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Noise
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (September 23, 1911) : 21
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Noise
Noise is the most primitive of the things that remain in this world for the sole purpose of annoying us. Noisy people are primitive, and even those of us who shudder most distressedly at the noise of others have moments, queer, incomprehensible moments when we feel an instinct to stamp loudly, howl, and beat some resounding thing. In parts of the world where, fortunately, we do not live, it is customary to express grief by wailing in public, and even in our own wanderings we have frequently passed wagon-loads of holiday-makers who announce the fact of their being in a frolicsome mood by calling out in stentorian voices to distant strangers, and blowing with great vigor on raucous tin horns. It is a matter for doubt in many minds whether, when we go to football games, it is for the interest of the play or the satisfied exhaustion which follows bellowing and frantic swinging of rattles. Noise has not a word to be said in its favor — the writer feels so strongly on the subject that she will presently give herself the pleasure of saying a great deal against it — and yet noise is mixed with an infinitude of the things we do and is frequently admitted to places we expected to find free of it.
When the English House of Commons wished to express mixed feelings toward a recent bill, it found no better mode than a prolonged racket. Though we may regard ourselves as lifted above all this in a cool, sane plane of our own, we are unable to let an argument run more than a quarter of an hour before we find reason inadequate and call to our aid loud belligerent tones with which to batter into submission those who refuse to be convinced by more civilized means. Such is our faith in noise that we rely on it to penetrate foreign minds when our own tongue or our rendition of theirs is proving insufficient. When we are in pain we make noises, half in spite of ourselves, half voluntarily for the diversion it gives. The only way we have of showing our appreciation of delicately blended harmonies is to split the air, while the lonely sounds are still vibrating in it, with tumultuous sound of so ugly a nature that it should be impossible to us, were we really the worshippers of harmony we pretend to be. And all this, mind you, when noise is one of the most hardly endured of the minor tortures.
Noise ought to be the public nuisance to receive severest punishment. Sights we can close our eyes to, abstraction, though open-eyed, rendering us comfortably blind. Smells, if disagreeable, are generally injurious to health, so that they are taken from the nuisance class into the company of more serious menaces and there dealt with; but sounds have us at their mercy. They are disregarded by the majority and beat on our nerves, wearing us down to the sensitive quick. If an idle moment is spent in a noisy place we find ourselves at the end of it as much exhausted as though we had been accomplishing Herculean tasks. Noise robs us of strength and gives nothing in return. Almost any one asks pardon for jarring your body by an accidental collision; it is only the civilized person who asks pardon for bruising your hearing by an avoidable noise. The abundance of parental affection is all required to endure the excruciating noise beloved by young human animals. Kindly intentioned people slam doors, and five minutes after a friend has declared she loves you she rattles tea-cups endlessly and loudly. If the changes prophesied for the future are of doubtful charm the coming generations will at least have the delight of living in an age of fewer noises, for they are gradually gaining ill repute, and the next step will surely be their diminishment. The depressing fly in the amber is that at present, when our irritation against them rises to a certain pitch, we add to the sum total of racket by our protest, which always takes a noisy form.
Cold-storage Admiration
We all of us know people who are enthusiastic admiration and yet with whom we have no relations, but occasional moments of great social discomfort. When we are away from them they shine as tantalizingly bright figures in our thoughts; when we are with them they are obscured to us by a gloom consisting of our bungled attempts at intercourse. Never do we show to such disadvantage as when they are present, which makes our exclamations over their charm when they are absent savor of true nobility. We never attribute to their influence those blunders we make when with them, but all magnanimously take the blame on ourselves.
Our opinion of most people is, as a rule, measured out in exact return payment for the side of us they have called to the surface. If it is our spiritual side we pronounce them spiritual. If we are happily quick-witted with them we declare wit to be their most prominent and pleasing characteristic. It is what our society makes of them and theirs of us that forms the proper material for a judgment on either side. We or they may be a dozen different people with a dozen different familiars, but that is the fault of the familiars and should rightly be attributed to them. Though it is in this way we judge and react toward the majority, there are, as was contended in the beginning, a few disquieting folk who conform to no rules and remain wholly captivating after an hour of what was for us exquisite torture. We feel them to be in every way the people we should find ourselves most quickly in sympathy with. We could swear that we are precisely their kind. When we are alone we think and feel in the very manner we would most like them to see us using, for it seems so fitted and attuned to theirs. Then they appear, and that side of us evaporates, leaving a solemn respectability or a shy dullness or something else equally foreign to us. We make valiant efforts to break through what is not even an occasional self, in despair at its being mistaken for our complete ego. The attempt is wofully futile. The maddening person remains delightful and our heart is filled with a desire to say, “I may be making a bad impression now, but I’m ever so companionable when I’m alone.” The solution of the problem might be a saying of this very thing, but if any such spontaneity were possible the affair would be a friendship and not a problem. They paralyze as much as they please us, and the extent to which so absurd a predicament is baffling is the extent to which we desire another attempt at solving it.
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