Out of Silence

1

Cow, he said, or tried to say, his bright eyes astonished by these creatures, the whole world still a wonderment for him at eighteen months, but now in need of names. Then Cow, he tried again, and this time the word was unmistakable, nothing more than a quick, coarse noise that seemed somehow caught inside his excitement, yet what a feat it was, of course—all first words, as well as those that follow them for a lifetime, formed and uttered out of magic.

Late in the soggy, snowbound winter of 1985, Ian lived with his parents, his sister, and a collie with a chronically sunburned nose at a scientific research station surrounded by ponderosa woods and great granite outcroppings high in the Colorado Rockies, the laboratory, its outbuildings, and their nearby house carved out of a showcase cattle ranch. It wasn’t particularly surprising therefore—in a world evidently populated far more by Angus-Hereford crosses than by people—that instead of Mama or milk or more, it was cow that first found its way out of this little boy’s mouth. But what was very much out of the ordinary—what was curious at first, puzzling, then worrisome, gnawing, exploding at last into something catastrophic before finally it was simply the way things were—was that for the next five years, Ian didn’t say cow again, nor did he utter another word.

Ian Martin Drummond, my nephew, my older sister’s son, was born on August 2, 1983, in Normal, Illinois, to Claudia Martin and Boyce Drummond. Befitting that heartland birthplace, Ian was, it seemed wonderfully certain, a normal infant in every respect. He began to crawl at seven months, a bit earlier than average; he was walking confidently at eleven months, seven months sooner than some of his peers. His parents remember that he acquired other motor skills with equal ease, and generally he was more coordinated than his sister, Sarah, had been when she was his age. Despite an allergy to milk and chronic ear infections, the early, toddling Ian was a healthy, gregarious child who liked to be held. He quickly became fascinated by books, toys, and videotapes. He began to babble with great gusto. He liked to imitate Sarah as they played, and she and her parents remember with an enduring sense of sadness and of loss the day— at perhaps sixteen or seventeen months—when Ian employed a stick-toy to imitate his father, who was vacuuming the carpets; the day when Ian smiled broadly, seemingly on cue, as Sarah aimed a camera in his direction; the day when Ian proudly growled for Claudia to show her what the lion says.

But soon after he achieved one more milestone by announcing that first formidable word to the cows scattered in one of the ranch’s roadside pastures, Ian received the fourth in a standard series of diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus immunizations, and as his physician cautioned he might, he fell soundly asleep as soon as he was home. He slept through the afternoon of March 6, 1985, and into the early evening; and without waking a single time—something quite unusual for him—he continued to sleep through the night. Although they were concerned by his reaction to the DPT shot, Claudia and Boyce had been assured that similar reactions were entirely normal, so they hadn’t attempted to wake him as they periodically checked him for a fever, nor, of course, had they monitored him closely enough to know whether he might have suffered seizures during the night.

Ian, in fact, seemed fine on the second day, and soon his long slumber was out of mind; it was simply one more of the hundreds of odd or unexplained occurrences that cause all parents some fleeting concern before their resilient children bound back to vigorous life. They might have forgotten it entirely had it not been for the fact that not only did Ian suspend his efforts to learn to talk in the days and months and then years that followed that immunization, but also, and in almost every way imaginable, he became a different boy.

Boyce, now forty-seven, is a scientist and teacher; Claudia, forty-five, is a teacher too, one for whom that vocation truly seems to be a calling. And at twelve, Sarah is a writer already, one who seems to understand intuitively that a story’s life is in its telling. She wrote this when she was seven:

I aspeshly like Ian because he is my brother, he is very very cute he loves music, and he loves the song (I know an old laty) I am very foned of Ian, very foned Hes not very cute win he skreames, he’s learning to talk, I beleve that Ian will someday talk as will as I can. . . . we all love Ian, and he loves us! some day I know Ian will talk.

For four full years, from the spring when an inoculation seemed to have assaulted his forming brain until the spring when Sarah first tried to describe her brother to a world she wasn’t sure would understand him, Ian was very cute, but he wasn’t cute when he screamed, and he screamed very much of the time.

