Reflections on the silence and angelic innocence found in the presence of an infant child. This is an excerpt taken from a new collection of essays soon to be published called FEATHERS IN THE DUST: Traditional Essays on the Human Condition.
The Silence of an Infant
by John Herlihy
We find silence in unexpected places, such as the profound silence of an infant child. I have the privilege of being the grandfather to eight beloved children within an adopted family, ranging in ages now from 10 months to 12 years old. As such, I now consider myself familiar with the early stages of life. For the first six months, the new born is tied up into a bundle when sleeping, which is much of the day and a good part of the night, except to satisfy the requirements of breast feeding, whence the baby quickly falls back into the neverland of sleep.
Early one morning, I am awoken to hear little Aishu crying when all the house is asleep. I make my way into the bedroom where she lies with the other seven children, thrown every which way in heaps amid a mountain range of pillows and blankets. The tiny bundle of life, tied delicately like an Indian papoose, immediately stops her tentative cries at the sight of my familiar face, old, white-bearded, weathered like ancient parchment, yet filled with compassion and love at the sight of this beloved infant who returns my greetings with her own benevolent smile. To be seen, recognized and known by a six month old infant with a smile of recognition is a miracle in itself, particularly when the child is emerging from the wonder-world of sleep and is easily confused and on the brink of tears at the abrupt re-entry into the harsh reality of “this world”.
I quickly reach into the heap of sleeping bodies and extract the vibrant, little bundle of life, gazing out at me tight-fisted and in wonder from the waves of her blanket, hurling her atop my hipbone where she relaxes at once into the familiar folds of my body with accustomed grace. She is used to being slapped and pinched, thrown about and carried asunder by all the other children in random attitudes of possessiveness and churlishness. I immediately take her out the front door of the house where we can sit in a little garden the father of the house, my adopted son, has nurtured in defiance of the desert environment that surrounds us.
Up close, the face of the child is one of beatitude, as though a celestial cherub at watch in the sky has unknowingly tumbled down from the cumulus clouds of heaven and stares about in wonder at the sights and sounds of what is seemingly an earthly garden paradise. I gaze up close at the watchful eyes, the alert nose, the fawn mouth, a ready smile awaiting its own bloom. The bemused face of the infant registers the warm brush of the sun; her silky hair blows amid the quiet rhythms of the wind. The head turns to the thick foliage of the trees fronting the nearby house, famous for their thick leaves and benevolent shade, where one can sit in peace and contentment under the shelter of this leafy awning and listen to the birdsong. None of this seems to escape the attention of the baby as she surveys the visual sights within reach.
The silence of the infant, as it sits in complete trust in my arms, defies clear description. One struggles with words to understand its implicit wonder and its striking sentiment. However, one thing is clear. The infant doesn’t speak and has no need for words. It is enveloped within the quietude of its own imagination and the clear awakening of its blossoming mind. We are gazing upon the model of an angel in infancy. I devoutly brushed back a curl of her hair and saw her deep brown eyes clearly widen in the light of dreams. There were messages there akin to secret whispers uttered into willing, eager ears. When she opened her eyes, I was the first thing she saw. She seemed too moved to smile even, but rather maintained the rigor of an eternal detachment that infants seem to possess as a natural grace, staring out at me from inside herself with all the hauteur of a queen surveying her subjects. It was love as in an enchanted trance or as a miraculous act of levitation rising above the world of gravity and forms, cozy as a cat in a blanket and as radiant as violin strings, a saint’s vision perhaps of the timeless within the humdrum of this world. The moment was ours, as if we had the whole world to ourselves. Her clenched fists flailed the air in bliss, as I bent my head into her open arms and awaited their heavenly pounding. This was silence at its exquisite best.
Silence wraps the infant within the velvet folds of its mysterious charm, like the silence of windless chimes. There is none of the babble that one finds with adults who are never at a loss for words. They are always seeking justification through the sound of their own thoughts and the relentless rush of their own ego. The infant makes no attempt to deal with the world of words and pictures. Its absorbing silence ignores the cacophony of the world and the antics of the adults that surround it with their fawning love and saccharine affection. Adults must actively return to silence through forms of spiritual discipline such as prayer, meditation, and introspection, like crawling back on all fours into the cocoon of infancy, where silence finds its natural habitat and makes no pretence to being anything but what it truly is. The infant child, on the other hand, has no need for words.
