Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  Unless you are deaf, total silence is not a possibility. In this, it differs from darkness, which under the right circumstances you can experience. Several years ago, I traveled through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, a region filled with caves that anyone can visit. It was a rainy, gray January weekday morning. Summer tourists, kids on school trips, and almost all other potential visitors had disappeared. I stopped at Endless Caverns. Nine people gathered at the ticket booth, and an amiable guide led us on our descent. Like Dante going down into the underworld, we stepped carefully, not so much fearful as modestly anxious. More than a hundred feet beneath the earth’s surface, our soft-spoken guide told us to circle around and to hold on to one another. “You will now experience total darkness,” she said, and flipped a light switch that plunged us all into blackness so deep that I could not see a hand in front of my face. Or anything else. We stood this way for no more than two terrifying minutes, and then the light returned, relieving our anxiety. A bit shaken, we climbed back up to the cave’s mouth and welcomed the day, which—however damp, dreary, and full of gloom—seemed spectacularly sunny.

  How often one wishes for that final or Platonic pair of earplugs that will eliminate all sounds, pleasant as well as noxious, appreciated as well as unwanted, necessary as well as superfluous. To do this would require strenuous measures, possible only in a specially equipped sensory-deprivation laboratory. And people have tried for a long time to get the desired results. Thomas Carlyle fantasized about a soundproof room; Franz Kafka ordered his earplugs from Berlin, imagining that the technicians in a big sophisticated city could provide him with greater comfort than what he had available to him in provincial Prague. More recently, one wealthy, eccentric, and phonophobic New Yorker commissioned an architect to build for him the world’s quietest house on Long Island, but he then complained that he could hear the front door and then the hum of something in his desk.

  As silence gets closer, we hear smaller things, like our computer’s tiny motor. Even the fanciest equipment can do only so much to reduce, let alone eliminate, the ambient noise. The equivalent of my underground spelunking blackness would be an anechoic chamber, which can go down to −10 decibels. (For comparison, a jet engine is 150 decibels; a jackhammer 100 decibels; a very calm room 20–30 decibels.) You can achieve a partial effect with noise-canceling headphones, but these never do the whole job. In an airplane, you can blot out nearby conversations, but you still hear the thrum of the jet engines. And even if total noise elimination were possible, one’s body produces internal vibrations, transmitted through the bones and corporeal fluids; in the absence of external sound, you will hear your own self, first your heart and then the blood moving through it.

  * * *

  I have been thinking about sound and noise, quiet and silence, and the inadequacy of speech—the very words we use to talk about sound—for a while. It is not mere curmudgeonhood that accounts for one’s increasing intolerance for certain kinds of noise. Everyone, especially over a certain age, can make a list of pet peeves: the cell phone going off inopportunely in the concert hall; loud conversations in railway cars; the constant presence of televisions in airports; rap music blaring from open car windows on city streets; the howling of a dog that has been cooped up all day at home in the adjacent apartment; restaurants in which civilized conversation is no longer possible; the low moan of a neighbor’s “entertainment center”; or the tapping of stiletto heels on a bare floor in the apartment above you. Some people cover their ears when a subway car or fire truck screeches by; the screechiness, like chalk on a blackboard, even more than the volume, offends them. Others are more disturbed by human sounds—wailing babies, sparring domestic partners—than industrial and mechanical ones. Many of us wince more when, traveling abroad, we hear our compatriots hollering en masse than when we hear the similarly loud sounds coming from people of other nationalities or in languages we do not understand. We make allowances for others. We forgive the foreigner, but shrill cries in English raise the blood pressure.

  And thank goodness for the so-called Quiet Cars on Amtrak.

  What deafens one person’s ears and deadens the spirit gives pleasure and uplift to someone else. Consider the generous, sympathetic, worldly toleration of Jane Austen’s narrator in Persuasion:

  Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity. When Lady Russell, not long afterwards, was entering Bath on a wet afternoon, and driving through the long course of streets from the Old Bridge to Camden Place, amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men, and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of pattens, she made no complaint. No, these were noises which belonged to the winter pleasures; her spirits rose under their influence.

  More than any of her other novels, Persuasion radiates with Austen’s warm appreciation of human difference in tastes, habits, and predilections. Everyone loves his or her own ways best, and Austen reminds us that these preferences are like aesthetic choices—felt along the pulse, in the body as well as the spirit—and infinitely expandable. Her wisdom is not mere feel-good cultural relativism but intelligent, pragmatic hedonism that encourages us to tolerate one another for the sake of civic harmony.

  Responses to sound change with age. Many babies can sleep through an explosion. Most adults cannot. Our responses change, as well, with location. Consider music. Noise can hold us captive in the concert hall. On the radio or stereo, we can adjust the volume, minimize discordancy, put obtrusive sounds into a background buzz. But it is also a well-acknowledged truth that people who tolerate or even relish chic radical experiments in the visual arts are usually much slower to accept the latest experiments in music. In a museum, you can walk past something that doesn’t appeal to you. An art historian friend of mine talks about “noisy paintings,” echoing Diderot, the encyclopédiste who said that Boucher’s pictures create “an unbearable racket for the eye.” Still, you can simply shut your eyes or avert your glance when you see something that bores or offends you. (Three centuries ago, Richard Steele made a similar observation and lodged the same complaint: “I have often lamented that we cannot close our ears with as much ease as we can our eyes.”) In the concert hall, you sit imprisoned by both dissonant sounds and the length of time required to endure them. A person can be tortured through sound but not, for the most part, through sight.