No one could be certain why, but as his interest in speaking suddenly vanished, Ian became strangely terrorized by much of what he encountered: Neighbors whom he had known and liked now no longer could enter the house without inducing his awful shrieks; he would begin to cry uncontrollably when trips in the car deviated from precisely remembered routes; he would throw a terrible tantrum if, as part of his relentless daily routine, he could not go visit the cows. Ian abandoned the spoon with which he had become adept at feeding himself in favor of his fingers, and he would eat only a few specific foods—always round crackers, for instance, never square ones. He would wake in the night and laugh eerily, irrepressibly, for as much as an hour. In lieu of other kinds of play, he would position toys in long lines so straight that seemingly no child could have arranged them, or often in radial arcs that were equally perfect, surely equally impossible.

Ian didn’t notice the new kitten Sarah was enthralled by; the dog he had befriended long before he now didn’t seem to see. Indoors, he lived only in his room, his solitary life lived out to the constant, droning accompaniment of videotapes of children’s cartoons— Dumbo, Charlotte’s Web, Winnie-the-Pooh—each one played literally thousands of times, the proper movie at the proper time of day according to his inviolate internal schedule. Outside, Ian took great, obsessive pleasure in running fast alongside fences—picket fences, rail fences, barbed-wire fences, often as not—his eyes only an inch or two away from a serious injury, yet he virtually never stumbled, and not once was he cut or scraped. At night, following dinner (always in his room and accompanied by a movie; always six pieces of tofu, never seven) and an elaborate bath-and-bedtime ritual (the same dozen toys with him in the tub to stave off chaos), Ian at last would surrender to sleep, but only if his father was beside his bed, and only if an Emmylou Harris album was playing as his oddly essential lullaby—that music, like his immensely important movies, and like the daily rituals that seemed to run in a deranging and endless loop, the source of vital structure in his life, the source of some security, of precious peace, it often seemed.

Except for those few stimuli, and other than the times when he would welcome his parents’ touch, their hugs and strong caresses, Ian lived in self-imposed, self-demanded isolation and in a perplexing kind of quietude, never attempting to speak, his babbling long since forgotten, a boy who once had been about to burst with language now silent except for his screams.

The diagnosis long since had been delivered, and autism was a disorder I had come to know firsthand by the time Barry Levinson’s Rain Man was released in 1988. Its Academy Awards notwithstanding, perhaps the film’s most important achievement was its success in bringing to so many people a basic awareness of this strange, inexplicable, and enormously disabling disorder; and I know that for those of us in Ian’s family, the film came to serve as a kind of ready explanation. "Have you seen Rain Man?" we would ask. Yes, the Dustin Hoffman character. Well, Ian’s sort of Raymond Babbitt still a child. He has the same need for sameness in his life, a similar demand for ritual and for exacting detail. He’s reminiscent of him in lots of respects, except that Ian doesn’t speak.

First reported in medical literature in 1799, autism (from the Greek autos, or self) was considered a psychiatric disorder until only recently. Generally characterized by a profound aloofness and need for solitude; by odd, repetitive physical movements and gestures; by variously heightened or diminished sensory abilities; and by passionate resistance to change—as well as by myriad disabilities with language—autism tended to be called childhood schizophrenia or childhood psychosis, far more than the mere implication, of course, that autistic children were demented, disturbed, deranged. Renowned psychiatrists postulated that the condition was the result of upbringing by severe, emotionally frigid mothers. Others were equally certain that overly intellectual, rigid, humorless fathers were to blame for the disorder’s onset.

But as many forms of mental illness finally began to be perceived as the results of abnormalities in the brain itself rather than as the products of anguished, assaulted psyches, so autism too began to be viewed as an organic, but still very mysterious, disorder whose most compelling symptom seems to be multiple deficits related to language: its reception via the senses, its processing and organization, its intimate role in cognition, its vocal expression. And only just now, researchers in several parts of the world are growing convinced that it is fundamentally an expressive disorder. They maintain that people with autism are neither psychotic nor somehow severely retarded, but instead are the victims of a very deceptive syndrome in which the brain, the cranial nerves, and the muscles of the mouth and throat are unable to coordinate the almost unbelievably sophisticated sequence of events that leads from a thought, an intention, to a successfully spoken word. Autism, some of them now persuasively contend, is not a cognitive disorder, and neither is it a personality disorder—not a sort of selfism chiefly characterized by an inability to interact with others. Instead, they point to a mounting—and even movingly symbolic—body of evidence that among autism’s several critical deficits, the most profound is a lifelong problem with expressive language, proof, if we need it, that language is the one wondrous human achievement that weds the otherwise stranded self with the world.

