There are nights in San Francisco when I wake up in the middle of the night and hear the foghorns out in the bay, and I have lain in bed and felt the beauty of where I live, listening to the different sounds at their different intervals, and the whole idea of a horn sounding over the land and the sea has been one that has made the night and the city feel like my own. It has sounded like a horn that is watching over everyone sleeping, and those who are awake and coming to rest after crossing an ocean, and listening to it purposefully feels like it gives me a little access to all it sees.
I have tried to think about places where a horn sounding at night does not carry any of the beauty of a city, places like Baghdad, where those horns carry an ugliness instead. I have lain awake in the middle of the night thinking of a horn having the exact opposite feeling, that the night and the city were not one’s own, that they belonged to somebody else, who could control them from above.
I have listened to those foghorns and wondered if I should forgo their beauty, since their sounds are happening in the country that is responsible for the horn in Baghdad, and in Kabul. I do not know what it means to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a horn and not fall back into a dream of the world. From my bed I have been one of those sailors coming to shore in a new city, sailing under the bridge. But I have wanted to say, to hell with horns, if a world with foghorns has to include those other horns.
I don’t need them, I’ve thought. I’ll take a world where everybody wakes up to silence. Meanwhile those foghorns have been sounding, through my sleepiest thoughts and my most wakeful, and finally I will let them guide me, just as they have been guiding those sailors away from the rocks. I will let them guide me away from a night of no sleep, away from a night of a man declaring his independence from horns, declaring that the world ought to just go on in silence from here on out.
Silence is not enough, because tomorrow morning you will have to begin to speak again, and you can do it with the beauty of the foghorns or the ugliness of those other horns. It is a very real option. You can take those other horns with you everywhere you go because anywhere you go will be America and you can tell them – this is what they hear in the middle of the night in Baghdad and in Kabul, this is what they hear when they hear horns.
But forgoing beauty is what a man does when he does not know what to do with it. For now, listen to the foghorns. Be glad for the way they are keeping those sailors safe. You are not hiding from those other horns when you listen. You are in the moment you are in. You are telling them that you acknowledge both, the beauty and the ugliness of the world, and that may seem like an insufficient conclusion to reach, but then that is what the dream that you fall back asleep to is for.
