Shouting Won't Help

“We hear as we breathe—effortlessly—until we can’t” Katherine Bouton

In her memoir, Shouting Won’t Help, Katherine Bouton writes that forty eight million Americans have some degree of hearing loss. You don’t have to be entirely deaf to have trouble hearing, especially in crowded, noisy situations.

Hearing speech is usually the most difficult problem for those with hearing loss. Bouton claims one in five people, across all age groups, has trouble understanding speech and many cannot hear certain sounds at all.

Hearing difficulties are known to outnumber vision problems by a sizable percentage. And the problem is exacerbated by the fact that hearing aids don’t work as well as glasses. In fact, by amplifying certain sounds, they sometimes make hearing worse.

Helen Keller considered her deafness to be a much more serious limitation than blindness. “…it means the loss of the most vital stimulus—the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.”

Bouton first became aware of her problem when she was only thirty while working as the editor for the Times Book Review and then later, at other departments at the Times. She couldn’t catch everything being said at the group meetings she attended and even in speaking one-on-one with a person in her office. She heard voices, was aware who was speaking, but didn’t hear the words they were saying.

As she got older, she heard less and less, “I had trouble at teacher’s conferences. One of the kids or my husband would fill me in. I missed most of what was said in school assemblies. I never heard a single graduation speech. There were times when my hearing loss was wrenching. I missed confidences, murmured fears, muttered anger. I never heard the backseat chatter and gossip between my children and their friends.”

Eventually she became bilaterally deaf, all the while hesitant to begin wearing hearing aids. They are expensive, for some unattractive, easy to misplace, and sometimes not particularly helpful. Eventually she began using them, but they didn’t improve her hearing a great deal.

To my delight she said email is the” best thing that’s ever happened” to those who have trouble hearing. She has received emails using voice-activated software that she might otherwise not have been able to hear on the phone.

She finally accepted a cochlear implant, in fact two of them, and they came with their own limitations, like trouble transmitting music very well. She took a lip reading course, studied body language, met with researchers, and then other audiologists. But she never did recover her hearing.

“Despite my sophisticated devices, I still can’t hear well enough to follow a conversation except under optimum circumstances—one-on-one, facing each other, in a quiet place. I hear speech, but I often don’t understand it.”

Hearing loss affects friendships, family and professional lives. If you know anyone who has trouble hearing, you might want to tell them about Katherine Bouton’s book. It might help them to recognize a hearing problem that they have been denying or simply unaware of.

On Hearing

As his hearing grew weaker in the years ahead he felt more and more isolated, trapped in an incompetent body, foolish and pathetic.
Andrew Motion

A few years ago, I noticed I wasn’t hearing as well as I used to. I didn’t always catch the questions my students were asking in large lecture classes, nor was I hearing much of the chatter on television with the same volume setting I always used.

Eventually the problem grew somewhat worse and I tried using tiny digital hearing aids. I found them disappointing, as I no longer sounded like myself, they amplified too many unpleasant sounds, and they were useless in a social situation with a fair amount of background noise. Hearing aids do not accomplish for the ears what glasses do for the eyes.

In time, I began to appreciate the new auditory world that I lived in. Closed captions on the television made hearing largely unnecessary and that was the same for the subtitles in the films I preferred. And when I went to the theater or to an English language film, I could usually obtain a wireless audio amplifier, if I wanted one.

My world became less noisy, the roar of the traffic didn’t bother me, and the overall quietude appealed to me. So did observing all the non-verbal cues of human behavior that I usually didn’t pay much attention to and yet often conveyed as much meaning, if not more, than spoken words.

My views about this new auditory world, differs from David Lodge’s expressed in Deaf Sentence. He writes: "Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse." Lodge had to give up teaching and greatly missed “the rhythm of the academic year.” However, I believe his hearing loss was far greater than mine.

As my social world narrowed, I began to wonder about the consequences of the limited number of conversations I have. There are days when I speak to no one, whether in person or on the phone. So I turn to the research to find out and am not surprised by the conflicting results. I look more closely at the studies to try to determine the most rigorous. It is impossible to identify them.

Absent that, I turn to those solitary souls who I most admire and here I see no change in their talent. I think of Beethoven who wrote his 9th Symphony when he was deaf. He said:

"Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, 'Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf…But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing.”

I do find it embarrassing when I turn down invitations to social gatherings where it is usually impossible for me to hear the speech of the person I am sitting next to. What can I say when a person talks to me? “Could you speak louder?” “Would you mind repeating that?” No, I say neither of these things. Instead I mumble something back and hope that I will not be thought deranged.

Beethoven was similarly embarrassed:

"Forgive me when you see me draw back when I would have gladly mingled with you. My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas."

In her Paris Review interview, Marilynne Robinson, who lives a largely solitary life, commented:

"… I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book."