Beginning at a time that now is a very long time ago—back when I was Ian’s age—on each Wednesday morning I would rise before my sisters and my mother, and my father would drive me the few blocks to the early mass at Saint Barnabas Church, where I would don the dark vestments that certified my importance in these mysterious, spiritual matters, then serve at Father Cole’s side during the short, sparsely attended service. I still remember the somber, age-worn faces of the few women who almost always were in attendance, and in my mind I still can hear fragments of that lyrical liturgy drawn from the sixteenth-century Book of Common Prayer, as well as the psalms, Epistles, and Gospels that were read from the King James Bible, their lexicon so strange to me yet so melodious, the rhythms of those ancient phrases and their orchestral pace so mighty—mystical in the way they were meant to be—the sounds themselves somehow full of meaning.

It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, surely I heard Father Cole say a thousand times (or chant in his quaking yet courageous voice on certain feast days),

that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty Everlasting God. Therefore, with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee and saying . . .

I remember that on Ash Wednesday morning every spring, as he rubbed sooty crosses onto our foreheads, in a hushed voice he would say to each one of us, Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return, that admonishment a trifle grim, but its sounds so lovely in their whispered repetition. And I remember, of course, the Gospel from Saint John at midnight mass on Christmas Eve—we stalwart acolytes bearing torches at either side of the huge and heavy Bible, it too held by a boy like me who couldn’t help but marvel at his special fortune—the words definitive and wonderful, yet still a little difficult to comprehend:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

In the beginning was the Word. Imagine my fascination. The world—and we—began with just a word, with something spoken, I assumed. But if the word was God, then who would have spoken it? Or, if He was the speaker, on the other hand, then what incredible, catalytic word might it have been? I liked to think that perhaps the word actually was Now, or better, Good. The religious fundamentalists who filled my town would have assumed the word was Don’t, but we Episcopalians were far more liberal than that, and although the question didn’t really trouble me, it was one I liked to ponder. I knew about this bang the cosmologists lately had begun to speak of, and it seemed that perhaps that was the explanation: the big bang that came as time commenced must have been the sound of God, shuddering to speak, calling his own name, saying, Let’s get started.

Speech came slowly for humankind, however. It arrived long past sunset on that metaphorical sixth day of creation, God’s work all but accomplished, we hominids crashing wonderfully into consciousness with our first rituals, with rough symbols, and then at last with words. Cosmologists currently date the bang at perhaps twenty billion years ago; the first animals, in contrast, began to crawl about on Earth some six hundred million years before our time. The earliest primates appeared seventy million years ago; the first fire-using, toolmaking, non-ape people not emerging for another sixty-eight million years or so. We cannot know when the first meaningful words were uttered by the people now known as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, but it is clear that our distant ancestors underwent a profound creative and cooperative florescence about thirty thousand years ago, at the time when Homo sapiens sapiens (wise man) emerged—people taller, slimmer, more agile than the Neanderthals; a new kind of creature who produced the extraordinary paintings that survive in caves at Lascaux in southern France and Altamira across the border in Spain, who wore clothes and lived communally, hunting and perhaps waging small wars in concert with their kin, caring for those among them who were infirm; people who marked graves with stones and who sometimes buried their dead on beds of flowers; human beings remarkably similar to us, possessing the same brain, the same physique, the same larynx slid far enough down their throats that they could utter the full range of human sounds, down far enough as well that they could choke on food.

