Quiet please: When silence speaks louder than words |
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
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Are you - Nobody - too?
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong year -
- Wise Emily Dickinson's persuasive case for just shutting up.
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There I was, reading rapt reviews of a loudly-praised new book all about Silence, when the SouthCare helicopter came noisily clattering low over my roof on its way to the nearby (almost next door, really) Canberra Hospital.
It was as if the cacophonous helicopter itself was joining in the lively discussion of matters of noise and quiet raised in Kate McLoughlin's scholarly and entertaining Silence - a Literary History.
My ears have pricked up at this discussion of silence because my ears are a Canberran's ears and Canberra, so thinly populated (the citizens so vastly outnumbered by trees) is so unusually quiet. The notion of a "quiet metropolis" sounds oxymoronic and Canberra's superabundance of silences is one of this odd city's defining oddities.
Not quite at ease with Canberra's sepulchral silences (after all, we will have more silence than one can poke a stick at after we are laid in our fine and quiet graves), I really love the mansion-shuddering, tile-shaking racket of the coming-and-going hospital helicopter. It is an exciting city sound, one of the very few truly city sounds Canberra makes.
But Oxford professor Kate McLoughlin is interested in many, many more sorts of silences and noises than these literal ones.
One of her wider notions of noise is the 24/7 "noise" of news and news-comment.
She is English and writes, "In 2016, the 16,141,241 people [Britons] who voted Remain in the UK's Brexit referendum, myself........