Epiphany

Brienne Guirantes
Professor Khan
ENG 101 AB Honors
Sep 29, 2008

Epiphan

    Life is a trial by error sort of thing. It does not come with a pamphlet or a cheat sheet telling you what and how to go through it. Most of the time life doesn’t make sense and even when it does, the answers don’t seem to click until after the problem has resolved itself. However, there a few great moments in our lives when the light bulb turns on and we have a clear concise understanding of the mysteries of life. This we call the Epiphany.

    Films are something of a masterpiece as a viewer there is so much information being feed to us unconsciously that it is hard for us to imagine the work that goes into it consciously. I love films. So when the opportunity to spend 15 weeks at NYU’s Tisch School Future Filmmakers Workshop presented itself I took it. It was four months of strictly filmmaking with lectures from editors, filmmakers, and writers who worked in the industry. For a kid like me who only watched films and never laid my hand on a camera, this was like heaven on earth. The only catch was that every film we made could not have sound. Why? You may be asking. The reasoning was simple in there minds, we lacked the time or experience to really understand the importance of sound in movies. We were told that in undergraduate school we would spend a whole semester learning about sound itself. Now this put up a block on everyone’s creative flow, for sound was a pivotal part of movies themselves. We were left to focus only on the visual aspect of our films which we needed to perfect to compensate for lack of sound and dialogue.

    I being who I am found this to be annoying and felt that there was too much drama placed on something as trivial as sound. Really think about it, you just point a mic and make sure that whatever is recorded is clear and there it is…sound. You didn’t need a semester to learn that. It was just a ploy to make sound technicians feel more important than they really were.

    One day I was walking from the store on my way home. I walked along Westside Avenue, one of the busiest streets in the city. People shouting children giggling, car horns beeping. Every sound that can and could pollute the air was on that street. I turned onto Gifford and as I hit the corner…there was complete and utter silence. Nothing not even the beating of my heart or the sound of my own breath not even the sound of my own thoughts. Just silence. It loomed and produced such fear that I thought I had gone deaf in a moment. Suddenly the trees blew softly and the sound of air brushing against dead leaves was sharp. It started out soft the built up. Then the leaves ran across the concrete hard as if they carried the weight of the world on there stems. It scratched and screeched. Then the car horns started to seep into the medley dull and bellowing. And all was as it used to be.

    I stood still in disbelief, numb, from what I had just experienced. It was as if the world made sense and I had the answer to life. It was beyond knowing the magic of sound or even its importance, no. I understood it now I knew sound, I touched it that day, I caressed its cheek and held its hand, and in return it shared its secrets, its purpose, its soul. Sound evokes emotion, Sound perpetrates thought, Sound is not just a boom, or a bang. It is rage it is sorrow, it is laughter and in its absence it is fear.

    My epiphany went far beyond that moment and it transcended to a greater plain of thought. If we would stop to listen, life will show us the way, and true meaningful lessons are taught everywhere we just must be willing to learn. It took the absence of sound to realize the purpose of life.