In Pursuit of Silence (38 page)

All at once, I felt myself back by the side of my child as he floated in the bath and we fell quiet together, listening for the world of sounds surrounding our infinitesimal pocket of life. How many different sounds can you hear? What is that sound? One by one, the scientists presented the sonic fruits of their contemplative labors. The windows behind them glowed. Then, in sublime and unremarkable silence, the sun slipped from the sky.

None of the silences I’ve encountered provide the definitive answer. But all the silences I’ve explored have something rich to offer. I came to appreciate the idea of a variety of microclimates of quiet that need cultivating if we don’t want the atmosphere to become sonic CO
₂
, an all-pervasive electroacoustical emission we cannot breathe in.

Throughout my pursuit of silence, a voice in my head kept repeating the refrain, “We have our sights aimed wrong.” And I found myself returning to the writing of Theodor Lessing, another great turn-of-the-century noise activist, like Julia Barnett Rice.

Lessing’s notion that people who lack economic and social power often strive to expand their physical impact on the world by making noise has a long philosophical lineage. We can
trace it back to Nietzsche
, who argued that people who are denied space for action will compensate with some imaginary form of revenge. And on through Schopenhauer, who identified noise as the most
flagrant spoiler of the capacity for concentration on which all great minds depend. But Lessing, unlike his philosopher forebears, tried to put these ideas into action through the founding of a social movement.

Lessing was nothing if not versatile. In different phases of his career, his energies were channeled into philosophy, journalism, pedagogy, and activism on behalf of various progressive movements. Lessing was one of the first writers to analyze the idea of “the self-hating Jew”—the phenomenon whereby Jews came to internalize the libels directed against them by anti-Semites, and which he saw as a grave threat to the future of the Jewish people. The notion of internalizing stereotypes may also have informed his views on the problem of noise. He wrote in his book about Jewish self-hatred that
“to change human beings
into dogs, one only needs to shout at them long enough, ‘You dog!’” Similarly, Lessing argued, the attraction of loud, unruly behavior for the working classes was symptomatic of both their lack of healthy outlets for instinctual drives and a form of vengeance exerted against those who stripped them of power and positive social value.

Lessing idolized Rice
. He devoted a significant part of a book he wrote on noise to detailing the activities of her society. After visiting New York in 1908 to study the results of her work, Lessing immediately set about launching an antinoise society of his own. And he asked Rice to serve as the leader of this organization. She apparently declined the invitation.

But although Lessing adopted some of Rice’s strategies, the principal motto of his society was “Quiet Is Distinguished.” He championed classical associations between silence and profundity
(Plutarch declared that “we learn silence from the gods, speech from men”) and the Eastern ideal of the contemplative life. In Lessing’s argument, silence served as an emblem of wisdom, against the egoistic Occidental value system. “Culture is evolution toward silence,” he declared in his book
Der Lärm
. And he developed various quirky schemes to foster this evolution. One of them involved preparing a “blue list” of the names of hotels, apartments, and houses where members of his society could expect to find quiet. He also designated “houses of silence,” in which, he said, it would be possible to hear a pin drop, and no pianos or parrots would be allowed to enter. Himself an idealistic teacher—his refusal to kowtow to German nationalism led to his being literally shouted out of the college where he taught—Lessing also fought to have schools built in gardens and forests in order that the silence of nature might catalyze learning. Another motto of his society was “
non clamor sed amor
”—roughly translated, make love not noise.

It’s easy to see why Rice’s campaign against unnecessary noise sparked popular support while Lessing’s more ambitiously philosophical program did not. On the surface, her strategy seems a straightforward, practical solution to a highly complex problem. However, as we’ve seen, there was a flaw at the core of Rice’s position, one that continues to hamper legal and political struggles against loud sounds today: When it comes to noise, how do we tell the necessary from the unnecessary?

Lessing’s movement, lampooned in the press as elitist and hostile to modernity, failed to build momentum. Yet people may have been too quick to dismiss the implications of his position: that we need to dedicate less energy to reducing noise and more
to increasing silence. His gripe with the age was not against technology per se but with the way society organized itself around the machine in opposition to fundamental physiological and psychological needs. And he was not given much opportunity to make his case. The noisy unrest that would make Hitler’s loudspeaker heard around the globe was already amping up. (
In 1933, Lessing himself
became the first person assassinated by Nazi agents on foreign soil.) Ultimately Lessing’s assertion that quiet is distinguished was meant as a rallying cry to the classes that had enjoyed little opportunity for distinction, rather than as a call to close ranks among an already anointed silent elite. If you continually scream at people that they’re dogs, they may one day lash back with a loud snarl. By the same token, if you treat people as men and women of distinction, capable of appreciating the riches of their own higher nature, many of them may be drawn to cultivate silence of their own volition. Lessing’s work implies that the deficit of silence in our civilization reflects a breakdown in education.

Perhaps we are misallocating our precious resources. Rather than dedicating so much money, energy, and time to measuring noises we already know to be loud and fighting policy battles that will never fully succeed, why not at least split our investment in two—putting half our capital into activities and spaces that promote silence?

As Colin Grimwood, an adviser working with the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs in the United Kingdom to protect quiet spaces, put it to me, the problem with
our current model is that we
“spend all this
money making noisy places a little less noisy. At the end of the day, we’ve managed to take a few dBs off, and they’re still noisy. That’s why we have to prioritize quiet.”

Grimwood and others argue that because quiet spaces in cities tend to be small-scale, contained areas, they can be created at far less cost than the infrastructure changes in road, rail, building HVAC systems, etc., required to bring about even a tiny reduction in overall noise levels for a busy neighborhood.

And as it turns out, designers of quiet spaces have found that one of the root causes of the problem of noise—overcrowding—can also contribute to its solution.
High-density development
, in which building façades form a wall that follows traditional street blocks, can be enormously effective at blocking sound on the rear. An unbroken line of dwellings, or office buildings, gives each individual structure a “quiet side,” and if there’s an outdoor common area or courtyard in back, this immediately becomes a secluded quiet space. The city planner Max Dixon remarked to me that a mere 5 percent gap in a perimeter enclosure will let through 80 percent of the noise. Seal up the row entirely, and you’ve got something close to quiet. (Air traffic is the outstanding threat.) Dixon reminded me that antecedents of this design principle can be traced back, not only to the shared rear gardens of Georgian houses in many London neighborhoods but to cloisters and to the buildings framing courtyards in some of humanity’s earliest cities.
A recent Swedish study
has indicated that, even when people live in a loud area, if residential buildings have a quiet side there’s a 50 percent reduction in annoyance levels. Add to this barrier of façades some acoustic absorption, such as a
thickly planted ground surface, and perhaps a small fountain—avoid the use of machines around the back area that produce negatively perceived sounds, like air conditioners—and one has carved out a haven against the loudening world. But only by adopting a fresh approach to educating people about sound can we hope that these simple yet effective quiet spaces will ever be treated as such.

Though we have a tendency to romanticize the silence of the past, throughout history many cities have been incredibly loud. Not only were there traffic noises of carriages, coaches, and chariots on rough paving stones, as well as disparate animal sounds and all the commotion of fixed and itinerant vendors, there were also industrial workshops intermingled with private residences.
In Pompeii, for example
, the main entrance of the patrician House of the Fauns was adjacent to two clamorous blacksmith shops. Indeed it’s been suggested that one reason why
the ancient Greek city
of Sybaris became as cultured and wealthy as it did, relative to other cities of the age, was because of the space for refinement of the sensibilities created when the authorities began zoning industry away from living areas. That said, there was also, as a rule, more acoustical contrast in cities of the past than can be found in today’s cities. Except in the most crowded metropolises, areas of urban congestion were often interspersed with patches of undeveloped land, an open riverbank, commons, temple yards, and cemeteries. Many city dwellers fortunate enough to have their health and a little freedom did not have to travel the distance we do to leave the cacophony behind for a time.

We probably do not need a pervasive silence—desirable as this might seem to some. What we do need is more spaces in which we can interrupt our general experience of noise. What we must aspire to is a greater proportion of quiet in the course of everyday life.

In almost all my conversations with antinoise activists, the person wound up declaring, “We need to fight noise pollution in all its forms.” But how many forms does noise pollution actually have? Supersonic jets produce noise pollution. So do many power generators, along with certain manufacturing processes. The most heinous form of noise pollution today may be that caused by naval sonar, which results in whales dying of dis equilibrium by diving too deeply as they try to avoid this new wave of noise. But the majority of noises in our lives do not meet this definition of the extraordinarily loud.

Rather than conceiving of the noise surrounding most of us as a pollution issue, we might think of it as a dietary problem. Our aural diet is miserable. It’s full of over-rich, non-nutritious sounds served in inflated portions—and we don’t consume nearly enough silence. A poor diet kills; but it kills as much because of what it does not contain as from what it includes. For this reason, we approach the challenge of correcting unhealthy eating habits differently than we do that of plugging the chimney on a factory. When we educate children about diet, we talk not only about the hazards of fast food but also about the benefits of healthy nutriments. Why can’t we do the same with quiet?