Navigating a Noisy World: Three Books about Silence

The upside of a defeat for the Montreal Canadiens is that nobody honks their horns and parades through the streets screaming. Lee noted that last night when the Philadelphia Flyers beat the Habs 3-0, for their second victory in the semi-final round of the Stanley Cup. Always the optimist, that man.

But his flip remark underlines one of the current under-appreciated problems of urban life: noise. In a sustainable economy we are going to have live closer together, and once sewage and trash are taken care of, noise become a serious threat to health and to good community relations.

Dwight Garner in Tuesday's New York Times has a very thought-provoking review of three books on noise, which look like they are recommended reading for anyone interested in the problem. They are Garret Keizer's The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise, George Michelsen Foy's Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence” and George Prochnik's In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise.

Garner writes: "I read all these books with an awareness of why my own nerves are increasingly jangled, why I mostly write (and often read) while wearing a clunky set of ear protectors, of the sort a particularly unhip airport runway worker in 1961 might have had clasped to his head. Make the world go away, as Hank Cochran’s song put it. Let my kids snicker at me."

But of course we can't do this, and what we can do is still not clear. Read Garner's review and then see if you can find one or more of the books, and perhaps we'll finally find the way.