TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

For some reason tonight I was thinking about the rhythms to which we live our lives. Right now (when I stop typing for a second) I can hear the crickets outside. I can hear Scott turn pages, clear his throat, and slide the desk chair across the hard wood floor. I can hear the faucet in the kitchen flow wildly, and I can hear the radiators in the living room, bedroom, and bathroom clank clank clank as if someone is banging on the pipes below us with a crowbar. All of these sounds made me think of this passage I read last year about Mrs. Ramsay living her life to the rhythm and timing of the surrounding noises, most particularly the waves. Sometimes I feel like it is almost impossible to live with this sort of metronome in our lives right now because there are simply too many sounds to hear. I picture my friend Tyler on his way to Disney Land and the headache that awaits his ears. I couldn't live my life to the rhythm of the noises at Disney Land. But there is something soothing about this idea. I do this at the Ranch. I live by the timing set by the rooster and the wind shooting through the aspens. I do this on the river. I live by the timing set by flying Tammy Beetles and the distant "shhhh" of rapids. I do this late at night when I finally indulge myself by sitting back, relaxing, and reading a book. Something about the timing set by the nighttime crickets and the buzz of my laptop tells me that it's okay to read a book in the evening. I can't read books of my choosing during the day. I can't even hear the buzz of my laptop during the day over the sounds of cars screeching and zooming along South Temple or the recess bell ringing at Wasatch Elementary next door. There's too many sounds; there's a rush. So I too am rushed during the day. But at night, when the sounds calm down, I calm down. I never noticed how often I take my cues from the sounds of the world around me. I was going to say the sounds of nature, but I take so many cues from the sounds of the city. All of these sounds drive and steer my own rhythm. Without me realizing it, they dictate for me my day.

"But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of a rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How’s that? How’s that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you—I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror (Virginia Woolf)."