I had another motive, as well, for visiting a laboratory. Based on a few remarks by a scientist friend about the long hours of ascetic observation in her lab, I’d conceived a notion of the laboratory as a contemporary version of the monastery. I pictured rows of people bent over their microscopes, scrutinizing the minutiae of life’s genetic coding in an atmosphere of rapt concentration that evoked the silent Cistercians hunched over holy writ.
Thus, one summer afternoon, I traveled uptown to the brown monolith of the Hammer Building on West 168th Street, where I met a friend who used to work in a neurobiology lab there.
We entered a large, fluorescent-lit room lined with black counters and high white shelves crammed with orange-capped glass bottles, microscopes, stacks of petri dishes, sleek instruments, and fat dark files. A number of researchers were hard at work in the space.
They were not, however, all quietly bent over their microscopes. Rather, most were talking intently in pairs and trios. Claire Benard, the high-spirited principal lab assistant, told me right off that she would be years farther along in her research were it not for the noise-related distractions of the lab—if she’d been able to work in solitude instead of being constantly interrupted by colleagues, centrifuges, freezer mechanisms, fans, and the popping hiss of the giant worm sorter. When she needed to concentrate, she told me, she wore state-of-the-art noise-cancellation headphones.
I thought it actually seemed pretty quiet in the room. The people engaged in conversation were speaking softly. There was no background music; no big machines were running. But I’d been disabused of my laboratory-monastery analogy. And with a sense that I’d again gone off into the world in pursuit of silence only to find another strain of noise, I asked to be taken around the corner to the darkened room where I was to look through a high-power microscope at the worms, whose neurons, I learned, had been grafted with luminescent jellyfish genes to illuminate them.
I took my seat before a big white Zeiss. My friend adjusted the focus and turned to Benard to continue a conversation they’d begun in the corridor. I bowed my eyes to the stereoscopic viewfinder, and suddenly I was transported. The worms, inlaid with soft emerald glows, swirling microscopic cosmos, took my breath away. Inside their bodies floated nebulae of pale green (the neurons) and tiny, hard bright glitterings (“gut granules”), little accumulations of fat crucial for the worms’ survival. I watched a pair of worms tie themselves into a sailor’s manual of knots. The circle within my viewfinder became an upside-down planetarium, presenting constellations in motion—the birth and destruction of galaxies; hieroglyphics raveling and unraveling—pricked with fiery cat eyes.
I don’t know how long it was before I realized that, while I hadn’t given a thought to the silence of the worms’ labors, I’d lost all consciousness of the ventilator above me, and even of the voices of my friends. They were just gone—vacuumed into the intensity of this vision. The composer John Cage wrote: “There is no such thing as an empty space, or an empty time … try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” Yet the reverse is also true. Sometimes, try as we may to make noise, we cannot. Just as the moment of quiet when ground control cut out enabled astronaut Williams to see the depths of space, the fathomless sight of these blurring emerald stars and filigrees of light had created silence everywhere.
I finally managed to lift my eyes, but words still failed me.
Benard smiled. “Yes … It’s beautiful. This keeps me going—still.”
We wandered back to the main room of the laboratory. And there, another extraordinary thing happened.
As we entered, one of the scientists lifted a petri dish, opened it, brought it down on the counter with a hard click, and slid it closer to her microscope.
“That sound!” my friend laughed, remarking how it brought back memories of her years at the lab. She picked up another dish—they resemble big round eyeglass lenses—and repeated the motion, unscrewing it and bringing it down: a hard tick, followed by a cool crissing scrape.
Another researcher was using a device that looked like a thick pen to lift tiny plastic vials, release drops of liquid from them onto a slide, then eject the vials into a bin.
“Do you hear that?” Benard smiled. “That sound of the tip releasing—it’s like a camera shutter.” I listened harder as she replicated the gentle, split-second whir. Benard added that one of her favorite sounds of the lab—though she felt awful admitting it—was the sound made when you burn a worm. The scientists have to do it, she explained. “If we pick up a larva, say, when we’re trying to get a group of hermaphrodites …”
My friend turned up the flame on a small Bunsen burner. “I like the burner sound too,” she said. She turned it high. It crackled like a bonsai fireplace. Benard lifted a long, thin needle and danced it in the flame until it glowed. Then she dipped it into the gel on a petri dish until she’d plucked a worm. She brought that over the flame and I heard a faint, fleeting, kihh amidst the fire noise. “I don’t know why—I love that sound.” Benard laughed.
Luisa Cochella, a woman at the counter behind us, abruptly remarked that she loved the sound of “chunking.” Chunking involves cutting out a tiny slab of gel to replenish the food on a petri dish. She demonstrated the process, heating a tiny, thin silver spatula over a flame, then lowering its blade into the gel. As the hot spatula hit the gel, the two substances made a delicate squeezy-kiss. Cochella’s eyes lit up and she laughed.
“And then of course there’s this noise.” My friend lifted a glass slide, then neatly tossed it into a red bin where it struck a mound of other discarded slides with a sharp ting. She did it again. This time the ting mixed with crunnch.
Suddenly different people at work around the room began entering into the play, pressing different sounds on me. I hadn’t sought out this strange, enchanting hear-and-tell. It hadn’t occurred to me to do so, but one after the next they came. And after each noise, the scientists would ask, “Hear that? Do you hear?,” repeating the actions that made their favorite sounds with infectious delight.
The laboratory wasn’t silent the way a monastery is silent. Yet it was quiet enough for the people working there to take the aural temperature of where they were. To hear and savor a great deal that might easily have been lost. These were the subtle sounds that picked out the hours for them—little noises that opened vast networks of association, like the constellations of neurons glowing through the bodies of the worms. Listening to these sounds was at once the recreation and reminder of the substance of their day.
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.
THE RIGHT TO QUIET
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 CO2, 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 forebe
ars, 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 qui
et in the course of everyday life.
SOUND DIET
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?
We talk a great deal about the terrible dangers of loud noise—so much so that the young tune out the din of the negative message. We are almost silent about the benefits of silence. Yet we already know a great deal about what these are from both a scientific and humanistic perspective. Why can’t we begin introducing some of what we already know about silence into public education, while working to expand our knowledge of its desirable effects?
In Pursuit of Silence Page 24