In Praise of Listening

In her new book, In Praise of Listening, Christian McEwen reflects on listening (silence, music, nature, prayer, &c.) in a series of thoughtful chapters, each one focused on a different theme. When an athlete speaks of “listening to his body,” or a gardener describes herself as “listening to the land,” when writers and artists explain that they are “listening” to their work-in-progress, they are using the word as she chooses to use it here—as an extended metaphor for openness and receptivity, rippling out from the self-centered human to the farthest reaches of the non-human world. In Praise of Listening is a kind of sister or first cousin to McEwen’s earlier, timely, and very popular, World Enough & Time (Bauhan Publishing, 2011), with the same emphasis on creativity and slowing down. As McEwen says: Most of us think of listening in fairly literal fashion: human beings listening (or not listening) to one another;the pleasure of attending to a familiar piece of music. But listening can have a far broader and more capacious meaning, moving out beyond the small apparatus of the ears to the hands or belly or enveloping spirit/mind.