Quiet, Please
I’m thinking about quiet.
Which means I’m also thinking about chaos.
Because it’s impossible to think about any concept without considering its opposite—even if that consideration takes place below the level of consciousness. For example, when you finish a meal and appreciate that feeling of fullness and satisfaction—satiety—you’re also (inescapably) thinking about hunger, even if the thinking takes the shape of how good it feels not to be hungry. You have to be thinking about hunger, because fullness has no meaning without the concept of hunger.
Just as light has no meaning without the experience of darkness.
Happiness becomes senseless without sorrow.
I’m thinking about quiet because of the pandemic. It was reported in the journal Science that the world has experienced an historic quieting. In a coordinated project, seismologists around the world measured human noise from March through May of this year and found that the din created by humans has dropped 50%. “The length and quiescence of this period represents the longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,” they concluded.
(Can we take a moment and appreciate the euphonic beauty of the word “quiescence”? The lovely repeated soft ‘e’ sounds, and the susurus of the two ‘s’ sounds? Please, take a moment and say the word out loud: quiescence.)
Did you know that human noise can be felt in the bedrock of the Earth? Heavy traffic, football games, jackhammers, industrial blasting, rock concerts, subways, fireworks, factories—all register on the same equipment designed to detect earthquakes and other tectonic activity.
For those of us who naturally like quiet, these would seem to be the best of days (if only they weren’t the worst of days). We are allowed to enjoy the quiet, aren’t we?
Except that there are a few strange phenomena attached to this particular quiet.
The first is that it contributes to the time-disconnection that so many of us have been feeling. Who knows what day it is, anymore? The hours blur, the days blur, the weeks and months blur. And this, in part, is due to the quiet. It turns out that hours, days, weeks, months have different and predictable levels of noise associated with them. Microphones on once-busy city streets around the world have recorded the sound of the pandemic, and the sound is an unchanging, undifferentiated quiet. “The rhythm of the week—Mondays louder than Sundays—has disappeared,” reports an article in the New York Times.
Another unwanted attachment to this quiet is the sadness that accompanies it, like the quiet at a funeral. One of the scientists on the pandemic noise project noted, “It’s the sound of the city aching. It’s not a healthy sound in my mind.” Context matters. So, while the decibel level in the woods on a snowy evening might be the same as that of the eerie quiet between mortar shellings in the Battle of the Somme during World War I, the experience of the quiet is entirely different.
Akin to this altered experience of quiet is the fact that cities are not meant to be quiet. And so the silence of an empty street in New York City on a Tuesday evening becomes ominous, because it doesn’t match the pattern of our thinking about a city street. And the quiet is a very loud reminder of our altered lives. The quiet shouts within us, “I am sick. I am unemployed. I am isolated. I am afraid.” It’s hard to welcome quiet when it carries such heavy baggage.
Arline Bronzaft is an environmental psychologist who has spent years studying noise pollution. She explains, “People have said they miss the sounds of New York City. They miss the honking horns, the crowds. And they would probably be the first people who were critical of those sounds. But it’s not that they miss them. They miss their lives.”
And so we return to context. Quiet—blissful, blessed, long-desired quiet—has been transmuted into a void within us. The word ‘chaos’ in English is derived from the ancient Greek word ‘κενος ’, which means ‘void.’
Quiet and chaos. In this time of the pandemic, you don’t get one without the other.
I don’t live in a city. I live in a densely populated suburb of Boston, a commuter town twelve miles outside the city limits, on a quarter-acre plot of land with a thin strip of woods behind it. For me, the quiet isn’t ominous. It doesn’t make my heart ache with sadness. It isn’t a void.
I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve always worked from home, and I continue to work and earn money from the relative security of my house. I live with my kids—college-age adults—and so I don’t suffer from isolation. I’ve been able to spend time in my backyard, gardening and socializing with friends (10 feet apart), or meeting them in their backyards, chatting with my neighbors whose backyard flows unimpeded into mine, neither of us entirely sure where the boundary line exists. And perfectly happy to leave it that way. Last evening, there was a full Klezmer band rehearsing in my neighbor’s backyard, each musician socially distanced, together making wonderful music.
I’m one of the lucky ones who can embrace the quiet, enjoying the revealed song of birds, the sighting of a stealthy fox on my lawn, the twice daily perambulations of roving bands of wild turkeys that have decided they own the town.
‘Cacophony’ comes from the Greek words ‘κακος ’ (bad) and ‘φωνη’ (voice or sound). Bad sound. When did quiet become a bad sound?
When it became the echo of more than 800,000 lives lost in this world with no clear end in sight.
And how have New Yorkers chosen to forcibly beat back the virus every evening at 7 o’clock?
They make noise.
References
“The Coronavirus Quieted City Noise. Listen to What’s Left,” by Quoctrung Bui and Emily Badger, New York Times, May 22, 2020.
“With Covid-19, a Seismic Quiet Like No Other,” by William J. Broad, New York Times, July 23, 2020.