That was just after the Communists took over, but I was too young to be bothered. Only later on did I end up on their blacklists, and eventually in a coalmine as a young man. Political prisoner, fugitive, asylum seeker in Sweden, and now a senior executive for a telecom giant in Canada. One hell of a trip. “I’m a time spastic,” I thought. “This present is not now. I am not I. They are not they…” I looked around the room. People shifted in their chairs uncomfortably, mouths were moving, someone was showing something on the screen, but there was no sound. There was just this a-temporal silence, a silence I had longed for for many years. It was the silence of the mind. Then I remembered the monk in his stone house up in the mountains and the smell of freshly-made candles burning on the ledge of his window. I remembered how I bowed before a man for the first time ever, just like that, out of an overwhelming feeling of respect for his renunciation of all that is worldly.