A Deaf Man's Mare: On the Silence of Faded Ink

I have been contemplating a stubborn phrase, a paradox that settled in my mind after reading the correspondence of an amateur ornithologist from the 1890s. In one letter, penned in a hasty, windblown scrawl, he apologizes for the quality of his handwriting. ‘Please excuse the scribble,’ he writes, ‘I am writing with what the French call l’encre pâlie—faded ink. It is the colour of a memory, and just as difficult to read.’ The words themselves, a century and a half later, are perfectly legible, iron-gall black against the foxed paper. The ink he complained of has held fast. It is the context, the world that gave it meaning, that has truly faded.

This is what I have come to think of as the ‘deaf man’s mare.’ The phrase is an old folk saying, an idiom for a thing that is gone, absent, completely unavailable. A deaf man cannot hear the whinny of his own horse. The sound exists, the animal is present, but the essential connection is severed. So much of our engagement with archives and old books is an exercise in listening for the whinny of a deaf man’s mare. We see the words, we analyze the sentences, but the living silence that once surrounded them—the assumptions, the shared jokes, the unspoken fears—has evaporated, leaving behind a beautiful, inscrutable shell.

Take that ornithologist’s complaint. His frustration was not just with the pale ink, but with the potential for a failed connection, a misinterpretation. He was racing against the afternoon light, against the post-boy’s schedule, against the slow decay of a thought. His apology was a bridge thrown across a gap he could already perceive. We, reading it now, cross a far wider chasm. We have all the time in the world to decipher his script, but we can never fully grasp the urgency that propelled his pen. The social choreography of letter-writing, the weight of a week’s wait for a reply, the very texture of the silence his letter was meant to break—these are the deaf man’s mare.

The Scribe of the Unheard

This is not a cause for despair, but for a different kind of attention. The craft of reading slowly becomes, then, an act of tuning our ear to a different frequency. We are not trying to resurrect the whinny, but to understand the contours of the silence it left behind. We become scribes of the unheard. The faint pencil note in a margin, the pressed flower that left a ghost of itself on the page opposite, the water stain that obscures a crucial adjective—these are not imperfections. They are the negative space of history, the silent testimony of the deaf man’s world.

And so, my own note-taking has changed. I find myself less concerned with summarizing arguments and more with recording the absences. I jot down not just what a letter says, but what it carefully avoids saying. I note the passages where the handwriting steadies, betraying a moment of deliberate, painful composition. I attend to the quality of the paper, wondering if its cheapness signals frugality or hardship. It is a practice of listening to the void. For in the archive, the most profound stories are often told not by the ink that remains, but by the echoes of what has been lost to the relentless fade of time.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: