“The sense of increasing noisiness today is an effect of speed and clutter, hubbub in the mind, not the ears: twittering and tweeting, the 24/7 streaming of news, cascades of emails, junk or not, bring a syncopated, restless rhythm to the day, filling our heads with Babel.” Marina Walker, reviewing “Silence: Christian History” by Diarmid MacCulloch).
I have just been on a walk. I passed a large crowd of school girls. Every single one of the twenty or so kids was obliviously walking along, gazing at an i-phone, ear plugs in her ears. Noise, useless, time-consuming and unnecessary texting.
Then, right at the back of the group, quite alone, was a young lady reading a book as she walked along. O.K, I thought, I will have to get out of her way because she hasn’t seen me (they don’t, do they?) but I can put up with this because she is reading “Tristram Shandy”, by Laurence Sterne. I thought, a girl after my own heart.
How long will it be before some pharmaceutical firm starts to offer a pill for electronics obsession?
Epicurus would have rushed into his quiet oasis of a garden and slammed the gate firmly shut.
Actually, Diarmid McCulloch, I think that it is PRECISELY the “hubbub in the ears.” Try choosing your veggies in silence at Whole Foods without the crummy music in the background, or shopping quietly in SAKS where musical assaults are inescapable. Silence in a restaurant? only if you request either that music be lowered or that you be given a table in the cloakroom so you can hear your friends. (I’m exaggerating, of course.)
Let’s give the “crowd of schoolgirls” a wider e-berth.
First, presumably, with ears budded, they weren’t making ungodly noise.
Second, absent knowing what they were looking at, it seems a little unfair to over-credit reading “Tristram Shandy” because it’s on paper. Maybe the group of young scholars (!) were reading Jane Austen or the “London Review of Books” on their iPhone. (Granted, a bit of a stretch) but possibly reading something at least half-way sensible. Or, they may have been chatting happily with friends as adolescents will do. We don’t really know, do we?
I think that the culprit, whether it’s ear-buds on battery or brain-buds on paper, is inattentiveness to traffic and fellow pedestrians. The greatest offenders, in my non-scientific sample, are joggers who are silent except for their soft foot-falls and energetic breathing, but whose dashing-without-looking or hearing often unnerve sober, non-ear-budded drivers like moi. 🙂
Were the words quoted those of Marina Walker, the reviewer? If so, I misaddressed my comment. ;-(