Does “leaf-shushed world” means a peaceful world like when you are in the woods, and all you hear is the sound of fallen leaves under your feet when you step on them?
Freddy wants a tree-house, and I always meant to build one in the copper beech. Nothing fancy – just a sort of tree-borne raft, like the one me and David Ockeridge built in his dad’s orchard, when we were kids in Black Swan Green. In my daydream I’d tell Fred that the copper beech is guarding his prezzie, and I’d watch him run down, find the rope ladder, and climb up to a better, leaf-shushed world. The thought of another man building Freddy’s tree-house in an ordinary green beech made me hurl my trowel through the shed window. Shark-fins of crashing glass followed the trowel.
Excerpt from David Mitchell’s The Massive Rat.
Answer
Have you ever had a conversation in an empty house? The lack of furniture or hanging artwork in the rooms can create an odd echo off the stark walls, where you can hear yourself talk in an unfamiliar way.
Acoustic engineers try to combat this using a myriad of diffusion and absorption techniques, to reduce echoes while musicians record their music.
Nature has its own sound room: the canopy of leaves in a well-treed area. When the author mentions
climb up to a better, leaf-shushed world
he is referring to an idyllic time where he, as a boy, would play with his friend in their tree house. We know that the tree house wasn’t fancy – just a raft in the trees, so to speak – so why was the world "better"? I’m guessing it was a time of active imaginations and memorable play, and one thing that strikes the author in hindsight is how quiet it was, so deep in the woods, where picturesque leaves suppressed noise in the same way foam cones or angled panels do in a studio.
Can’t you just hear how quiet it was out there in the middle of summer, when the leaves were thick, and they shushed the noises from the nearby roadways?
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Lincoln , Answer Author : J.R.