Strangely, the species Homo sapiens was and still remains the only mammal at much risk of choking. Horses, cats, and chimpanzees, as well as you and me, have larynges that are located at the backs of our tongues—the two necessarily linked and interacting—yet we humans are anatomically distinct from all other mammals in one very critical respect. Because the tongues of nonhuman mammals are relatively short in relation to the size of their skulls—ending at the rear of their mouths—and because their larynges are therefore positioned high enough that they can shift them upward through their mouths to form a watertight seal with the entrance to their noses, they can—and do, of course—eat and breathe at the same time without any risk of food entering their airways. Efficiently and safely for all animals but us, air passes through the elevated larynx en route to the lungs while food and water are routed around it to the stomach. In the curious human case, however, our tongues extend halfway down our throats, ending where our larynges are positioned behind the protruding thyroid cartilage commonly called the Adam’s apple, resulting in what Charles Darwin noted in The Origin of Species as the strange fact that every particle of food and drink which we swallow has to pass over the orifice of the trachea, with some risk of falling into the lungs, with a quick and panicked death the likely outcome. Normally, of course, the flap of tissue called the epiglottis covers the larynx as we swallow, then opens, allowing us to breathe again as food safely enters the esophagus, but the arrangement surely is flawed. And the thousands of deaths choking has caused each year for thousands of years would seem to defy the Darwinian principle of natural selection were it not for the subtle yet fundamental advantage it provides us: positioned at midpoint in our throats, our larynges allow us to make vocalizations that no other animals can match, sounds that Brown University linguist Philip Lieberman contends have been more important to the survival of our species than the certainty of safe and simple respiration.

Our species alone, for instance, can make non-nasal sounds by sealing off our nasal cavities and using our lips, tongues, and larynges to change the shape of our vocal tracts, producing a wide range of oral sounds that are easier for us to distinguish, one from the other, than are the less clearly definable nasal sounds. Also, our long, round tongues enable us to make quantal sounds—the vowels of the words feet, shoe, and sock, and the consonants in words like go and kick— sounds that further facilitate the encoding and decoding of our speech because they are less likely to be misinterpreted than are the tongue-tip-on-palate dental consonants employed in to and do, or the lip-closing labial consonants of my or buy. It is the range of distinct sounds that we can form, together with the rapidity with which we can form them, that make us much quicker at transmitting sound data than are other animals; Lieberman estimates that we are three to ten times faster than any other primate, an obvious advantage when it comes to communicating timely and complex information. Consider the selective value of being able to communicate the encoded message ‘There are two lions, one behind the rock and the other in the ravine,’ he writes in Uniquely Human, "in the same time as the unencoded ‘lliiooonn rooockkk.’ ‘

But what Lieberman posits for consideration far more fundamentally—in that recent book as well as in his earlier and highly regarded investigation The Biology and Evolution of Language—is his conviction that the development of the ability to utter that hard e that you hear in feet led to the florescence of language as surely as the development of the opposable thumb led to tools. And although that causal link between speech and language may at first seem simple enough, even obvious, it isn’t necessarily so.

In fact, University of Hawaii linguist Derek Bickerton argues openly with Lieberman, contending that language did not develop as a means of facilitating communication but rather as a means of ordering and understanding the world. Bickerton’s basic quarrel with a speech-based explanation of the origin of language can be reduced to what he calls the continuity paradox—the ticklish contradiction between the certainty, on the one hand, that language is the result of evolutionary adaptation and an equal certainty, on the other, that evolution, even via mutation, cannot produce something that is utterly new. Since human language is so very different from every other form of animal communication, Bickerton wants to know, how can it be the product of that communication? Where is the necessary evolutionary continuity? Finding it neither in the sliding of the larynx down the Neanderthal throat nor in the emerging ability to make uniquely human sounds—a range of sounds broad enough that communication could begin to grow complex—Bickerton instead lands on an evolutionary link that is rooted in the dense soil of symbol.

Language is not primarily communicative, he argues in Language and Species; it is representational. We did not develop language because we could make new sounds but because we had become conscious, ever more aware of new objects in our world, new conditions, and new possibilities, and we needed some sure and stable means of representing them—a way in which we could consider them, share them with others, relate them to our lives.

No creature perceives the world directly. The categories a creature can distinguish are determined not by the general nature of reality but by what that creature’s nervous system is capable of representing. The capacities of that nervous system are, in part at least, determined by what the creature minimally needs in order to survive and reproduce. . . . The categories distinguished by frogs, it would seem, do not extend very far beyond bugs they can snap at, ponds they can jump into, and other frogs they can mate with. The categories distinguished by [monkeys] are more numerous, and those distinguished by our own species more numerous still, but the same principles apply.

