Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us by Kim Haines-Eitzen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us by Kim Haines-Eitzen Katie Kleinkopf Kim Haines-Eitzen Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022 Pp. 168. $19.95; £14.99. Listen. No, really. Stop for a moment and just listen. What do you hear? People talking? Birds chirping? What about the sound of your heartbeat or breath? Now, listen again and consider how your own soundscape informs your experience of and connection to the place in which you reside. This phenomenon dwells at the center of Kim Haines-Eitzen's remarkable and deeply personal book, Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us. Not a typical academic monograph (though one built on a considerable foundation of historical, scientific, and literary sources), Sonorous Desert perhaps more closely aligns with other recently published works on our present quest for quiet attention in a world dominated by incessant noise and increasingly invasive technology. In order to accomplish this task, Haines-Eitzen draws on both her personal and professional background to offer a meditation on the phenomenon of deep listening through the lens of ancient Christian monastics. Sound connects each chapter, bridging not only the deserts of the Middle East with the American Southwest, but also the early Christian landscape of desert ascetics with Haines-Eitzen's current life in a COVID-ravaged world. This book seeks to find the balance between humanity's yearning for silence and solitude with the inextricable pull and necessity of community, and it does so through the experience of sonic landscapes across time and space. Chapters progress with a story-like unfolding through Haines-Eitzen's own personal quest to record natural soundscapes as well as the lessons she learned along the way. Her own anecdotes and discoveries during her time in disparate deserts frame most chapters and drive her over-arching questions. The tales of the ancient ascetics, like those of Antony, the Desert Fathers, and the hermit Paul, act as mini-listening workshops, akin to the ornithological labs Haines-Eitzen herself attended. With these works (which may be deeply familiar to many scholars, though, perhaps, unknown to students, her primary audience), Haines-Eitzen teaches us how to listen. She draws our attention to the sonorous landscape of the desert both past and present, the onomatopoeia lost in English translations of ancient Greek words, and our own culturally constructed idea that we should separate "human" sounds from "natural" ones. The sonorous anecdotes from ascetic vitae and sayings ground each chapter in an aural landscape, convincingly arguing that soundscapes formed an active element of ascetic practice. In order to help her audience experience these places for themselves, the coda of each chapter contains its own QR code where we can listen to field recordings collected by Haines-Eitzen herself. Not only do these recordings allow us to hear what we have only previously imagined, but they enable us to close our eyes and feel the bridge across space and time—to experience not only the same [End Page 652] phenomena as Haines-Eitzen during the time of her recordings, but perhaps, as she would suggest, what ancient people experienced thousands of years ago. To use sound as a source requires a different methodology than scholars of the ancient world typically employ. As with a scientist collecting field samples, Haines-Eitzen asks us to be still, to feel, and to experience. To listen deeply with our whole bodies. Listening, as she explains, is far more than hearing. It is a vibration, both a presence and a stillness. How did it feel, she asks, to dwell in the desert, this place between earth and sky, God and demons, noise and silence, solitude and community? Ultimately, it is this paradox on which we are (as were early Christian monks) urged to ruminate. As much as we and our late ancient counterparts may have wanted to, it is impossible to escape fully into silence and solitude. Silence, Haines-Eitzen concludes, is a human construct—one created purely of imagination. Something sought and...