Those voices are the sweeter which have fallen

 forever silent, mournfully

resounding only in the heart that sorrows.

 Cavafy (transl. Daniel Mendelsohn)

(…)

The sea gives out a secret voice–

 a voice that enters

our heart and moves it,

 and delights it.

Cavafy (transl. Rae Dalven)

Hearing is the gateway to sounds, while listening is the path to the sound of time. Sounds alone do not necessarily reveal the sound of time, just as events alone do not necessarily arrange themselves into time. Hearing and listening are not the same, just as taking part in events and being in time are different things. Listening (and entering time) means setting out on a journey; making—or perhaps yielding to—a decision, overcoming inertia, performing an act. It is recognition—beginning to distinguish and participating in tensions and conflicts. It is undergoing metamorphosis and emerging from a cocoon.

Listening (and entering time) is an act of the body and entails revealing oneself in the body. In listening, one loses one’s innocence, comes out of hiding, and risks being noticed. One relinquishes the freedom to choose a path—once taken, a path is not so easily retraced. One cannot listen for the first time again. Listening sets memory in motion, and the sound of time reveals the monstrosity of forgetting and the fragility of recollection. Both carry the treacherous sweetness of anticipation.

In listening—through listening, in short—a person is constituted and takes concrete form: like a candle with a bright, living flame, fuelled by a relatively stable body that holds together only under certain conditions and for a certain time, and sustained by the encounter and violent reaction between its own substance and a substance from outside. A person is extinguished when their body burns away, or when they lose contact with what kindles them from beyond themselves. A person shines in time.

In listening, finally, a voice reveals itself. Not necessarily intelligible, but seemingly possible to understand. As though it belonged to someone. As though somewhere out there were another living person with a voice. This voice sounds almost familiar, as though one might recognise it. Déjà entendu. It sounds like someone else’s voice and, at the same time, one’s own, only coming from another time. As though one were listening to it the way one looks into a mirror—hearing one’s own reflection in time. As though one were a reflection of the world, and the world recognised itself in that reflection. As though one were listening to a distant echo of a primordial, lost indistinguishability. As when, with a choking surge of emotion mingled with mortal terror and a sense of peering into a dark core, one recognises in a parent’s voice a tone identical to one’s own.

Drama unfolds in listening.

Some of the maps I have looked into

Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future
Thomas Clifton, Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology
David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation
Joseph Kerman, Gary Tomlinson, Listen
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening
Richard Taruskin, Text and Act