Silence becomes its second nature and the infant wears it like an ermine cloak, happy to keep silent in the knowledge that the world will tend to its needs without uttering a sound. There is an exquisite stateliness and compactness about an infant child. As I sit there with this person in miniature nestled in my arms, I have the sense of entering a higher plane of experience than that to which I am normally accustomed and feel fully energized to receive the miracles that await me there. The silence that exudes from the infant is absolute and infinite. It observes the world with a sense of primitive holiness; it has no need to comment or even to react with a facial expression or gesture. What seems to draw out the child from its infant inscrutability is purely human interaction; it responds to the grace of a smile or the lilting sound of a lullaby. Even the sheer visual recognition of a loved one with affection and love has the infant erupt into expressions and gestures of happiness and bliss. A smile or laughter from an adult brings out the smile and laughter of the child in return. Otherwise, it gazes out placidly from a face that has yet to age, a face that time has not yet furrowed and experience has not yet weathered. It is the face of a thousand moons that have risen and set, casting its pale light on all it beholds. It is a face with the wisdom of a thousand years, captured within the features of the infant in all its raw innocence and sweet intimacy. When I look into the eyes of the beloved eight-month old Aishu, I am humbled and in awe of the wild joy, the primitive sweetness, and the raw innocence that lies captured within the essence of this infant form.
In another instance of manifest silence within infancy and childhood, I think of my grandson Raouf. When he was about three years old, he was running about the room as all exuberant children do, unconscious of the dangers that can lie within a simple domestic environment. I was sitting on cushions on the floor just after lunch with my back against the wall. He rushed headlong across the room in my direction, but somehow slipped along the way as he gathered speed. Before I could comprehend what was happening, he rushed headlong, like a battering ram, into the wall beside me not two inches away, seriously banging the top of his head against the wall with a dull thud. I picked him up at once and looked into his face and eyes, while he glanced back at me in a mask of momentary shock and disbelief. I expected a howl of rage to come out of his little mouth, for children are capable of great tantrums when they are hurt or offended, but none came. Not a sound, not a howl of outrage, not a tear.
Only silence prevailed and a look of stunned disbelief flickered across his childlike face as from some deep well of the soul within him. He had wrapped himself in silence like a black cloak. It was as if a million miles fell between us and a million moons passed overhead, distances travelled and chasms crossed in order to reach each other in this interaction without words. The silence continued, as though the silence itself were a balm and a cure, expressing with more eloquence what no other sound could approximate.
As it happened, I gathered him up into my arms where he folded himself into the contours of my body like a rag doll and gave up his trust to my ministrations. I took him into my bedroom and laid him down on the bed. He lay there silently as I placed a cool cloth over his forehead; within minutes, his silence turned into deep slumber. When he awoke hours later, he was himself again, running and shouting and challenging his older brother as ever before. I kept silent myself, but thanked God with words of the heart for a crisis averted and the return to normalcy in life’s routine, without mishap or lasting injury to the innocent child. Silence once again has reigned supreme, providing the child with the holy eloquence of an abiding stillness to put him back together and make him ready again for the misfortunes - or misfortunes, such as they may be - of this world.
An eloquently written story about the profoundness of silence inherent in infants, elicited by vivid details and description. You make a valid point of how adults capture the beatitude and tranquility of silence through discipline in the form of meditation, prayer, spiritual retreats, etc.
An early riser, my favorite time of day is just before sunset because it offers a slice of silence.
Let this coming of age story of a boy named Bean take you back to a simple time. Set in a small southern town in the 1960's, encircled by a river and gleaming white cotton fields.
Let this coming of age story of a boy named Bean take you back to a simple time. Set in a small southern town in the 1960's, encircled by a river and gleaming white cotton fields.