  Silence, like the star-studded nighttime sky formerly available to all but now invisible to virtually everyone, has become a lost commodity. Some of us make efforts to retrieve it. Privacy and slowness, equally in short supply, are its cousins, requiring cultivation. Noise, like public life and communal activity, dissipates as well as stimulates energy. Thoreau had it right: “Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts.” Where do we, especially those of us who live in cities, find it? Do we really need CNN in airports or music in restaurants? Without entering a Trappist monastery, or otherwise taking a vow of silence, how can we effect noise reduction in our daily lives? If you have the good fortune to live on a vast property, you may have momentary respite. But few people can, or wish to, remain agoraphobic forever. We live in the world. Nature—a park, a lake, a desert, even a backyard—can offer weekend solace, although the hum if not the roar of traffic, the most pervasive noise on the planet, exists everywhere, in the country as well as the metropolis.

  Silence has a next of kin, however: it is called Quiet. We can try to discover or achieve, and then maintain it, sometimes with difficulty. For years, I have looked for tranquillity in four kinds of urban venues. You used to be able to eat a civilized meal in an intimate restaurant and enjoy serious conversations in hushed tones. When I was in college, long ago and far away, we would drive to New York from the provinces to enjoy big-city delights: museums, concerts, plays, and, most of all, food. Too much mystery meat, covered with bland brown gravy, from the universit
y cafeteria can turn a desperate, hungry adolescent into a budding epicure in search of a more sophisticated meal. Manhattan’s West Side used to be dotted with small, unpretentious brasseries like Brittany du Soir. It was staffed with stiff French waiters of the old school who didn’t introduce themselves to you, try to cozy up and flatter you, or tell you that what you had just ordered was “an excellent choice.” They did not tell you what “Chef” (which has since turned into a proper noun) had purchased that morning at the farmers’ market. They wore black or white jackets and bow ties. Their hair was oiled and slick. They minded their manners and performed their duties. You minded your manners and did the eating. If you had a question, you asked. They answered. Then you got down to the serious business at hand: enjoying a meal of exotic stuff you never ate at home. Escargots! Artichauts vinaigrette! Quenelles de brochet! Île flottante! Over dinner, you were also conducting polite, even intense, conversations about life’s important issues or crying over romance gone sour. Restaurants were for intimacy, and for intimacy peace and quiet are prerequisites.

  Those days are gone forever, like black-and-white television and rotary telephones. In nearly all restaurants, everywhere, it seems, commotion and hysteria have replaced tranquillity.

  But not quite everywhere, not yet. Last year, I refreshed my memory of civilized life when, on a trip to Paris, I made a point of eating in highly recommended but not break-the-bank bistros. We sat cheek by jowl with our neighbors, whose food we could see. We could even grab a forkful of it. We could hear their conversations, but only if we listened hard. Why? Everyone was speaking softly. Politesse still existed. I was appeased. But in the States, how many times have you returned from a dinner, having spent a king’s ransom, and come down with laryngitis to boot? When did the noise levels in restaurants begin to pose a public health hazard?

  I knew I had tapped into some new roar in the zeitgeist more than a decade ago when I went for an early supper with three friends to a now defunct eatery in Dallas. We were the only guests. Music was blaring. I said to the waiter in my gentlest tone, “Would you be so kind as to turn the music down, or off?” He returned with the owner.

  “What’s the problem?” she inquired.

  “The music is so loud we can’t hear ourselves talk,” I replied imploringly.

  “But that’s the whole point!” she said.

  Things have only grown worse. Recently, I went with a worldly foodie friend to a fancy San Francisco restaurant. We might as well have been at an SMU football game. My dining companion was in heaven; I was at least in purgatory. For our decent but costly meal in a beautiful room, we suffered at the hands of an unctuous waiter who practically sat on our laps, and under deafening noise caused by high ceilings, sound-amplifying tile, loud music, and people screaming. I expressed my discomfort. “It’s fun! Dinner as theater!” my friend helpfully explained.

  If I want theater, I buy a ticket and go to a theater to see a play. I don’t want to witness, let alone participate in, the soap opera on all sides of me, any more than I want to eat architecturally sculpted vertical food. Let’s hear it for calm, and relative silence, and a nice plate of things laid out horizontally.

  Am I too much an old-fashioned, kvetching purist? I hope not. I am a mild-mannered college professor with excellent hearing and simple tastes. I want good food, pleasant surroundings, and tranquillity. I don’t want to walk onto the set of Sex and the City. Quiet is a diminishing resource, like water, clean air, and petroleum. Unlike oil, however, there’s no reason we cannot regain more of it.

