Songs at Twilight
The most beautiful sound I have ever heard was created by about a dozen old men in a little church on the island of Lewis and Harris.
You will probably never hear it. It is part of a culture that is fading away.
Lewis and Harris is the northernmost island of the Outer Hebrides, and it feels like a different world from most of Scotland. Stacks of black peat sit in front of the homes, to burn for fuel, and the smell of it is always on the air. A sign at the start of a path, reading “Please Respect the Sabbath,” does not seem out of place. The sun in the winter rises at 9:00 in the morning and sets at 3:00 in the afternoon. It is a place of desolate beauty and old-fashioned faith.
Lewis and Harris is also famous as one of the last enclaves of Scottish Gaelic, a dying language. And yet, while on the island, I never once heard Gaelic spoken until I went into the church. It was a Saturday evening service, to prepare the mind and soul for Sabbath the next morning. About a dozen people were in attendance, all of them elderly. They sang psalms in a stirring call-and-response style, only one of which—Psalm 145—was in Gaelic. The Gaelic psalm was sung in a different mode, ethereally beautiful in a tortured, primal sort of way.
No Replacement
If you’ve never heard Gaelic psalm-singing, I urge you to listen to it. But listening to a recording doesn’t compare with being in the middle of it, surrounded by voices that echo about in the vaulted wooden church building. Better still would have been to join them in song myself, if only I could have. For participating in something—flesh and blood and breath—will always be an experience of entirely different quality from that of merely observing it.
There’s an old Scottish Gaelic saying, Cha mhol duin’ a sheud ’s e aige: “A man doesn’t praise his jewel while he has it.” As someone recently pointed out, cultural diversity has never been so rare as in this age, when it is idolized. Now that it is apparent that the Scottish Gaelic language is dying out, it is booming in popularity. Recently, Duolingo came out with a Scottish Gaelic learning program, and over a million people internationally have tried it—many times the number of native speakers in the world.
Learning an endangered language on an app is fun—I started the program myself—but there is a big difference between that and living and breathing a language in the context of a community. In response to the Duolingo phenomenon, the Hebridean writer Angus Peter Campbell pointed out: “A thousand colourful plastic roses can never replace the fragrance and beauty of a single natural one, growing on a prickly thorn by the roadside.”
It’s hard to preserve a culture. Cultures, like some animals, die in captivity. And later, taxidermied in a museum, they may still be beautiful—but they are not the same type of thing they were when they were alive. What is more, the various aspects of a culture cannot be successfully isolated from one another. Language, art, music, ritual—are all woven together in a tapestry of daily life. Tear a thread out and all you have is a thread. A pretty thread, but still just a thread.
As I left the church and walked out to the parking lot, I lingered to talk with an elderly churchgoer, one Ian MacRae. I noted that I hadn’t heard much Gaelic spoken on Lewis and Harris.
“Gaelic is dying on the island,” he replied sadly.
Daniel Witt is a writer and English teacher living in Amman, Jordan.
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