In the 1980s, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States detected a mysterious sound at 52 Hz in the North Pacific. The U.S. Navy later tracked it and confirmed that the sound came from a baleen whale. Its vocal frequency was far higher than the hearing range of its own kind, and so it wandered alone, singing for more than twenty years without ever finding a single listener.
When I first came across this story as a child, one question stayed with me:
Could she hear herself speak?
After looking through the relevant material, the answer seems clear: it is almost impossible that she could not hear her own 52 Hz voice. Fin whales have a broad hearing range, reaching from 10 Hz to 30 kHz. Seawater carries sound, and bones carry sound too. Alice knew she was crying out.
And perhaps, to her companions, this “different” voice was not entirely inaudible either. It was only that 52 Hz was indeed somewhat higher than the usual main frequency of blue whale or fin whale songs, which commonly fall around 15–25 Hz.
There is a degree of fabrication in this story.
So the truth is, Alice’s companions did not abandon her because she could not speak. They abandoned her because when she spoke, she sounded like a freak.
It was not that “Alice could not speak, and so no one understood her.” It was that she had been speaking all along, and perhaps her companions did hear her, but they never took that sound as language.
Loneliness does not always come from silence. Sometimes, loneliness comes from spending your whole life making a sound, only for the world to hear it as noise. I always comfort myself by thinking that as long as one is sincere enough, someone will eventually hear; as long as the voice is loud enough, someone will eventually answer. But what the ocean taught me is this: being heard does not mean being understood; being noticed does not mean being accepted.
Drifting alone through the ocean, the sea brings nothing but suffocation.
All around her, there is not silence.
All around her is water.
All echoes.
All herself.