  Where does the noise come from? It has three sources, but these make for a kind of chicken-and-egg dilemma. Who knows which came first? Restaurants like to pump up the noise and the music in order to turn tables more quickly, and also to make people think they’re dining where the action is. Being where the action is naturally appeals to the young and the hip. So restaurants deliberately use sound-enhancing equipment rather than sound-deadening materials. That’s for starters. It doesn’t matter whether ceilings are high or low. And, to continue with causes of the din, they turn on the music to fortissimo. Finally, people must scream. When one table screams, the next table screams. On it goes.

  Young people—who by and large have not been trained in the niceties of polite conversation, in which people talk one at a time, in quiet voices—tend to be threatened by silence. And they become so used to screaming that even in a quiet place they’ll start to yell, and then everyone around them will join in. The noise snowballs.

  Regardless of ceilings, acoustics, or music, one’s neighbors can spoil everything. Think of your favorite little bistro. You can’t pick who will sit next to you. At an intimate restaurant one night, the people beside us were so rambunctious that we couldn’t speak across a circular table for six. On my way out, I stopped and said, ever so sweetly, to the group of drunken merrymakers: “Do everyone a favor. The next time you’re out, if you’re going to be loud, please try to make sure that your conversation isn’t so boring.” Nonplussed, they continued their revels.

  Even when the servers and the hosts try to be helpful, they simply cannot understand what “quiet” means. For a recent Sunday brunch, I walked with a friend into what seemed like a sparsely populated local place. We were greeted by both a smiling hostess and the inevitable musical accompaniment washing over us from speakers on all sides. “Is there a corner where there’s no music?” I asked gently and hopefully.

  “Certainly,” said the obliging hostess. She led us to a side room, even emptier than the main one. We sat at a booth. Then I realized that “no music” does not mean “quiet.” Above us on the wall were hung three large television screens broadcasting Sunday’s football games. With sound. I summoned the waiter and posed a similar question to him. “Could you turn the television sound off, since no one here is watching the games?”

  “Not a problem, sir,” he helpfully replied.

  After ninety seconds or so of silence, the music came back on. Apparently, one had two choices: music or football. No one in the restaurant could imagine that a third choice was possible.

  I have a dream. I want a boîte du quartier, a neighborhood place where I can go for a good meal and quiet conversation. What to do? Where to go if you don’t want over-upholstered plush, or over-miked rush and glitz where the wild things grow? Where you don’t have to take out a second mortgage and can still have a conversation about life’s persistent mysteries? Everyone can make recommendations, but you’re not always safe. One recent night, I went to a Dallas restaurant where nothing has changed in a quarter century—neither the staff, the menu, the decor, nor the best pommes frites in town—and where you hear Handel or Vivaldi, not rock. There were three tables of two and one of six. The last, at the far end of the small restaurant, was full not of raucous kids but of hearing-impaired, screaming eighty-somethings having the time of their lives, thinking they were in their own dining room.

  I had three choices: to go over and politely tell them to turn it down, to tell the waiter to do so, or to wait and hope they’d get out soon. I chose option number three, and after forty minutes they hobbled out on their canes and left the rest of us to return to our delicious dinners. And then it came to me: for the best, most civilized meal in town, you might as well stay home.

  * * *

  In the quest for public silence, then, restaurants are out. And, for the most part, so are libraries. Gone are the stern, shushing, schoolmarmish figures who held sway with an iron hand in the libraries of my youth. The main reading room at any university library is liable to sound like an extension of a dormitory. Collaboration has become a mainstay for work in industry, commerce, business, and now in the university. Group tables and open plans have replaced individual desks, cubicles, and offices. Space becomes public and shared, not private and individualized. Teams, rather than solitary people holed up and thinking new thoughts, work together to solve problems, create models, and save the world. At my school, “Engaged Learning” is now a mantra use
d as a selling point when the university tries to “brand” its product. Students are discouraged from merely reading and writing. These seem selfish and self-indulgent as well as economically useless activities. Instead, we encourage our students to get out into the community with the results of their ideas and research. These may be admirable efforts, but none of them has its origin in the silence of a library carrel where a midnight-oil-burning solitary genius wrestles with feelings and intuitions that may blossom forth into unexpected creations. The library is a buzzing beehive of activity. That activity demands chatter, lots of it.

  What does this leave you with if you want silence and solitude? Until they became theme parks and mini-malls, museums offered a ticket to privacy. In my earlier chapter “Art,” I describe some recent museum experiences. Before the age of the blockbuster, courtesy of the late Thomas Hoving at the Metropolitan Museum, before gift shops and restaurants rather than the art objects on the other side of the turnstile made museums hot destination spots, you could wander in at lunchtime—many museums had free entry—look at a favorite picture or two, and leave refreshed. Art is supposed to soothe the soul, to calm as well as stimulate the mind. How can this happen when you have to ignore not only the bodies of people between you and what’s on the wall but also, and more irksome, those people’s often loud outdoor voices as well?