The Distant Music of The Hounds

Last weekend, in a little antique shop in Southern Indiana, a customer came to the counter, a treasure in hand to be purchased and wrapped. I took the book from her, and discovered a full edition of Kipling's "Just So Stories." The volume had an illustration of the little elephant child trying to pull his nose away from the crocodile. The picture was one of those emotional triggers with the power to carry a person off to another place and time; in my case, the time machine took me back to a day of gardening I shared with my father. As we pulled new baby carrots from the soft, rich soil of the garden (and I kept breaking the tops off the carrots without taking them from the ground), my father told me the story of how the little elephant got his long trunk.

"In the high and far off times, The Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk."

I was surprised only by the emotional reaction caused by the picture, not the memory itself. Both my parents read to me constantly - my mother introduced me to Tom Sawyer, a chapter a time at bedtime, but my father read any and everything to me that interested him. One of the "stories" that stood out in my mind, but whose title I'd lost, was a piece about "the music of the hounds" which he'd read to me around Christmas time. It was, it turns out, a "comment" first published in The New Yorker on Christmas Eve, 1949.

To set the piece in perspective, in 1949, WWII was a scant four and a half years in the past, and many Americans from the ranks of politicians, businessmen, intellectuals and just plain family folk were debating, speculating on, and trying to plan the future of a newly born world power, the United States of America. Europeans as well were concentrating on plotting the future course of civilization, but nowhere was the sense of immanent possibility so rich and alive as it was in the USA.

My father read this piece to me one evening, as we sat in front of a blazing fireplace - there was no television in those days, so mothers and fathers did actually read to their children and talked about what thoughts they had on the content of the readings. My father liked this piece I believe because his roots were European and he thought a great deal about making the future a good place to live, and I liked the piece because I'd actually been hunting with hounds and the sound of their baying was a beautiful mystic thing which sent shivers down my spine. I'd also heard the short story by Issac Asimov about a robot named "Robbie" who was designed as a nannie and the evolving relationship between him and his "child." I made the connections to this story on two levels because of the things my father had already shared with me, so when my Kipling-tickled- memory found the proper "key words" the article was not difficult to find.

It is now 60 years since E. B. White's "comment" appeared in the December 24, 1949 issue of The New Yorker, but it is still interesting reading - a commentary on how far we have, or have not come, and on the ever-so-much-more commercialized treatment of Christmas and the Yultide Season. I'm not aware if Mr. White is still living, but I can only imagine what his reaction to "Christmas shopping as a patriotic act" statements which issued forth from the horror of 9/11.
Mr. White is correct, our "outward bound tracks" only lead back to Man himself.

Let me share the story with you, now.

The Distant Music of the Hounds
E. B. White

"To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. There was a little device we noticed in one of the sporting-goods stores—a trumpet that hunters hold to their ears so that they can hear the distant music of the hounds. Something of the sort is needed now to hear the incredibly distant sound of Christmas in these times, through the dark, material woods that surround it. “Silent Night,” canned and distributed in thundering repetition in the department stores, has become one of the greatest of all noisemakers, almost like the rattles and whistles of Election Night. We rode down on an escalator the other morning through the silent-nighting of the loudspeakers, and the man just in front of us was singing, 'I’m gonna wash this store right outta my hair, I’m gonna wash this store...'

The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart—over so many years, through so many cheap curtain-raisers. It is not destroyed even by all the arts and craftiness of the destroyers, having an essential simplicity that is everlasting and triumphant, at the end of confusion. We once went out at night with coonhunters and we were aware that it was not so much the promise of the kill that took the men away from their warm homes and sent them through the cold shadowy woods, it was something more human, more mystical—something even simpler. It was the night, and the excitement of the note of the hound, first heard, then not heard. It was the natural world, seen at its best and most haunting, unlit except by stars, impenetrable except to the knowing and the sympathetic.

Christmas in 1949 must compete as never before with the dazzling complexity of man, whose tangential desires and ingenuities have created a world that gives any simple thing the look of obsolescence—as though there were something inherently foolish in what is simple, or natural. The human brain is about to turn certain functions over to an efficient substitute, and we hear of a robot that is now capable of handling the tedious details of psychoanalysis, so that the patient no longer need confide in a living doctor but can take his problems to a machine, which sifts everything and whose “brain” has selective power and the power of imagination. One thing leads to another. The machine that is imaginative will, we don’t doubt, be heir to the ills of the imagination; one can already predict that the machine itself may become sick emotionally, from strain and tension, and be compelled at last to consult a medical man, whether of flesh or of steel. We have tended to assume that the machine and the human brain are in conflict. Now the fear is that they are indistinguishable. Man not only is notably busy himself but insists that the other animals follow his example. A new bee has been bred artificially, busier than the old bee.

So this day and this century proceed toward the absolutes of convenience, of complexity, and of speed, only occasionally holding up the little trumpet (as at Christmastime) to be reminded of the simplicities, and to hear the distant music of the hound. Man’s inventions, directed always onward and upward, have an odd way of leading back to man himself, as a rabbit track in snow leads eventually to the rabbit. It is one of his more endearing qualities that man should think his tracks lead outward, toward something else, instead of back around the hill to where he has already been; and it is one of his persistent ambitions to leave earth entirely and travel by rocket into space, beyond the pull of gravity, and perhaps try another planet, as a pleasant change. He knows that the atomic age is capable of delivering a new package of energy; what he doesn’t know is whether it will prove to be a blessing. This week, many will be reminded that no explosion of atoms generates so hopeful a light as the reflection of a star, seen appreciatively in a pasture pond. It is there we perceive Christmas—and the sheep quiet, and the world waiting."