As Bickerton examines the evolution of language, it seems to him that it was the emergence of syntax, the arrangement of representational symbols—signs, grunts, words—to create meanings that extend beyond those symbols themselves, that was the truly explosive catalyst for language. It was the evolution of the brain—some mysterious series of neuronal mutations—not of the supralaryngeal vocal tract, which made language possible. And had it not been convenient for early hominids to create languages out of sounds, he contends, they would have shaped them out of hand signs or perhaps simply from scratches in the earth.

Yet is it possible that both scholars are correct? Could simultaneous evolutionary adaptations have occurred that led to the rise of language—our throats and our cerebrums evolving separately but in symbiotic tandem? My linguistic credentials are more than merely suspect, yet that curious possibility seems so readily conceivable that I will risk it. Surely early symbol makers whose hands and arms were occupied with tools and children would have relished the sense they could make with sounds. Surely tentative, tongue-tied early speakers were made more eloquent by brains that could muster a simple lexicon and the rich variety of syntax.

And there are dozens more scenarios, of course, ripe for our imagining. Neurobiologist William Calvin, for example, entertains himself and his readers with speculations on whether language emerged simply because we couldn’t resist the sounds that we—and we alone—could make with our mouths, akin to kids who learn to talk like Donald Duck, then do so for days on end solely for the special joy; whether intricate communicative gesturing, or even playing with shadow puppets on the fire-lit walls of caves, might have led to true sign languages that long preceded speech.

Or does Calvin’s own, rather more elaborate, throwing theory make some serious sense? Among the cornucopia of things that intrigue Calvin—in his book of essays entitled The Throwing Madonna, as well as in the more recent Cerebral Symphony—are the likelihood that, very early on, certain brain functions were lateralized to a specific cerebral hemisphere and the further possibility that it was the development of the intricate technique of throwing rocks at escaping prey that prompted that lateralization. Neuroscientists have known for decades now that language function is lateralized to the left cerebral hemisphere in a huge majority of people: pick any dozen who pass you on the street, and perhaps one of them will possess right-sided language, but perhaps not even one. Yet what wasn’t known until recently was that movement-sequencing skills— the linked abilities to pick up a rock or a football, for instance, to cock it behind your head, then to throw it forward—are also lateralized most often to the left side of the brain. Intriguingly, researchers have been able to demonstrate as well that oro-facial muscle sequencing—the ability, say, to purse your lips, then open them wide, then to stick your tongue out—is lateralized to areas just above and below the so-called Sylvian fissure in the left temporal lobe, an area of the left hemisphere that also controls a variety of language-producing and language-decoding functions. The question Calvin poses in that regard is this: Do activities as seemingly unrelated as speaking and throwing actually share much in common, and if so, is that commonality the ability to produce—precisely, reliably, and rapidly—muscle-movement sequences?

He believes the answer is yes. And what Calvin delights in imagining, in fact, is that as hominids began to heave stones at tiny targets—necessarily a one-handed, one-sided enterprise—their opposite cerebral hemisphere was correspondingly taxed (each cerebral hemisphere controls sensory and motor function for the opposite half of the body). In order for rock throwers to grow more and more proficient at the requisite and complicated series of movements involved in throwing, their brains, or at least a part of their brains opposite their throwing arms, had to become very good at orchestrating those movements, at sequencing. And as new skills slowly were acquired, skills that demanded equally complex muscle-movement sequencing—such as the movements of the mouth, lips, and tongue required in the pronunciation of saber-toothed tiger or its Cro-Magnon equivalent—it would have made obvious and efficient sense for the brain to control those skills with the sequencing computer it already had in place and in working order.

So, did generalized human language evolve from specialized hunting ‘computational’ skills? Calvin asks as he tidies up his argument. Bootstrapping language through better throwing? If orofacial sequencing built upon the throwing-sequencing machinery of the left brain, then it would be natural for the expanding repertoire of verbal expressions to also settle alongside in the left brain—and so to set the stage for more sophisticated language, hence culture, and science, and all the rest.

And all the rest. From beaning a rabbit with a well-aimed rock to linking the sounds that mean You got him! From the first paltry, faulty speech to Peter Rabbit.

