When I look out my office window on my ninth floor apartment along the Charles River as it winds its way through greater Boston, I can contemplate acres of fully grown trees nearby. That’s Mt. Auburn Cemetery, which I studied many years ago, when I was preparing my essay, “Nothing More Beautiful Than Death?”
The so-called “rural cemetery movement” that flourished in the U.S. beginning in the late nineteenth century, gave birth to a number of awe-inspiring human creations like Mt. Auburn that were designed to beautify death. Turns out that my wife and I live right next to one of the greatest of those national monuments.
Over the past twenty-five years, Laurel and I have enthusiastically made Mt. Auburn our own. A splendid backyard, for sure. On holidays, when visitors from Greater Boston and indeed from all over the country find their way to Mt. Auburn, we love the place all the more, glad that so many others can enjoy it, too. But on most days, we have most of that rich and hilly green abundance all to ourselves, along with the dozens of caretakers, who busy themselves pulling blades of grass one by one from vinca beds or triming assiduously around the gravestones or the many beds of variegated flowers and shrubs.
In the midst of this elegantly verdant world, perhaps improbably, I have come to appreciate modern technology more than ever before. True, this hallowed natural place of countless specimen trees and other seasonal plantings seems worlds away from our technological era. Mt. Auburn is a peaceful natural reserve to which harried people like me can go to escape from the often treeless world of modern urban noise. But it’s also much more. On a typical day, you can actually hear the songs of many birds! That particular hearing has always delighted me. But, recently, more than ever.
Enter modern – or post-modern? – technology. It so happens that Laurel and I, like many others these days, use a smart phone. In my low-tech innocence, I have lately discovered what for many others may well be obvious, that that device can hear the songs of birds! And also give you photos of just that species of birds whose song you may be hearing at any particular time, even though you can’t see them!
On a recent afternoon, I came home from one of our frequent midday walks around Mt. Auburn with this list of birds on my phone, all of whose voices our phone – and thankfully we, too, however unknowingly, had just heard: Blue Jay, American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee, Northern Cardinal, White-breasted Nuthatch, Tufted Titmouse, Gray Catbird, Golden-crowned Kinglet, Eastern Screech-Owl, Winter Wren.
It makes me think of the Little Prince, in Antoine de Saint-Exuperay’s children’s classic by that name. At one point in that story, the Little Prince is sitting on a very small planet, so small indeed that he can contemplate sunsets and then sun-rises in a very short time. Says the Little Prince: “When the wonder is so great, one can only obey.”
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