Echoes

Is an echo an instant memory?

Echo is a cool word. There’s something mysterious and magical about echoes. We take them for granted, but we shouldn’t. In their own way, echoes are every bit as beautiful as rainbows, but louder and less colorful.

A favorite of mine is a Grand Canyon echo. It takes a long time, and it’s faint because it comes from far away. You might not even hear it because of the distance, but if you do, that very distance makes it amazing, much more so than an echo from an empty parking lot.

Another favorite: an enormous cavern in Northern Italy, said to be large enough to contain Notre Dame cathedral. It gave back more echoes than I could count. Yet another: actually, a non-echo. I was a mile underground, in a hundred-year-old gold mine somewhere in South Dakota, walking in the deadest black I’ve ever experienced from one working part of the mine to another. Just me. I stopped, turned off my miner’s light, and listened. No sound. Dead air. The darkest dark I’ve ever known. I yelled as loudly as I could just to hear the echo. Nothing. Somehow that eerie mine tunnel swallowed up the loudest sound I could muster. I had a nightmare that night.

Why is an echo so cool? It’s nothing more than sound waves bouncing back at us after we make a noise. I think it must be the reverberation. Don’t most echoes have an echo-echo, or sometimes an echo-echo-echo?

There are other experiences that are echoes, although we don’t think of them that way. For instance, a photograph. A photo isn’t the original sight, it’s a representation, but, like an echo, it brings us hints of the original. The advantage of a photo over an echo is that we can keep the photo and experience the visual flashback as often and for as long as we wish, unlike echoes, which are fleeting, not to be captured, not to be arrested in any way. Brief…then gone.

A memory is an echo. My mother died a decade ago, but I can call up echoes of her at will. My first backyard fort was a trench dug in the dirt and covered with scrap wood. It’s a favorite memory, echoing summertime adventure and imagination. A girl I wanted to marry, but who didn’t want me, was another echo, a bittersweet one. Rocky, the world’s best dog and my best friend when I was ten, is long gone, yet he’ll always be the standard by which all dogs are measured…remembered and loved as if he were still running by my side as I bicycled everywhere and nowhere.

Thoughts that we don’t realize aren’t ours—which is most of them—are echoes from others, although original thoughts must be possible, otherwise, how could there be an Einstein, a Shakespeare, a Madam Curie…or a Yogi Berra? True creativity can’t be an echo. Echoes are never new; they’re repeats, reverberations, replays. Yet, they’re a renewal of sorts, reviving something faintly, and reviving it again and again, more and more faintly, until it ghosts away.

Are we echoes of our parents? I think that depends on our life experiences. Like echoes, we can be shifted, for better or worse, by our encounters and the nature of our surroundings, but unlike echoes, we have agency and can shape ourselves. So, no, we’re not echoes, but something more complex. Still and all, don’t we carry our parents within…at least a little?

Does any of this matter? Do echo metaphors bring us any new understandings and insights? Probably not. But echo is still a cool word.