No less a legendary linguist than Noam Chomsky is bothered by this kind of speculation about the origin of language. As far as he is concerned, early humans developed language because they possessed—and their descendants still do—what he calls a language organ, an unspecified but nonetheless physiological piece of the brain, an organ not all that unlike the heart or the liver, and he views its origin as deserving no more sustained interest than theirs do. Chomsky’s apathy toward matters paleontological plainly irks Lieberman and Calvin, and Bickerton is nettled enough by his colleague’s disinterest to quip, It would be strange indeed if physicists were to say, ‘We will concern ourselves only with matter as it is now or as it has been in the recent past; the origins of the universe are of their nature unknowable, and we shall not even try to explore them.’ Why linguists have tacitly accepted just such a self-denying ordinance should be a topic of some interest to sociologists of science.

And surely Bickerton makes his point; surely the origin of this most human of characteristics—perhaps the only thing that truly separates us from our brother creatures—is an inquiry of real importance as well as fascination. The genetic makeup of Homo sapiens is ninety-nine percent identical to that of Pan troglodytes, the chimpanzee, yet we and chimps—even space-faring, sign-making, show biz chimps—bear faint resemblance to one another when it comes to the question of language. But what, if that’s the curious case, is language?

Is it speech? Well, your parrot can speak, can mimic certain sounds you make, sounds you recognize as words, but your parrot surely doesn’t possess language, does it? Then is language a system of representation—the sophisticated use of symbols? Consider in that regard the amazing messenger bees who dance against a honeycomb within their hive to indicate where they have found a food source, their intricate movements very specifically symbolic, capable of precisely communicating the supply’s direction and distance from the hive. The process is little less than wondrous, but do bees then have language? Do whales? Do dolphins? Was a chimpanzee trained at Columbia University in the 1970s employing language when he signed Tickle me at times when he wanted to play, or even more intriguingly, Me sorry hug me after he had been scolded?

Distilling the essence of language is a bit like attempting to define love, and there is a simple reason why any number of scholarly and popular books on the larger subject of language steer well clear of actually defining it: you can far too readily land in a lexicographical corner when you attempt to do so. Yet near the end of the twentieth century, it is generally agreed that there are several components every true language must possess. Early in the 1960s, anthropologist Charles Hockett, perturbed by the absence of a universal definition of language, bravely devised one of his own, one that contained thirteen different features. Thirty years later, Hockett’s bakers-dozen definition has been whittled down to six components or so, and it may be that there is little left to whittle.

Every language, it seems safe enough to begin, must possess a lexicon, an alphabet, a code; simply, an agreed-upon set of symbols—sounds, graphics, hand positions—that singly or in combination represent its morphemes, its smallest decipherable elements. And every language also must possess syntax, a set of operating rules for manipulating its morphemes into meaning; and thirdly in that regard, a language must possess semanticity—it must be capable of eliciting meaning, something understandable.

On a kind of second tier of features, in every true language there is an arbitrary relationship between symbols and their meanings. It is only arbitrary, in other words, that in English the letters c, a, and t, in that order, represent the name for one kind of animal, while cl, o, and g represent another; there is no direct relationship between the symbols and the animals in either case, no reason save centuries of convention why the names couldn’t be interchanged. A language must be capable of productivity as well—it must generate and readily allow the incorporation of new or altered symbols. A language like ours, for instance, must be capable of creating meaningful new terminology as needed, words like transmission, telecommunications, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, every true language is capable of displacement, the ability to refer to things that are remote in time and space, the ability to discuss elephants without seeing one face-to-face, to refer to past events without somehow reenacting them. It is that feature of language, foremost among all the others, which makes most linguists willing to walk out on the limb where they assert that language is unique to humans. What is perhaps most improbable and most important about human language is our ability symbolically to bring both to mind and to dialogue people, places, and times that we haven’t personally experienced, and even—when language sometimes soars and transcends—to very closely approximate them, to bring them to a kind of linguistic life.

Although we can marvel at messenger bees, we seem on solid ground in assuming that they, in turn, cannot marvel at some of our sharper stuff. Neither parrots nor the cleverest chimps can talk to you about school holidays or baseball scores. And while it does seem certain that many whales and porpoises are capable of intricate kinds of communication, employing their cries and sonar-sensing capabilities in ways we are just beginning to understand, it seems very unlikely—so far as we now know—that the most articulate of them can tell their offspring stories about the fine old days at sea.

It was Ian’s apparent inability to hear his parents—the stories they spun at bedtime, the words with which they greeted him in the morning—rather than the fact that